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Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.52.4.e-7

1528-4212

Barnita Bagchi,

Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka: the sovereign nation-states of present-day South Asia encompass huge diversities, but one of the key elements they have in common is the fact that the majority of the population of this region lives in villages even today. Anupama Mohan has written a lively book with a focus on the utopian imaginative mode and the representation of the village in South Asian literatures, which she selects from two countries, India and Sri Lanka. With the exception of M. K. Gandhi's polemical treatise Hind Swaraj, Mohan's texts of choice are novels. These novels are written in English, as well as in some bhasha or vernacular languages (that she reads in translation) of the region, notably Malayalam and Sinhalese. Focusing on literary texts published between 1909 and 2005, Mohan's monograph opens up exciting terrain.Theoretically, the monograph grounds itself in Michel Foucault's conceptualization of heterotopia. Mohan makes good use of this term, which was explicated in Foucault's 1967 essay “Des Espaces Autres.” Mohan sees Foucauldian heterotopia as spaces where “social ambivalences can thrive and diversity and difference can be negotiated—an impulse that utopia too can share. Foucault's heterotopia subsists in the intersection between difference (other-space) and alterity (another-space) in much the same way that utopia occurs between no-place and good-place.” (15). Foucault evolved the term heterotopia, clearly, at least partly as a critique of the term utopia, which he sees as nostalgic and homogenizing. There is much to critique, in turn, as regards Foucault's ironing out of the irony inherent in the term “utopia” as coined by Thomas More in 1516—but Mohan does do justice to that irony. She uses yet another term, “homotopia,” to signal “those visions of unified collectivity where an aggressively homogenizing impulse operates and where unity is a form of collective gathering of one or two co-ordinates (race/language/religion) and the deliberate repudiation and exclusion of others” (8–9). This is in contrast to utopia, seen by Mohan as a space for shared transformation and amelioration. Mohan's taxonomies around utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia are flexible and supple.M.K. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, first published in Gujarati in 1909, and then translated into English by Gandhi, is analyzed deftly by Mohan. Gandhi's normative view of the Indian village as utopian community is a frontal challenge to British colonial structures of governmentality and metropolitan power. The ashram, a kernel in this rurality, is a utopian locus for collectivity. Mohan here makes skillful use of the work of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, concurring with their argument that the Gandhian ashram helped to forge a civil society and a public sphere that were an alternative to British colonial collectivity. Emphasizing the value and practice of ahimsa, nonviolence, the Gandhian ashram and village enshrined concrete quotidian practices such as the spinning of khadi cotton, and need to be seen as a culmination of a number of reformist movements that had swept different parts of South Asia since the mid-nineteenth century, led by nonelite reformers such as the Dalit or lower caste activist Jytotiba Phule in western India, and Sree Narayana Guru in Kerala, another leader of the lower castes who came from the Ezhava community.Mohan argues that though the Gandhian utopia of the village and the ashram was Hindu in overtone, it was also ecumenical, culturally accommodating, and socially empowering. However, she argues convincingly, in Raja Rao's English novel Kanthapura (1938), the Gandhian village is a homotopic site, affirming the hegemony of Hindu, upper-caste power, and either excluding or appropriating lower castes and other religious communities, notably Muslims. For Sri Lanka, Mohan sees Martin Wickramasinghe's Gamperaliya (“Uprooted,” published in 1944) affirming another homotopia, based on Sinhalese Buddhist homogeneity. Contrasted to this is Leonard Woolf's The Village in the Jungle (1913), which sees the village in critical terms, anatomizing the unequal relationships of class and gender in the village of Beddagama. A novel in Malayalam from India titled The Legends of Khasak (1969), by O.V. Vijayan, meanwhile, like Woolf's novel, offers a far more discordant, nonhomogenizing view of the village of Khasak, which is represented as a site of contestations around traditions and modernities, offering a critique of the trope of the timeless village. In Khasak, equally, Islam and contestations round it play a large role. For the present reviewer, the analysis of The Legends of Khasak was one of the freshest and most insightful in Mohan's monograph.Two recent novels in English, Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (2000) and The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh (2005) show us, argues Mohan, that writers can think beyond the binary categories of the South Asian village as idealized pastoral or as dystopian counter-pastoral. Ghosh's work, set among the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans in Bengal, plays in powerful ways with themes such as locally grounded civic activism, the constant prospect of environmental disaster, and the conflicts between internationally articulated demands to protect tigers in the area versus the survival of a highly poverty-stricken local human population. Offering hopes for a rural cosmopolitanism, Ghosh's fiction has as a protagonist an empathetic diasporic “outsider,” Piya, who comes from the United States to the Sundarbans, just as Ondaatje's novel has the character of Anil, a diasporic Sri Lankan who comes back to her country of birth as a United Nations human rights investigator. Ondaatje's novel takes no ideological sides in the conflict between Tamil and Sinhala nationalisms that it portrays and that was raging until recently: rather, it shows up the brutality and senseless violence of both these nationalisms. Ondaatje, like Ghosh, affirms ultimately an ethical multicultural cosmopolitanism.Mohan's monograph has necessarily had to carve out small case studies from the vast field of South Asian creative literature written about the village. Much has been excluded, and some exclusions detract from the convincingness of the argument. This reviewer, for example, was unsatisfied by the lack of comparison between Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Tagore, a Nobel laureate who built up a local, rural utopia and a set of cooperative and educational institutions in the early twentieth century in Santiniketan (which means the Abode of Peace) in Bengal in India, was both a friend of Gandhi and a critic of Gandhi's views on many things. Both believed in rural reconstruction as the heart of social transformation. Since Tagore, a poet, painter, and writer, saw aesthetics and creativity as central to his vision of social transformation, he would have been enormously generative for Mohan's research. Equally, when reading Mohan's analysis of Kanthapura as a faux-Gandhian homotopia, the reviewer found it a shame that Satinath Bhaduri's classic novel in Bengali Dhorai Charitmanas (1949–1951) was not mentioned, let alone analyzed. Bhaduri's protagonist Dhorai, a member of the Tatma or Tattama marginalized lower caste, inhabits a village in the eastern province of Bihar in India, and slowly awakens to political consciousness, becoming a Gandhian activist. The title of the novel alludes to Ramcharitmanas, the sixteenth-century version in Awadhi of the Hindu epic Ramayana: subversively, Bhaduri's novel makes the lower-caste, poor male Dhorai (not the powerful, privileged king Ram of the Ramayana) its hero, as Dhorai sees patterns of inequality, exploitation, and possibilities of resistance around him. Bhaduri's novel plays with legend and myth on the one hand, and historical consciousness on the other, and is an illuminating contrast to the Sanskritized, homogeneously Hindu and upper-caste world of Kanthapura.Mohan's book is thus a promising beginning: it is an entrée to a potentially highly fertile field, and whets one's appetite for more work, for more academic conversations and collaborations between scholars working on utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia in South Asian literatures. The book affirms one's optimism about comparative critical academic writing bridging area studies and world literature. It is also a considerable achievement.