Indian literature with postcolonial prism

Since its infancy thirty years ago, postcolonial thought has become the subject of numerous criticisms, sometimes legitimate, relating in particular to its now hegemonic scope. According to his detractors, postcolonial criticism would have become a single thought aimed at valuing hybrid, dislocation, migration and relativism. Admittedly, it has often been overused and instrumentalized so as to support suspicious causes: eliminating regional specificities for example, ignoring the issues that would not correspond to a dialectic of impact of civilizations (Orient against West), or erect canons Doubtful literary, for the sole reason that the texts convey political messages of resistance to European hegemony. But it would be wrong to see postcolonial thought as monolithic and frozen: it is the bias of Indian literary modernitycollective work by Anne Castaing, Lise Guilhamon and Laetitia Zecchini, who claim the postcolonial critical tool and put it into practice to show its formidable power of problematization.

This theoretical positioning makes it possible to shed light on a foreign subject, Indian literature, in the French and French -speaking intellectual context. Because if postcolonial thinking has become central to Anglo-Saxon debates, it is not in France, where, it seems, the pioneers of the movement (Césaire, Fanon, Sliding) did not leave heritage worthy of the name. This is evidenced by the recent works which vehemently contest the postcolonial method, while literary studies and the social sciences in France turned its back in the 1990s and 2000 (it is with several decades late that the big ones theoretical texts are starting to be translated into French). In the absence of a “ postcolonial turning point In France (which also poses a major political problem, if we believe recent debates), this text therefore proposes to fill a lack by disseminating a literary production and critical thinking in all its diversity, in French.

Indian literary modernity is organized in three parts (the influence of the mythical imagination on modern writing, the representations of communitarianisms and colonialism, and finally the postcolonial question) which tackle poetics in its close relationship with politics, mixing original texts (Essays, extracts from prose and verse texts) and university analyzes.

Vernacular languages ​​and decolonization

The book opens with texts and analyzes of texts ofUr Annanthamurthy, Nirmal Verma and Arun Kolatkar, initially written respectively in Kannada, Hindi and Marathi, and thus poses against the majority of works on contemporary Indian literature, characterized by a strong English-speaking tropism (with a predilection For authors such as Rushdie, Roy, Seth, Ghosh, etc.). In a desire to expand this too limited vision, the authors recall that literatures in vernacular languages ​​are fundamentally modern, born with decolonization and having developed in dialogue with Western modernist literature. Annanthamurthy evokes the role of the writer in Indian space, worked by his rooting in a village and in a language, which gives him a “ cultural density », And exposure to the West and the English language, which replaced Sanskrit as the language of the elite. Annanthamurthy writes: “ I live my emotions in kannada, I articulate my thoughts in English (P. 36).

This double anchoring is also the subject of the test of Nirmal Verma devoted to a pilgrimage, “ Brandon of eternity “, Translated from the Hindi in French by Annie Montaut: the narrator reveals a spirituality there which does not exclude the expression of an individual, autonomous,” identity, “ modern “, From writer. The text highlights the specificity of the relationship to time in India, “ time encompassing Where the past is contemporary with the present, where historical time and eternity seem simultaneous. This insistence on the Indian conception of temporality, antithetical with our Western consciousness of history characterized by the notion of progress, is the working ankle of the whole work: all contributors work to bring this other epistemology that allows to do justice to the complexity of Indian thought and modernity. In an exciting chapter, Laetitia Zecchini demonstrates for example that by rewriting an episode of Mahabharata (In marathi, then in English), the poet Arun Kolatkar opens a critical reading of the nationalist political context, and proves the vitality of the mythical narrative in the contemporary collective imagination.

Literature and writing of history

The writing of colonial and postcolonial history constitutes a major feature of Indian literature, and the work chooses to be interested in narrative techniques and methods of those which are most often analyzed in critical works (such as the Magic realism, the documentary novel, etc.). Claudine Le Blanc summons subalternist studies to analyze an overly known oral literature in Kannada, the language of Karnataka, collected in XIX^e A century by a British colonist, which, by mixing traditional and thematic form close to the news, inaugurates a rare example of modernity and resistance to colonial politics. Analyzing a more recent corpus, Anne Castaing explains how the Hindiphone writer Krishna Baldev Vaid, by offering a fragmentary and polyphonic vision of the history of the partition between India and Pakistan, succeeds in accounting for its complexity instead of Given to pathos or nostalgia for a fantasized fraternal community between Hindu and Muslims (as Kushwant Singh can do, the best known writer in the score). Historiography is at the heart of the modern Indian writing company, and several translated extracts are offered to the reader as so many supporting evidence: an extract from Vaid’s novel, Time spenttranslated from the Hindi, a poem by J. Das, “ 1946-1947 “, Translated from Bengali, and the news of Agyeya,” Muslims, all brothers “, Translated from the Hindi.

The postcolonial question

The book ends on the postcolonial question as the theoretical and political issue, with a rereading of Kipling texts by Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas, which demonstrates how fiction works to reveal the cracks of colonial ideology, even in a traditionally seen corpus Colonialist: The texts analyzed highlight, for example, the sharing of the colonial role -playing game (by the colonist, by the colonized) which signals a resistance to colonialism, although masked. In an excellent test translated from English, the writer Amit Chaudhuri, who has always chosen to situate himself on the margins of English -speaking Indian literature carried by the market for world publishing, expresses all the ambivalence of diffusion methods of this foreign literature: “ Isn’t postcolonial theory not being, paradoxically, an educational and didactic discourse on marginality, aimed at offering a fixed definition of the latter ? (P. 197) He recalls, in particular, the need not to oppose Western modernity to the Indian tradition. On the contrary, if some authors writing in vernacular languages ​​have sometimes been able to fall back on nativist and traditionalist positions to oppose globalization and the perverse effects of the domination of English in India, this current must not hide the Elan of reflexivity and deeply modern reform within Indian thought. This is evidenced by the poetic but also a political scope of the language on the language and on the languages ​​in the English Indian novel, designated by Lise Guilhamon under the term of “ Masala English In one of the last chapters of the work: this new language, which includes traces of Indian languages, opens the fictional space on linguistic otherness so specific to the Indian subcontinent.

This book therefore constitutes an important contribution, not only for Indian literary studies (by emphasizing a demanding, innovative and diverse corpus), but also for the understanding in France of a flexible and open disciplinary field.