Humanities Underground

A Moment of Revelation

 Prasanta Chakravarty (A Report on ‘The Everyday Life of a Discipline’- a colloquium on contemporary English Studies that took place on February 4, 2011, at the Department of English, University of Delhi) Unlike the social sciences, humanities in India at least, have been less systematic and meticulous about introspection. This is slightly odd owing to the fact that the onslaughts on humanitities, from both outside and from within its own quarters, have been quite relentless and ballistic of late. Besides, it is a good idea to take stock of things from time to time as disciplines morph and change gear. So, when I was asked to be part of a group of practitioners of humanities who were at the forefront of the last bit of stock-taking that took place during the late nineteen-eighties, I was curious to know how they see their own transition at this point of time and also get a sense about their assessment of English studies now, apart from my own contribution to the current debates.  Alok Rai, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Gauri Viswanathan are literary critics and scholars who in their own ways, along with many other fellow scholars, actually helped make a strong case for various changes in the way disciplines and departments of literature function. Chief among them were vital questions on the politics of canon-formation, the role of language in literature, issues of vernacular articulations and translation, forms of colonialism—including homebred ones, identifying markers of gender and identity politics and so on. In 2011, many of these issues are quite relevant and yet doing literature today also means dealing with fresh challenges and innovations. For one, we now inhabit a much more fractured global world with more surreptitious forms of literary activities and attacks on it. The deeply invested local author is as much rooted in his own milieu as in other networks that mediate continuously with his own output and imagination. A dynamic scholarly document no longer resemble a linear narrative. There is a challenging task to identify and tackle this whole new field called digital humanities where literature intersects with documentation, visual media and other interactive literary production. There are issues of power equations involved with such innovations and yet these areas and paratactic associations could be explored effectively and critically. There is now a tremendous investment in areas like textual and print studies, new aesthetic formalisms, detecting renewed ideals of empire formation in texts, studying subjective spaces (from diaries to autobiographies to blogs), invoking sacred spaces or looking for legal implications in literature and reconfiguring the political in literary utterances—say, looking closely at the way political poetry (a genre often not recognized adequately by postcolonial criticism) has been able to galvanize people in Middle East or parts of South America, of late. These concerns are not necessarily new to literary studies, but the times demand a fresh historicization from the practitioners. So, it was interesting when Alok Rai started the proceedings with a mea culpa: that he feels like Hardy’s Jude—a hapless prisoner, in this case, implicated in the trajectory of literary criticism the way it has played out. What combination of sweetness and light led him to think that the outside is free and vigorous and the academe is not so—he asked himself. Even as he acknowledged the valuable works of the literary critics (on forgotten scandals and caste autobiographies) in the past three decades or so in cahoots with, what he marked as the cruising gangs of philosophers and social scientists, he came down heavily on the fake benignity (ah! English is so oppressed by Shelley) of such high moral endeavours. To study literature has become surrogating on a certain idea of reality, to gain a purchase on how one can affect the proceedings around oneself, even if that is through exploring tributaries of power or micro-studies of texts and textualities. Scholarship has become a matter of conviction rather than appreciation: ethically bankrupt, overtly politicized and thoroughly without joy. The world itself has become a text and the idea of representation is eroded. No appreciation for the subtleties of speech or rhetoric there. This Rai feels to be a kind of textual-political imperialism. The price to pay then is a gradual erosion of appreciating a certain cognitive purchase that the ‘word’ provides. This expanding world of textual imperialism on the word, that forces us to forget the joys of discovering the turn of the phrase or the craft of lucid composition, is now being gutted down by the grim managerial class. The accounting protocols of footloose capitalism, which is not even deliberately cruel, is completely oblivious to the loss of this shared world. He invoked the multifarious life-world of Milan Kundera and John Keats’ idea of negative capability—the ability to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries and half-knowledge that literature provides us—in order to appreciate the role of literature in a world away from the capitalists and their vulgar opponents.  Rai is essentially asking for two things: by means of getting back into the specificity of the word, he seeks to reconnect literature with a communitas of connoisseurs. There is a certain repossessing of an enshrined certainty of the experiential or the aesthetic in this act. But since he is at the same time arguing against the righteous certainty of literary activism, he also celebrates the complexity of the life-world that revels in its uncertainty of the fantasy, away from verisimilitude or truth hunting. There is a lament for the world that we have lost and a clarion call to restore a certain complexity within that very world, by capturing the nuances of literary hermeneutics. Rai’s project is philological, a historicization of the text after theory! Rajeswari Sunder Rajan does not see humanities to be in a mode of crisis at this point. The crisis she finds in rather two concomitant developments: in the ideas that claim a of clash of civilizations even in the literary world and a rampant provincialism in literary-critical activities on the other hand.