ABSTRACT
This chapter tries to make sense of the somewhat complicated if not convoluted idea of nativism in Indian literary criticism through the key texts of Ganesh N. Devy and Bhalchandra Nemade. Nativism is situated in larger literary-cultural debates by tracing its genealogy within more widely acknowledged historical and cultural processes such as modernism and nationalism. Even so it is doubtful that nativism is a coherent body of critical and creative texts forming a movement; rather it is a term to be variously understood and loosely interpreted, depending on its context. Not a well-developed theory or literary movement, it may be better characterized as a corpus of concepts and attitudes, some of which contradict or diverge greatly. On the one hand, it can refer to specific styles, genres, linguistic and formal features of a work; on the other, it can encompass the whole socio-cultural and psycho-spiritual outlook of an author or society. With such a breadth of possible meanings, its efficacy and utility as a critical tool is somewhat limited. Yet we cannot deny that it played an influential role in literary and critical production in India for a few decades, say, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The main problem with nativism is its, almost by definition, oppositional nature. It cannot exist without its opposite or Other. If so, the inevitable question is not just who the native is but also who the non-native, the outsider, the alien is. Bhalchandra Nemade’s nativism seems narrower if more well defined than Ganesh Devy’s, which is slippery and ambiguous, if not expedient.
