Javed Majeed

Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land: The Ethnographer- Historian and the Limits of Irony1

India and the Middle East during the 12th century. The second narrative is constructed around the author’s experiences as an ethnographer in an Egyptian village in the 1980s. These two narratives embody a triangular relationship between historical reconstruction, ethnography, and literary text. This paper explores aspects of this triangular relationship. It also explores the main opposition to emerge in the text between the &dquo;medieval&dquo; and the &dquo;modem&dquo;. The medieval world which the author evokes becomes the basis of a critical perspective on modernity and in the polemic of the text the term &dquo;medieval&dquo; is shorn of its pejorative connotations. The author’s ambivalent attitude to irony is examined in the context of this opposition. The essay ends by suggesting a number of reasons for this

GEOGRAPHIES OF SUBJECTIVITY, PAN-ISLAM AND MUSLIM SEPARATISM: MUHAMMAD IQBAL AND SELFHOOD

This essay focuses on the oppositional politics expressed in the historical geography of the Persian and Urdu poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), showing how it emerges from, and breaks with, Urdu and Persian travelogues and poetry of the nineteenth century. It explores the complex relationships between the politics of Muslim separatism in South Asia and European imperialist discourses. There are two defining tensions within this politics. The first is between territorial nationalism and the global imaginings of religious identity, and the second is between the homogenizing imperatives of nationalism and the subjectivity of individual selfhood. These tensions are reflected in the composite geography of Iqbals work, which contains three elements: a sacred space, a political territoriality and the interiority of subjectivity. But these elements are in conflict with each other; in particular, the space of interiority in his poetry conflicts with the realm of politics in the external world.

Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Nineteenth-Century British Ethnology and the Romance Quest

Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. Dickinson, “I am bored not only by my creative impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of the fictionform”.2 In many ways, A Passage to India articulated Forster’s dissatisfaction with the genre of the novel as a whole. Stephen K. Land reads Forster’s novels in terms of the ways in which their protagonists either embody or challenge social conventions.3 The aesthetic form and subjectmatter of A Passage to India can also be read in similar terms as a set of challenges to novelistic conventions. This is evident in the way the novel self-consciously plays with conventional literary expectations on a variety of levels. The key here is the deliberate uncertainty of what happens in the caves, which is the open question that structures the novel as a whole. Famously, Forster refused to clarify this, suggesting that neither the narrator nor the protagonists, and so neither the readers also, can ever know what happened in the Marabar caves. It is clear that the notion that a novel with a supposedly third-person omniscient narrator who can inform the reader of what happens within the world of the text is undermined by the absent centre of A Passage to India, in which the status of its central event, and even the nature of what constitutes an event, is left ambiguous and uncertain. But Forster argued that this uncertainty was linked to his theme of India itself. In a letter of June 1924 he wrote: Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India

‘A State of Affairs which is Essentially Indefinite’: The Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927)

Historians of colonial India have argued that cartography was central to colonial power in India; maps came to define the British empires authority in the subcontinent. The effectiveness of imperial geography made India a concrete entity for both British colonialists and Indian nationalists, for whom India came to be a single and coherent geographical entity whose boundaries coincided with those of the subcontinent. This article argues that the geographical imagining of India in the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927) was in conflict with these colonial and nationalist mappings of India. It complicated the notion of India as a single, coherent, self-referential geography, and in doing so it centralised India in a global linguistic geography. Its cartographical exercises were at odds with the colonial states investment in a particular geographical image of India, and with the canonical nationalist geographical imagining of India as a multilingual entity as expressed in the Report of the State Reorganization Commission of 1955.

‘A Nation on the Move': The Indian Constitution, Life Writing and Cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACT The Indian Constitution (IC) has been considered in terms of its intertextuality with preceding colonial documents such as the Government of India Act 1935. This essay relocates the IC in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies and texts such as Gandhis Hind Swaraj, showing the parallels between the way they dramatise self-rule and mix global, Indian and regional levels of identity. Both the IC and these texts are marked by processes of transnational and internal dialogue, and reflect transnational aspects of Indian print culture and the subject positions it gave rise to. Widening the discursive sites of the IC to include anti-colonial autobiographies raises questions about the IC as a species of autobiography itself, and it also gives us another perspective on the tensions within the IC, showing how the conflict between liberty and power is manifested in its linguistic cosmopolitanism and its approach to translation. Constitutions embody the aspirations of a nations citizens, and the ICs verbal skills grade and structure these aspirations, plotting them along a spectrum of possible futures and grounding them in a variety of pasts. This concern with temporality has a parallel in some anti-colonial autobiographies where the consciousness of time is particularly acute. Finally, both the IC and Indian anti-colonial life writing can be seen as instances of South Asian literary modernity in terms of the style of their creative choices.

THE CRISIS OF SECULARISM IN INDIA

In the early 1960s, Donald Smiths India as a Secular State questioned the credentials of the Indian states secularism. Since then the issue of what constitutes secularism in India has loomed large in Indian political thought. Like a number of other key categories in political history, such as nationalism, the debate has centred on the question whether the Indian states version of secularism is viable in its own right or not, and if it is viable, whether it extends the concept of secularism in new and innovative directions. The other possibility is to see this secularism as a “derivative discourse” (to adopt a phrase from Partha Chatterjee), confusedly echoing Western notions of secularism, with the caste and communal complexities of Indian society and the structuring role of religion in everyday life at odds with any coherent or recognisable notion of secularism.

Introduction: India and South Africa – Comparisons, Confluences, Contrasts

The articles in this Special Issue come out of papers delivered at a conference called ‘India and South Africa: comparisons, confluences, contrasts’, organised by Javed Majeed and held at King’s College London in October 2012. The aim of the conference was to deepen the interdisciplinary nature of literary studies (especially in its comparative literary dimensions) and Indian Ocean studies by building links between these two areas. From its inception in the 19th century up to the present day the practices and theories of Comparative Literature have, of course, been critical of nationally defined literary canons, and one of its defining aims continues to be transnational readings of literature and literary history. Scholars in Indian Ocean studies have also stressed how their work on transnationalism challenges nationally-based historiographies. In addition, academics in both fields have re-thought the category of ‘Area Studies’, either by moving away from what they see as its constraining legacies, or by appropriating its linguistic and textual expertise in new configurations within a more thoroughly globalised Comparative Literature (Hofmeyr & Williams 2011; Bose 2006:chapter 1; Spivak 2004; Saussy 2006). The conference therefore aimed to create a space for further transnational revisions of ‘Area Studies’ and nationalism in both fields by bringing together their different methodologies. Comparative and connective work on India and South Africa has generated a long historiographical tradition. Its earlier instantiations focused on indentured labour and ‘passenger’ Indians, largely merchants following in the wake of indentured workers. Mohandas Gandhi and his political mobilisations constituted another important focus. In keeping with earlier historiographies of diasporic communities, this body of work was often narrowly ethnicised (focusing only on ‘Indians’ and excluding other groups from the frame) and tended to have a ‘one-way’ orientation, namely it only tracked movement in one direction from South Asia to Africa without looking at reverse movement or asking what the implications of this migration were back home (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2007). The transnational turn and the move beyond nation and area as units of analysis have opened up this field considerably. Studies of ‘Indian’ communities have been de-ethnicised with other communities being brought into the picture.

What’s in a (Proper) Name? Particulars, Individuals, and Authorship in the Linguistic Survey of India and Colonial Scholarship

This chapter examines how the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) grappled with the proper names of Indian languages and dialects. For the Linguistic Survey, India was a site for integrating the different branches of linguistics as a modern European discipline (phonetics, historical linguistics, dialectology, etymology, and philology) into a unified working project. However, this chapter addresses the modes of thinking and the operations of thought that precede this formal organization into linguistic knowledge. The published volumes of the Linguistic Survey, and especially the unpublished files, foreground the process of naming in the Survey’s attempt to separate individual entities from each other—whether these entities are languages, dialects, individual sounds, or individual persons. At this level, before any formal organization of knowledge, the Survey evinces what might be called a metaphysical mode of thinking. The Survey is an exercise in what Peter Strawson called descriptive metaphysics;1 that is, it seeks to distinguish individual entities or “particulars” from each other. This strand of the Survey reveals a complicated picture of colonial power in the realm of linguistic knowledge that belies the usual characterizations of colonial knowledge in this field in terms of strategies of command and clear-cut definitions.

Nationalism’s Travelling Autobiographies and Indian Travelogues

While Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal are writing back to some of the grounding assumptions in colonial ethnography, colonialism itself is not conceived of as a unitary totality in their works. We shall see how Gandhi’s autobiography contains a traveller’s knowledge of the British Empire as a polycentric entity, rather than a monolithic institution with its centre in London. Nehru’s open avowal in his autobiographies of his anglicisation also undercuts any such notion of colonialism in his works.1 Moreover, they assert their intellectual freedom as readers by appropriating European texts for their own purposes, rather than rejecting the West and its intellectual products wholesale. More importantly, though, their travelling autobiographies need to be read in terms of their continuities with and discontinuities from preceding Indian travelogues, and not in relation to a colonial archive alone.

Travel and Modernity

Thus, the travelling autobiographies of Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal emerge from, and write back to, a tradition of Indian travelogues in the nineteenth century, in which there was a conflict between the travelling identities of these Indians and the political and imperial frameworks in which they had to travel and represent themselves. One of the ways in which travel disempowered Indian travellers in the nineteenth century was the increasing awareness they had of the global extent of British power as they journeyed from India to Britain, usually on British ships. The further they travelled, the more disempowered they sensed themselves to be in relation to the empire which unfolded before their eyes. They experienced a Eurocentred global planetary consciousness as subjects who were aware of being caught up in its web of power. The self-consciousness of Indian travellers born out of disempowerment is indicative of ‘the simultaneous nonconsistency of subject-positions’1 in their travelogues. As they travelled, Indians became self-aware in the ethnographic gaze of others, while simultaneously being frozen and disempowered by that gaze.