Mahesh Paudyal
There is no academically accepted chunk of writing called ‘SAARC Literature’, like there is a convention of using a volley of misnomers like South Asian Literature, Third World Literature, Commonwealth Literature and so on for the body of writing coming roughly from this region called SAARC today. These academically accepted and exhausted terminologies are misnomers for a number of reasons. The invalidity of the label ‘South Asian Literature’ comes from the fact that like ‘European’ or ‘American’ literature that is defined by cultural and religious homogeneity and commonality of lineage and race—when has Western mindset counted the minorities: the Jews, the Kurds, the Meshwakis or the Kiowas?—but then, South Asia is synonymous to heterogeneity of what not—religion, race, language or culture. In that case, a sweeping generalization often foisted by simplistic nomenclatures like ‘South Asian Literature’ or even ‘Asian Literature’ does not count. Any approach like that is sure to fail, for, how much has Paul Brians included Maldives, Bhutan or Nepal for that matter, when he wrote his magnum opus, Contemporary South Asian Literature, published by Greenwood Press? Where are these nations in Barbara Stoller Miller’s ambitious book Masterworks of Asian Literature, a Columbia project on Asia? Where are poets from these nations in Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman’s Asian Poets, published by Charleston Southern University? Are or are not these small countries Asian, or South Asian? Looking for commonality from a Westerner’s eye is sure to lead to embezzlement, and out this embezzlement created by stark heterogeneity of these nations, a writer or editor is left with no option but to leave out the ‘inaccessible’.
The category ‘Third World Literature’ is invalidated by two factors. First, in 1991, the so-called ‘Second World’ collapsed and with that, the validity of these ordinals has collapsed. These ordinals—first, second and the third—inspired by European narcissism force upon the ‘third’ a constant sense of guilt and humiliation, and such labels need not be accepted anymore, when discourses have moved towards the plane of regionalism, towards the plane of new-regionalism and planetarity. And emotionally enough, one doesn’t hold moral rights to place himself first, and relegate others to lower ranks, be it owing to ‘white-man’s-burden’ discourse, or capitalist-communist binaries.
The problematic are even more pronounced with a category like ‘Commonwealth Literature’. It too is a forced nomenclature, and it constantly reminds of the colonial past, and revokes guilt every time it comes into currency. In South Asia, there are countries like Nepal that never fully came under the shadow of the Union Jack. Therefore, it cannot be an inclusive nomenclature when the subject of study is literature coming from the SAARC countries.
The name SAARC Literature, for now, seems to work, albeit as a term justified by the notion of strategic essentialism, with full regards to its contingency and a potential vulnerability, because, like a hypothetical category called ‘Soviet Literature’—if such thing had ever been named—it can sooner of late turn into a dinosaur category. For, don’t we the thinkers have every right to think that an experimental category like the SAARC, bonded more by a weak Vander Wall’s force of trade than by strong hinges of confidence, will collapse sooner of later, if India-Pakistan antagonism is not resolved? And we have seen, it seems to be a problem without any visible solution at least in a near future. However, with all doubts and looming vulnerability of the life of SAARC, the term ‘SAARC Literature’—as a case of strategic essentialism, to repeat—at least does not hide any vested prejudice, or guilt, or any sort of anachronism as the names discussed earlier do. It too will not be a European charity or rebuke; it will be a home-cooked stuff. No one can predict the longevity of SAARC granted; it can even be a bubble that might burst in tension between the poles. Yet, the ‘regional’ element in the name, with all variations, vagaries and heterogeneity, allows for a grouping on shared cultural or economic traits, if they are amply explored and put into use.
It is not the question of nomenclature alone that vexes the literature of these regions. There are other factors as well. One of the challenges the region faces is to free itself from colonial hangover. The debates of using or not using the colonizer’s language—English—is of no much import for me, as the language has truly acquired a global hue, and is now no man’s asset, and it has been well exploited to anti-colonial effects. But our literature has other issues to address, when it comes to rinsing the colonial hangover. This cannot be achieved simply by doing away with western metaphors and turning inward in creative writing. It too needs to be addressed theoretically by developing methodologies that replace theories rooted in Western historical experiences and ground realities. For example, Western modernism ends when ours begin. Their postmodernism begins, when we have just started realizing self-rule, or to borrow Kant’s prescription, freedom from self-incurred tutelage. This freedom from tutelage, in case of most South Asian nations came in the fifties, when Western modernism ended. In fact, the columnist has no confusion about modernity and modernism, but one cannot always divorce their relation as mentalities and cultural manifestations, that work together. In the case of the West, class is a mere economic category; for us, it is often a cultural or religious provision. For them, man is the centre of literature, and eco-criticism is for saving nature for man; for us, nature is as living an entity as man is—as the phrase yat pinde tat brahmande—or, whatever is in an atom, is in the universe too—teaches us to adopt a fairly universal outlook—and for us, even without man, nature forms a living and meaningful whole. Concepts like ‘order of being’ with man atop everything, does not count in the East. In other words, our pervasive unporposiveness and their overtly utilitarian outlooks do not always crisscross.
All these paradoxes can be addressed simultaneously through a single approach: looking inward. This applies to both creative writing and theoretical modalities. Inward refers to an array of complexities and heterogeneities or homogeneities that are insiders to South Asia. Theories should come also from insiders, and in that case, they will save themselves from the fear of being misfit. To cite an example, much of Subaltern arguments were fished out of the Indian soil, and today, India is home to the largest body of Dalit literature, nothing of whose counterpart is ever seen in the West, thank to the fact that it had deliberately suppressed the aboriginal literature in North America, Canada, Australia or any other parts of the world. The Dalit stuff is emerging in Nepal too and local narratives like those of the Baluch nomads is coming from Pakistan. The extraordinary art of storytelling, rooted in Afghanistan’s tribal ways of life, is gaining global attention though the novels of Khaled Hossieni, while Bangladeshi micro-narratives, with all complexities of gender and religion are to be read in fictions of Taslima Nashreena and Monica Ali. This local flavor, as a powerful rejoinder to hooping Western influence, is to be explained as a major shift in contemporary writing from the non-Western world, and SAARC region seems well aware of its utility. In other words, it’s time we tell the global audience, we have heard your stories enough—from Sophocles to JK Rowling; it’s time you prepared to sit down cross-legged and listen to us. For, we have stories accumulated through generations, and these stories are our sciences, our philosophies. Our tribal knowledge, our Dalit episteme, our peasant’s movement for freedom, our women’s experience through sati, dowry and patriarchal discrimination, our extraordinary religious tolerance among practitioners of Asia-born religions, our domestic ways of conflict resolution and lot other corpuses of knowledge, should now be articulated, and yes, heard with seriousness. SAARC literature should, henceforth, appreciate the strength of its local-ness, and seek ways to show that this ‘local’ in the SAARC region was what first mesmerized the colonizers and what ultimately showed the intruders their ways out of the Asian door. This local will, now, be the ground on which a grand South Asian corpus of knowledge will rest, and out of the same local, the South Asian version of the global will be molded.
[Paudyal teaches at the Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University]