Review Essay
Humanism in Indian English Fiction.
Edited by T. S. Anand, L. S. Bedi, Sushminderjit Kaur and Hargunjot Kaur Kapur.
Creative Books,
Edited by T. S. Anand in
association with his colleagues L. S. Bedi, Sushminderjit Kaur and Hargunjot Kaur Kapur, Humanism in
Indian English Fiction brings together in one volume the assorted papers
presented at a seminar organised by
A book that comes out of a seminar has a peculiar
character. It is marked by diversity and unevenness, is multifocal, and is
likely to dispose of somewhat tangentially its foundational assumptions. A
planned book, with its specific, invited contributions, can better afford to be
focussed and intensive. But then a seminar is an
occasion for fruitful indiscipline, when different trajectories intersect, fly
off tangent, or even ignore one another altogether. The criteria of uniformly
good quality and progressive elaboration cannot be always applied, therefore,
with a good conscience to a book born of a seminar.
Although humanism lost its innocence a long time
ago, a certain naivety about its ‘natural and obvious’ connotations,
complicated by anthropological hubris, lingers on. The tendency, consequently,
is to compulsively and exclusively read humaneness, universal compassion and
glory into humanism. Neither the violence of the human being nor the violence
on (human) being gets registered in
the process, something that humanism ever since its problematization has borne
as a burden of guilt. Grappling with humanism’s bad conscience in the complex
terrain of Indian literature (on which the Western Enlightenment humanism is
only one of the several influences) is an obligation that remains unfulfilled.
The present book, happily, gestures towards the fulfillment of that obligation.
In fact, the book stitches together –not seamlessly– humanism as a set of noble
values and humanism as a discourse. And the dichotomy suggests more than the
positions taken; it is symptomatic of the intellectual state of the academy,
with its unequal distribution and utilization of the highly fluid intellectual
capital.
T. S. Anand’s
Introduction and the papers by K. B. Razdan and Nibir K. Ghosh provide the
necessary historical context. In his short and crisp paper, Razdan
brings out the predicament of the humanist writer in a mass society even as he
takes into account both New Humanism and antihumanism.
He is, however, at his perceptive best in his unconventional reading of Tagore’s poem as an ironic prayer. Both Anand
and Ghosh trace the course of humanism –the former
briefly, the latter elaborately– but somehow without interrogating its Eurocentricity and thus without seeking its other than
European Enlightenment precedents. Can Indian literature, or for that matter
Indian English literature, be fairly judged without recovering the histories of
humanism which have been subalternised by the
onslaught of Western cultural imperialism?
Swaraj Raj comes closest to
the territory in which this question can be raised when he considers the
problematic melding, in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, of
the novel as a specifically Western bourgeois individualist narrative form and Advaita as a specifically non-dualist Indian philosophy.
The result, as he points out, is that the accepted parameters of humanism are
strained. And hence the need, according to him, to rethink
humanism.
When the parameters of humanism are coming under
increasing strain in an assertively multicultural world, its supposedly
self-evident universalist inclusiveness should be
quite an enigma. The many papers on feminism, for instance, testify to this
inclusiveness. The only problem, though, is that they treat of humanism as a
pure ideal, uncontaminated by practice. They do not acknowledge the complicity,
bordering sometimes on identity, between patriarchy and humanism. Literature is
a distinctly human artifact: this is as true as any cliché can be. But does
this imply that whenever you talk about human relationships in a literary work,
it naturally means you are talking about humanism? The distinction or the
convergence, whichever the case may be, needs to be rigorously worked out.
Short of that, the papers of Somdatta Mandal, Shalini Gupta and Anupama Kaushal offer interesting
readings. Mandal’s range is extraordinarily wide and
yet her focus is precise and her lucidity astonishing. She disposes of the
stereotype of the diasporic writer and breaks the obsolete binaries of east and
west that continue to obscure the vision of her many colleagues in the academy.
One such binarism is that of tradition and modernity,
on which Shalini Gupta’s paper is predicated and
which is implicit in the term ‘New Woman’ used by both Anupama
Kaushal and Subhash
Chandra. In Chandra’s paper, however, the gender binarism
is deconstructed through exposure to Judith Butler’s feminist use of
performativity, which he expounds with precision and applies in his highly
persuasive reading of Kamala Markandaya’s Nector in a Sieve.
Wide sympathies pulsate almost visibly in Seema Malik’s examination of the
critical treatment of ageism in the short stories of Shauna Singh Baldwin and Shashi Deshpande. Ageism is, paradoxically, a dehumanizing
humanist ideology insofar as it rests on the unacknowledged essentialisation
of the human as young, powerful, attractive and rational, a move that quietly
drives the old people to the outer margins of the properly human. Rabinder Powar’s paper also
engages with the wider and really crucial issues of the ecologically predatory
ideology of progress and its ruin of rural community systems on the one hand
and the nurturing capabilities of intergenerational bonding and
trans-generational familial memory on the other. Her double vision, thus,
enables her to judge humanism dialectically, as potentially both evil and
ennobling.
Jaspreet Mander, in her reading
of Arundhati Roy’s novel, chooses to identify humanism, in the given Indian
situation, with the oppressed and marginalized humanity. Before that, however,
she puts her ear to the conscience of humanism in which are embedded not only
many –most of them lost– promises of glory but also the archives of numerous
inhumanities.
The very ordinary humanity, in the persons of Ram Chand and Kamla in Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop, is the subject of Rupinder’s
Kaur’s paper. In juxtaposing Bajwa’s
characters with those of Dickens, she attempts what is unfashionable and
succeeds in getting the most vital but little owned link acknowledged: the link
of the Indian English novel with the classics of English fiction.
Anil Raina’s elegantly
written paper on Attia Hosain’s
Sunlight on a Broken Column offers a
detailed and judicious analysis of the text and exemplifies the comprehensive
sweep of a humanist stance that rightly –albeit without self-critique– embraces
feminism, postcolonialism and Marxism.
Avtar Singh’s paper on Arun
Joshi’s The Last Labyrinth and Ashoo Toor-Gill’s on Bhabhani Bhattacharya’s So
Many Hungers! and Kamala Markandaya’s
A Handful of Rice seem to be similar
in that both examine characters and their situations and bring out the disastrous
consequences of incompatibility between the two. The illusory similarity is,
however, undercut by a deep dissimilarity based on the difference of class, as
a result of which an inversion takes place: the narratives of Bhattacharya and Markandaya become the narratives of situations and their
characters, and hence of history’s frustration of humanism.
Manjit Inder Singh’s “The
Human Worlds of Naipaul and Mistry”,
as the title indicates, is an appropriately
post-humanistic critical-philosophical reflection. Neither the ideology of
humanism nor the idea of a cultural, sub-continental or continental world can
adequately frame the imaginative universes that Naipaul
and Mistry create. But there is an incommensurabilty
between the two, an incommensurability of scale and intensity that emerges
almost transparently in Singh’s treatment of their respective works. The fruit
is the unstated irony which lies barely veiled under the adequate treatment
that Mistry’s work invites but Naipaul’s
eludes.
The fact that Manjit Inder Singh’s paper appears at the end of the volume has
its own serendipitous symbolism: it could be read, even if for no reason, as
pointing to the urgent human need to outgrow humanism. To fulfill, albeit
somewhat late, Heidegger’s wish.
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Rajesh Kumar Sharma
Department of English
©2006 Rajesh Kumar Sharma
sharajesh@gmail.com
http://litarkay.netshooter.com