Marginalized Communities, Poetic Transcendence, and the Guardianship of Literature in Desai's India and Wordsworth's Scotland
2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1920-1222
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Cinema and Culture
ResumoBy choosing as an epigraph for her 1984 novel In Custody a passage from Wordsworth's Roy's Grave, itself part of his Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803, Anita Desai affiliates Wordsworth's verses about Highland Robin Hood with her account of efforts of an adjunct Hindi lecturer at a regional university to turn his career into something of significance through interviewing greatest living Urdu poet, custodian of a language radically marginalized within postcolonial India. If Desai had not called attention to her novel's connection to Wordsworth's poetry, it is unlikely that any one would associate these writers' works with one another. In several novels over past three decades, Desai depicts postcolonial Indian middle-class life in an eloquent but spare modernist prose that would seem to owe much to E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Maddox Ford, but to be far from declamatory lyricism of Wordsworth and his contemporaries. Writing from heart of an ascendant empire, spokesman for an ascendant middle class, a male writer consciously affiliating himself with great tradition of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton while formulating a new poetry meant to reform but also revitalize national literature of world's dominant power, Wordsworth would seem to speak from a position radically distinct from Desai. She writes in subtle, allusive English from postcolonial periphery of former empire, speaking to an educated Indian middle-class readership increasingly disempowered by global capitalism, mass media popular culture, and religio-political fanaticism, a woman addressing patriarchal legacies of classical Indian literature and culture as well as Indian and Western modes of middle-class gender formation, a half-Bengali, half-German writer addressing a nation internally divided and (unlike Wordsworth's England) given to profound doubt about its identity, direction, and mission in world. The most obvious connection between Wordsworth and Desai is that, in memorializing Rob Roy, Wordsworth pays homage to his resistance to English cultural and economic colonization. Going beyond common observation that English colonization of Scotland served as a dress rehearsal for British colonialism's worldwide expansion, however, Desai suggests that devotion to literature, impracticality of which is highlighted by its marginality within university politics, is ultimately, if paradoxically, a powerfully anticolonialistic force. In Desai's novel, Urdu serves in part as a metaphor for all literary discourse, whose effacement within postindustrial global society resembles effacement of ethnic, regional cultures (such as that of Rob Roy's Highlanders) and languages (such as Urdu) within modern nation-states. (1) Urdu evokes a peculiar imperial history. After Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605) unified northern India by winning allegiance of both Hindu and Islamic nobles, creating a social order marked by material splendor, religious tolerance, and cultural syncretism, Akbar's system was unravelled by Aurangzeb (or Alamgir), who reigned from 1658 to 1707. (2) Aurangzeb re-imposed a specific tax on non-Muslims, sought to create a pure Sunni Islamic society, and pursued a ruinous conquest of Hindu kingdoms of Deccan plateau (Wolpert 156-86; Hintze). Persian was administrative language of Mughal empire. Urdu, the lingua franca of Muslim elites in those areas of India which were under their direct rule both before and after British established their rule in developed alongside Hindi in northern India, for development of modern Urdu and Hindi literature and until rise of movement for spread of Hindi in nineteenth century, terms Urdu, Hindi, and Hindustani equally described standard, spoken, urban language of north. Even today, as a spoken language, Hindi and Urdu cannot be distinguished for purposes of ordinary discourse (Brass, Language 127, 128-29). …
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