Prachi
Deshpande is the author of
 |
| PRACHI |
Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and
Identity in Western India, 1700–1960
(Permanent Black and Columbia University Press, 2007)
She worked for a longish stretch as an editor with the review magazine Biblio and was for some years assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. She is currently with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences at Kolkata.
She responds here to some of the questions earlier posed to Anne Feldhaus and Christian Lee Novetzke.
Q1) An influential
view of the current state of historical and literary scholarship pertaining to
India is that of Sheldon Pollock, who remarks:‘the number of citizens capable
of reading and understanding the texts and documents of the classical era—or
precolonial or premodern or pre-1800 era, all equivalent terms for my
purposes here—will very soon approach a statistical zero. India is about
to become the only major world culture whose literary patrimony, and indeed
history, are in the custodianship of scholars outside the country: in
Berkeley, Chicago, and New York; Oxford, Paris, and Vienna. This would not
be healthy either for India or for the rest of the world that cares about
India.’ Does this critique also apply to Maharashtra, and to what degree?
A1)
Pollock is speaking of a decline of scholastic philological skills due to an
institutional apathy. The decline and apathy are real enough. But for all the
attention to the historical contexts within which it has occurred, his critique
ultimately privileges the institutional, and now globalized, world of
English-language scholarship. To me it is impossible to separate the specific
problem of linguistic ecocide in classical studies from this deeper privileging
of English, and its history of dominance over contemporary Indian languages in
our entire institutional and educational set-up. For all the superficial
provisions for “vernaculars”, our education system continues to be predicated
on an alienation from working in Indian languages rather than on them.
This gap between those educated in English and Indian languages has only
widened in recent decades. Pollock mentions the erosion of English skills in
this context, but completely ignores the inability or refusal among
English-language scholars to make our contemporary Indian languages viable sites
of our scholarly thought and critical debate, and spaces to which they can and
must bring global debates; this is the nub of this problem.
Unless these languages are strengthened
institutionally and prioritized in our scholarly practice beyond the acquisition
of reading skills for archival work, scholarly work in the ‘vernaculars’ will
consistently fail to catch up with global trends or ‘fit the bill’, classical
languages and pre-modern studies will remain resources of symbolic power for
political and cultural agendas, and those who can study these through English
will prefer to do them abroad, where the economic and institutional resources,
not to say exposure to theoretical tools, are more easily available. Speaking
of ‘citizens’ and ‘patrimony’ in this regard, where the system itself is geared
towards strengthening the global knowledge economy, is not only futile, it is
also disingenuous.
Speaking of Maharashtra, I do not know the
exact institutional fate of Prakrit or old Marathi today, but Modi script
classes are witnessing a recent resurgence in Pune, with people of all ages and
backgrounds flocking to them. Of course, this interest is fuelled by the
popular interest in Maratha history, and a variety of non-University spaces
sustain it. Independent scholars working mostly in Marathi have always had a
strong hand in shaping modern Marathi literary and historical discourse, and
this ‘amateur’ interest sustains these skills even today, whether old Marathi
for interpreting devotional texts, or Modi documents for various regional
narratives. For all its overt politicization and increasingly raucous
interruption of the scholarly world, this non-scholarly domain underscores the
need for the ivory tower to confront the multiple worlds and ground realities of
literary and historical study in India and seriously engage the idea of
situated knowledge. Many leading scholars of Maharashtra have been ‘bilingual’,
writing both in English and Marathi not simply in the sense of translation, but
also in engaging the scholarly as well as popular domains. Any meaningful
discussion about language study and its implications will have to include this
bilingual practice, its mechanisms and challenges, instead of contrasting an
imagined, pure scholastic philology against a sweeping scenario of crisis and
incompetence.
Q2) Who are the
major Marathi scholars you feel the English-speaking world doesn’t know about
but should.
A2) Apart from, of course, Ra.
Chi. Dhere, I would mention the critics Ra. Bha. Patankar and Narhar Kurundkar,
the historians T. S. Shejwalkar, Kru. Bhi. Kulkarni and Na. Ra. Phatak, the
anthropologist Durga Bhagwat, Sadanand More for religion and philosophy, and
two of the finest writers on linguistics and grammar, Ashok Kelkar and K. S.
Arjunwadkar. But one of the most important thinkers and writers of modern
Maharashtra that deserves greater attention simply for the wide-ranging impact
he had on a number of modern disciplines is Vi. Ka. Rajwade.
Q3) If you had to recommend five Marathi classics (fiction,
non-fiction, poetry, any genre at all) to the non-Marathi world, which would
these be and why?
A3) There are classic, but well
known examples like Tarabai Shinde’s Stripurush Tulana, Phule’s Shetkaryacha
Asud, Lakshmibai Tilak’s Smritichitre, or even Tukaram’s finest
poetry and the best of contemporary poets like Namdeo Dhasal. Instead I would
recommend five that don’t often figure in non-Marathi discussions and which are
very dear to me –
1)
Antajichi Bakhar by
Nanda Khare: a 1990s historical novel set in the times of the Maratha raids in
Bengal in the 1740s and 50s, written in a reinvented style of the 18th
century Marathi bakhar. It is a superb critique of Maratha power as well as
colonialism, and is possibly the best Marathi historical novel out there.
2)
Indhan by
Hamid Dalwai: a fine, restrained and linguistically rich novel from the 1960s
that lays bare the destructive fires that burn within all of us and consume our
communities.
3)
Rujuwat by
Ashok Kelkar: Marathi linguistics at its colossal, erudite and humorous best, a
collection of essays from the past few decades.
4)
Asa mi Asami by
Pu. La. Deshpande: this is difficult to characterize by genre because he
performatively read it on stage before it was available as text. Through the
frame of the autobiography of an ordinary man, it is one of the most
empathetic, and funny explorations of post-1947 middle class urban life.
5)
Hindu: Jaganyaachi Samruddha Adagal by
Bhalchandra Nemade: a tremendously exhilarating, and linguistically
extraordinary journey through the millennia of Indian history and memory,
published in 2010.
Q4) Name five books OUTSIDE your disciplinary area that have meant a
great deal to you in some deeply personal way, or constituted you in some
defining way.
A4) It is difficult to put any
significant work of critical theory outside my disciplinary area nowadays, so I
will focus on some literary works: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous
Conditions, Iravati Karve’s (Marathi) Yuganta, the Kannada poetry of
Purandaradasa, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Jose
Saramago’s History of the Siege of Lisbon.
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