The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India

by Snehal Shingavi

Overview

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857285119
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Series:	Anthem South Asian Studies
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Snehal Shingavi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas, Austin, where he specializes in the teaching of English, Hindi and Urdu literature from India and Pakistan.

Read an Excerpt

The Mahatma Misunderstood

The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India

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By Snehal Shingavi

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 Snehal Shingavi
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-647-5

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CHAPTER 1

THE MAHATMA AS PROOF: THE NATIONALIST ORIGINS OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

It is perhaps easy enough to understand why anglophone Indian novels of the 1930s and 1940s are called Gandhian novels. Aside from the long shadow that Gandhi casts on all aspects of late-colonial India, the literature of the period also bears heavy traces of the Mahatma. Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable not only includes a long speech by Gandhi as its climax, the entire novel was rewritten after a conversation with Gandhi. Moorthy, the main character in Raja Rao's Kanthapura, is affectionately called the "Little Mountain," a reference to the fact that he is the local lieutenant of the Mahatma, whom the villagers have dubbed the "Big Mountain." The other novels of the period, like Bhabhani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers (1947) and R. K. Narayan's Swami and Friends (1935), involved Gandhian-style agitations and Congress rallies. The cumulative effect has been to see the literary period in the era immediately preceding independence, as one critic has described it, as the "Gandhian whirlwind."

But there is a problem with this historiographical procedure: none of the novelists in question would have called themselves Gandhian. Anand was a social democrat, uncomfortable with Gandhian ideas about religion; Rao disagreed with many of Gandhi's ideas about women and politics, joining up with Trotskyist groups in the early 1930s; and Ali, probably the closest politically to Gandhi of all of the writers of the period, was never involved in nationalist politics but is left out of the canon altogether, partly because he is a Muslim and partly because he ended up in Pakistan after partition. Any critical account of this literature, then, has to begin by asking the question: what makes a text Gandhian and how much Gandhi does one need before a novel becomes a mouthpiece for Gandhian politics?

The story, however, is complicated by the fact that Gandhi and late-colonial anglophone writing are connected by a critical misreading. The Gandhi of the 1930s and 1940s was a symbol that meant something quite different from the idea of Gandhi that developed after independence, his assassination and the partition of the country. The cult of the Mahatma that was invoked by the Indian nation (sometimes reverentially, sometimes cynically) meant – at least throughout the 1960s and 1970s – that Gandhi (now dubbed the father of the nation) became a more concrete symbol than he would have been otherwise. As Claude Markovits has elegantly argued:

One of the greatest paradoxes in relation to Gandhi is the contrast between the diversity of perceptions of him in his lifetime and the very limited range of iconic representations retained of him by posterity. In his lifetime, Gandhi had been perceived successively and simultaneously as a Bolshevik, a fanatic, a trouble-maker, a hypocrite, an eccentric, a reactionary, a revolutionary, a saint, a renouncer, a messiah, an avatar. He was likened both to Lenin and to Jesus Christ, indicating the wide scope of representations. After his death, two views of him have become dominant: in India he is remembered as the father of the nation, outside India he is remembered as an apostle of nonviolence. (Markovits 2004, 13)

The critical deployment of the term "Gandhian" in the phrase "Gandhian novel" itself occludes the real political, cultural and religious debates that were happening with the Mahatma and over his very body.

By the 1970s, a consensus had developed about the origins and interpretations of the Indian novel in English. This national consensus consisted of the following propositions: while there may have been vernacular traditions, British masters and early experiments, the Indian novel in English really came into its own in the 1930s; the 1930s were an important break in the periodization of the novel since it was clear that the novel's concern was now nationalism and it seemed to bear the imprint and influence of Gandhi, as opposed to the earlier novels of the nineteenth century, which tended to have a more personal and limited view; the Indian novelist in English was preoccupied with the representation of India in its entirety, usually for a European readership; and its most important practitioners were Anand, Narayan and Rao, though Bhattacharya, Desani and Singh could be added without much controversy (Riemenschneider 2005). By themselves these propositions are hardly controversial, but the reason that these propositions and not others (e.g. the diasporic origins of the novel in English, the continuities between vernacular literature and English literature, the effect of publishing and patronage trends in England on the rise of certain Indian authors, or the influences of regional ideologies or local political movements or intellectual developments in Europe) came to dominate had as much to do with the history and form of these novels as it had to do with the needs of academic circles and a wing of the Indian ruling class to make the case for the national utility of English in the 1960s and 1970s. Novels in English could do what none of the vernacular literatures could: namely, suture together a geographically and linguistically disparate readership in its identity as Indian, and therefore they had to be preserved as part of the national heritage. As a result, the national consensus triumphantly contended, the Indian novel in English came into its own as the twin of the newly independent Indian nation-state, bearing all of the marks of a bright future:

It is no mere coincidence that there came a sudden flowering of Indian fiction in English in the 1930's – a period during which the star of Gandhiji attained its meridian on the Indian horizon. Under the leadership of Gandhiji, the Indian freedom-struggle already more than a generation old, became so thoroughly democratized that the freedom-consciousness percolated, for the first time, to the very grass-roots of Indian society, and revitalized it to the core. It is possible to see a close connection between this and the rise of the Indian novel in English. Fiction, of all literary forms, is most vitally concerned with social conditions and values, and at this time, Indian society, galvanized into a new social and political awareness, was bound to seek creative expressions for its new consciousness and the novel has, in all ages, been a handy instrument for this purpose. The "Three Musketeers" of Indian fiction in English – Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan started writing during the 1930's, and the first of the novels of the first two demonstrate the Gandhian impact convincingly. (Jussawalla 1985, 158–9)

The terms that then came to define this approach to the novels of the 1930s and 1940s were "Indian," "nationalist," and "Gandhian" (as opposed to say "Punjabi," "modern," "secular," "Nehruvian," "diasporic," "imagist," "Socialist-realist," "translational," or "experimental"), since these were unproblematic virtues in the newly independent nation. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, once critical opinion had shifted with respect to the value of "nationalism" and Gandhism (and with the growing national disillusionment with the Congress, the rise of viable and powerful separatist movements in India, and the growing support for the Naxalites on a number of college and university campuses), readings of these novels were merely inverted. The global attention on Salman Rushdie and his claims about the primacy of English only served to bring this development into sharper relief by giving it a formal – as opposed to a political – aspect. But instead of reorganizing the historiography of the Indian novel in English, the postcolonial, feminist and minority readings of these same novels found vice where there had previously been virtue. The novels of the 1930s and 1940s tended to be seen as allied to a variant of Congress politics and the agendas of its leaders, principally Gandhi. They continued to be perceived as homogenizing or flattening out the differences in the Indian nation in favor of a mythical national unity, which could only serve to stamp out the rights and identities of minorities. The novels were seen as products of limited, chauvinistic and elitist worldviews, all of which were directly related to the novels' ideological proximity to nationalism. This essay seeks to map out how the terms of this historiography came to dominate the critical vocabulary and some of the problems that continue to plague such a historiographical consensus.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the canon of Indian writing in English had become fairly well established in Indian universities. Courses on Indian writing in English were now a part of most major university curricula at both the graduate and undergraduate level. A small industry of graduate dissertations and book-length studies of Indian writing in English was produced in the 1970s in order to cement the formation of the Indian English canon and to accredit instructors in the new field. The crowning feature of this development was the Sahitya Akademi's publication of M. K. Naik's A History of Indian English Literature to fill the glaring absence of "a systematic, comprehensive and critical history of this literature, clearly defining its nature and scope, adopting proper periodization and relating writers and school firmly to changing socio-political conditions" (1982a, v).

There may have been some early disagreements as to the exact genealogy and composition of the canon, but these were more or less resolved by the time that Rushdie became an international celebrity and Indian writing in English was thrust into the global marketplace. As new debates about the character of Indian writing emerged in the 1980s and 1990s – between those who advocated English as the only important Indian literary language and those who saw it as a bastardization and exoticization of more developed vernacular literary traditions – understandings of the intellectual, political and aesthetic preoccupations of the canon were mapped out. The new controversies were important to both the understanding of the terrain of Indian writing and the defense of the intellectual and literary output of the subcontinent, but in many ways they masked a deeper and more salient contradiction in Indian writing in English and, in fact, may have been symptomatic of this problem. For if the question of which language was to represent India in the global literary marketplace had resonance, it was because India had just barely survived a fissiparous debate about the national language, which was resolved not by the parties agreeing to the three-language compromise but by the needs of the nation-state in wedding its population to supporting the troops in the coming war with China.

Part of the reason that Indian writing in English was so well suited for this ideological role had to do with its origins, beginning as it did with some early experiments in prose and poetry in the nineteenth century – with figures like Raja Rammohan Roy, Henry Derozio and Toru Dutt – and continuing through the early nationalist, political writings of members of the Congress, which secured for it a relationship to the nationalist pantheon. Despite the variety of thinkers and attitudes that might have been involved in early nineteenth-century publications (though new research has argued that the origins extend back even further), Indian writing in English really began to become interesting, the critical consensus stressed, around the 1930s when, under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi, literary practitioners began their first mature ventures into the Indian novel in English. Anand's Untouchable, Narayan's Swami and Friends and Rao's Kanthapura – now lauded as the three foundational texts of the canon – were understood to represent a radical break from the "old Macaulayan amplitude and richness of phrasing and weight of miscellaneous learning" that had characterized the previous generations of writers (Iyengar 1962a, 272). These three novelists were held up as markers for a new kind of English: an Indian English prose, which was capable of moving beyond a crass mimicry of the British intelligentsia and was able to offer a uniquely Indian contribution to the cosmopolitan world of English letters. Moreover, since each novel bore the clear imprint of the Mahatma – Gandhi appeared as a character or a clear theme in each of the novels – then it certainly had to be a confident Gandhian nationalism to inaugurate the kinds of radical formal developments that these texts evinced. Consider, for instance, the defense of this literary history given by Naik, one of the leading figures in establishing the canon for Indian writing in English:

By 1930, Indian English literature was more than a century old; and yet, curiously enough, it had not yet produced a single novelist with substantial output. And then came a sudden flowering when the Gandhian age (1920–1947) had perhaps reached its highest point of glory during the Civil Disobedience Movement of the "thirties." It is possible to see the connection here, if one remembers that by this decade the nationalist upsurge had stirred the whole country to the roots to a degree and on a scale unprecedented earlier, making it acutely conscious of its present and its past and filling it with new hopes for the future. A society compelled into self-awareness like this provides a fertile soil for fiction and it is no accident that three major Indian English novelists – viz., Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao began their career [sic] during this phase. It was, in fact, during this period that Indian English fiction discovered some of its most significant themes. (1984, 103–4)

Now, whether or not these writers actually represented a stylistic break with the past is beyond the scope of this chapter. What is of interest here is how nationalism under Gandhi was credited with making the kinds of changes in style, rhythm, syntax and form of which Anand, Narayan and Rao were seen as merely symptomatic. In fact, the seismic political event that was the Noncooperation movement (1920–22) could not but have found its aftershocks in the imaginative prose of Indian writers, the argument goes, since what it discovers in the prose is Gandhian. Little reference is then made to either the political ideas of these novelists (on the off chance that they might have differed from Gandhi's) or to the novels themselves, since the argument was nicely tautological. Having been born under the sign of Gandhi, novelists were bound to reproduce their indebtedness to him. Gandhi's relevance to the genesis of this new literary style or to the political direction of these novels was based more on the needs of the postindependence Indian state and university than on the real proximity of these writers to a Gandhian worldview. The anxiety about English-language instruction in the new Indian university required a consciously aggressive rereading of these texts to demonstrate the nationalist contributions that could be made in English, and that by reading back through the needs of the postindependence Indian state we can begin to uncover a different legacy of engagement between literature and nationalism, which begins to shatter certain notions of nationalist movements and their automatic and unmediated influence on the middle class.

In 1962, while making the case for reading literature with an eye towards both Western and Indian classical (Sanskritic) critical traditions, K. R. S. Iyengar, then the doyen of criticism of English literature in India and vice-chancellor of Andhra University, produced a polemic about the role of the artist in a modern, independent India:

The man of letters in independent India, whether he writes in English or in one of the modern Indian languages, has a part to play in projecting before the people a vision of the unity as well as the variety, the variety that is held together by the unity, of India. A Hindi or a Bengali or a Tamil writer, while reflecting accurately the contours of his particular linguistic area, has also, and perhaps even more emphatically, to stress the undying elements in Indian culture. It is thus necessary for our writers to conceive their works simultaneously in diverse planes of reality so that the lesser may not hide the greater, nor the greater quite obliterate the lesser. In recent years preposterous theories were propounded to prove that the worse was the better reason, and the country was in consequence cleft in two. Siren voices are even now occasionally raised to bewitch us into perpetrating the cultural atomization of the Indian Union. There is no doubt that our men of letters – not the least those who write in English – can organize the best insurance against all such attempts. [...] Even Indo-Anglian literature, though being appareled in a seemingly alien garb, is at its best Indian to the core, being (in C. R. Reddy's words) "a modern facet of that glory which, commencing from the Vedas, has continued to spread its mellow light, now with greater and now with lesser brilliance under the inexorable vicissitudes of time and history, ever increasingly up to the present time of Tagore, Iqbal and Aurobindo Ghose, and bids fair to expand with our and our humanity's expanding future." Literature in India, in the future as in the past, should function as a mystic bond of union between the individual and the State, the provincial unit and the national aggregate. (Iyengar 1962b, 243)

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter 1: The Mahatma as Proof: The Nationalist Origins of the Historiography of Indian Writing in English; Chapter 2: “The Mahatma didn’t say so, but …”: Mulk Raj Anand’s “Untouchable” and the Sympathies of Middle-Class Nationalists; Chapter 3: “The Mahatma may be all wrong about politics, but …”: Raja Rao’s “Kanthapura” and the Religious Imagination of the Indian, Secular, Nationalist Middle Class; Chapter 4: The Missing Mahatma: Ahmed Ali and the Aesthetics of Muslim Anticolonialism; Chapter 5: The Grammar of the Gandhians: Jayaprakash Narayan and the Figure of Gandhi; Chapter 6: The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Arrested Development of the Nationalist Dialectic; Conclusion: Dangerous Solidarities; Notes; Bibliography; Index 

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From the Publisher

 “Richly historicized and rigorously attentive to form, this book evades stale theoretical assumptions and makes an important contribution to the study of Indian English fiction. Inviting a reconsideration of the problematic of anticolonial nationalism, Shingavi offers lucid and erudite Gramscian readings of significant texts and their engagement with the fraught hermeneutics of Gandhi as Mahatma.” —Dr Priyamvada Gopal, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge