Literary historiography of India

Many critics believe that literary history is relatively a recent field of enquiry. However, discussions held at a recent seminar indicate otherwise

Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia were concerned with chronological listings of literary works, including origins, attribution and textual explications than with a literary history that attempted to understands texts in their wider cultural and historical frame works. The modern literary historical sensibility, which developed in the later, focussed its attention more on the national origins, linguistic identities and political entitlements.
A national seminar organised by Central Sahithya Academy in collaboration with the department of English, SV University, Tirupati, recently provided a platform for the discussion of various issues related to Indian Literary Historiography.

In his keynote address, Indranath Choudhury, eminent scholar pointed out that the literary discourses themselves become history and he enunciated the influence of spiritual and ethical values on literature.

K Sachidanandan, the convener of the seminar asserted the importance of an in depth study of the historiography of Indian literature by quoting the essay of AK Ramanujan.

Harish Trivedi, a noted academician observed that there are three important questions to be answered: What did we have by way of wide ranging literary discourse before 1850, if it was not history? When did the term history assume its strict chronological protocol and positivist truth-claim? How strong has been the nexus between literary histories and national political histories? After discussing the ground work for cannon-formation, inter-lingual plurality and social political orientations of writers based on chronology, periodisation, generic categorisation and addressivity, he suggested that there are two sites, which would help to interrogate these issues: juxtaposing published histories of Indian Literature and juxtaposing some histories of Sanskrit literature written by Indians and non-Indians.

Ipshita Chanda of Jadavpur University, tried to answer the question, what is the kernel of a historical narrative. According to her, the kernel of such narrative is either the nation or a region, both being conflated with a language or a period identified by common elements of literary form and convention within and across temporal and spatial locations.

Arindam Chakrabarthi of University of Hawaii observed that some Sanskrit commentaries on ancient philosophical literature should count as Sanskrit history of Sanskrit literature if history is re-conceptualised as an epistemic-imaginative re-engagement with past and literature is re-conceptualised so as to include philosophical poems, dialogues, and aphoristic prose such as Kena Upanishad.

According to Malasri Lal, a senior professor from University of Delhi, Indian Literature in English held itself away from regional expressions and developed a track of its own, which was not cross referenced with the mass culture of languages of India.

HS Sivaprakash, the renowned poet and scholar of Kannada literature, a senior professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, who is writing the history of Medieval Kannada Literature at present, declared that he attempts a more kaleidoscopic history underscoring clashes, compromises and confluences between different castes, conventions and genres.

Based on the popular literary histories of Malayalam literature, EV Ramakrishnan and PR Ravindran discussed some important issued related to Historiography. Ramakrishnan observed that some historians produced canonical texts with emphasis on literary merit as a criterion and some of them identified the trends of a period, where as some lack a sense of social history though they steer clear of evaluations and map the transitions in literary history. Ravindran discussed the ways that the Malayalam literary historians elided the distinction between socio political modernity, literary modernism and the progress used as a key term to evaluate tradition and modernity.

Lalith Kumar of University of Delhi, who represented the Maithili literature showed how literary history of Maithili was derived from the anthologies. He maintained that the production of full-fledged literary histories of Maithili was an outcome of a three-tier transition.

The remarks of Esther Syiem, a professor from North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, spoke about the literary history of Khasi, the language of a considerable number of people of the hill-societies have to be noticed carefully and meticulously. She informed that the Khasi society is basically an oral one and its spoken word has prioritised a way of life that was irreducibly linked with mythical figurations of its land and identity.

B Thirupathi Rao, the noted Telugu critic, represented the Telugu literature. In his perceptive analysis he proved how the Indians are memory centered and how it becomes a hindrance for an unbroken narrative of the literary history. He asserted the need for breaking the shackles of colonialism for having an out and out native tradition of historiography. With the publication of two major short story anthologies, ‘Thondanadu Kathalu’ and ‘Morasunadu Kathalu’, which included the stories of Telugu, Tamil and Kannada, the biographical oneness of literature in spite of the lingual difference has to be recognised for writing a truthful and credible literary history.

All these papers reflect not only the varied and multiple issues related to Indian literary historiography but also the complexity and limitations related to it. But it is high time to evolve our own concept of literary historiography and this seminar is a humble and small step towards that direction.

- (The writer is a bilingual short story writer, novelist and poet, writing in both Telugu and English)

By Madhurantakam Narendra