ABSTRACT
Critics and theorists in India tend to fall into three broad states or stages: regional, national and the global. Not only by the content of their work but by their discourse styles are their positions revealed. Used to be that regionalists and nationalists, whether in English or vernacular, spoke in an idiom which their Indian peers could comprehend. Their cosmopolitan counterparts, sights fixed on faraway academic horizons, resorted, especially in the heyday of the ‘post’, to an arcane obscurity or ‘vaguology’. Some of their effusions required a special strategy of reading; when the froth settled, the poverty of their ideas lay exposed. The regionalists, among them Dalits, minorities and other subalterns, defined themselves by opposition, whether to the national or global, their rhetoric characterized by outraged, outrageous, demands from those perceived as their exploiters. Both regional nativists and global champions of cosmopolitan theory have little interest in or respect for the nation though they speak even less of what will replace it. Given these (op)positions, where is our own allegiance owed? What sort of literary theory can mediate between these three tents or critical factions? And where or how will a responsible Indian literary criticism emerge?
