ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a series of recent conversations. In fact, these are snatches of conversation from larger discussions, in almost all of which the subject of cosmopolitanism and modernity – in their locations both in and out of Europe – were broached, explored and argued over. In one of them (the venue was a bookshop), I was trying to articulate my unease with the term ‘postcolonial writer’; not only as a description of myself, but as a description of a generic figure. Both the affiliations and the oppositionality of the ‘postcolonial writer’ seemed too clearly defined; while, for most of the more interesting canonical writers of twentiethcentury India, the complexity and unexpectedness of their oppositionality took their affiliations to unexpected territory – for the Urdu writer, Qurratulain Hyder, therefore, there was Elizabeth Bowen; for the Bengali poet, novelist, and critic Buddhadeva Bose, who adored Tagore and also adored Eliot, there were the compensatory, contrary figures of the poet Jibanananda Das, a contemporary he did much to champion, and of D. H. Lawrence and Whitman. The richness of the various power struggles to define the literary within India in the time of modernity, and the robust, often contradictory creative opportunism that took place in the interests of that struggle, is, alas, considerably reduced and simplified by the terms ‘colonial’ or ‘postcolonial’. If one were to map the strategic affinities of these writers, those terms would gradually lose their mythic integrity; what would begin to appear (almost accidentally, as not every point of the map would be known to the other) is a sort of trade route of vernacular experimentation, a patois of the concrete, an effervescent cherishing of the idiosyncratic. If we were to trace the lines radiating from one writer or location to another on this map, we, for instance, might find that, often, a high degree of attention and erudition had been brought to bear upon the commonplace.
