Possible Areas for Doctoral Research in English Studies

After the recent announcement by the HRD that a PhD will be made mandatory after the year 2021 as minimum eligibility for applying for the post of assistant professor, the number of interested students inquiring with me about possible areas and topics for doing PhD has gone up. I have been regularly blogging about doing research in English studies, the questions of methodology and coming up with a research proposal and many people have found it useful. Please also check out my following blogs: 

i) A Beginners Guide to Doing PhD in English Literature
ii) Choosing a Topic for the Research Project in English Literature
iii) Writing a Research Proposal in English studies
iv) Possible Areas of Research on Translation Studies
v) On Theorizing Indian Literatures and Cultures
vi) Application of Dionyz Durisin's notion of interliterariness to Indian literatures

English studies in India, after the late nineteen eighties, has undergone a paradigm shift by moving away from centrality of the Anglophone literatures (‘English’ literature, ‘American’ Literature and ‘Indian Writing in English’) to a more comparative Indian literatures framework. It moved away from the study of ‘English literature’ to ‘literatures in English’. This shift was propelled by multiple factors like the rise of postcolonial studies, ‘ the crisis in English studies’ debates in India, growth in Indian literatures in English translation,  development of translation studies and the Dalit studies,  as well as substantial incorporation of non-Anglophone critical theory (largely continental) and cultural studies into the English studies curriculum.  It is the same cultural need to contextualize English studies in India and make it relevant to the Indian studies that has given rise to growing emphasis on ‘English Language Teaching’.

 I have been working within this reoriented discipline from the past two decades, and hence my suggestions for the topics and areas for an M. Phil or PhD research comes from comparative Indian literatures framework. These topics and areas also reflect my own understanding of ‘the knowledge gaps’ in research in English studies today, as well as my own personal research interests. Hence, obviously these are not the only areas. I will be blogging more on other areas as well in future.

 A distinction between ‘an area’ and ‘a topic’ needs to be kept in mind. I have offered broad outline of an area, obviously one needs to relate it to specific authors/texts/ languages/ periods to delimit the project. This specific delimitation would be ‘the topic’. I have given examples from my own research and one can come up with any number of parallel ‘topics’ for their own research projects.

1) Hypertextuality and the questions of Digital Archiving of Indian literatures (Bhakti, 19^th century etc), the post-print condition

While digital humanities has made substantial inroads into the western humanities academia, it is yet to make its place in India. However, after the explosion of the internet and massive proliferation of post-print digital data (‘big data’), the nature of knowledge, its production , circulation has undergone a profound change, and it is often compared to the print technology revolution in the early middle period of the previous millennium. Digital humanities as a discipline engages with methodological, epistemological and ontological issues of literary research in the context of this post-print digital universe of discourse. In the west, digital humanities  has often been thought of in terms of ‘ waves’ where the first wave focussed on large-scale digitization projects and the establishment of technological infrastructure facilitating the shift from ‘ print’ to ‘ digital’ space, the later developments and waves moved towards creating tools for dealing with ‘ born digital texts. Digital humanities in India is still in its nascent stage and will require transferring of massive pre-print, and print era documents into the digital space , hence dealing with the basic issues of OCR, funding and lack of interdisciplinary expertise. One can look up books like Digital_Humanities. eds. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, et al. MIT, 2012 and Understanding Digital Humanities , ed. David Berry , 2012 for more information about digital humanities.

2) Globalization and Literary languages in India

The processes of globalization unleashed during the nineteen nineties have profoundly altered the cultural landscape of India. How literatures in Indian languages engages with the disturbing questions of virtual reality, new corporate capitalism, hybridization of languages, ‘post-truth’ and politics of media manipulation, rise of social media and the questions of digital identity, privacy, freedom of expression, pornography, and new forms of religious fanaticism is a critical domain of research. One can study how literatures produced in Indian languages (bhashas) in the nineteen nineties and the twenty first century comparatively. My own research on contemporary Marathi poetry deals with such questions. How do literatures from other Indian languages engage with, and embody these developments?

Read my write up on 21st century Marathi literature by clicking here

3)  Dalit literatures of the twenty first century

Caste and gender-based discrimination is deeply rooted in Indian society, and finds its expression in literatures. Dalit literatures emerged during the nineteen sixties, primarily in the form of autobiographies and poetry, and are receiving significant attention in the English studies academia. However, most of the texts that are being studied deal with the lives of Dalit writers during the sixties and the eighties. There is a need to focus on the writers who grew up in the nineties and the twenty first centuries (like Meena Kandasamy and S.Chandramohan  in English and Des Raj Kali in Punjabi) in order to understand the nature of their protest and their negotiation of caste-gender discrimination. We need to ask the questions regarding the role of class, corporate capitalism and technology in this negotiation. We need to compare their writings with the Dalit writers of the earlier generations.

4)   World Literature and Modernisms in Indian languages

Though the concept of ‘world literature’ is fairly old, going back to Goethe at least, it was during the nineteen nineties, after globalization, that the concept started being critically rethought by scholars such as Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti and David Damrosch. These scholars went beyond the traditional notion of world literature as body of texts or a canon to underscore the transnational, trans-regional contexts of literary production, consumption and circulation. David Damrosch edited World Literature in Theory (2014) is the key anthology that would serve as an introduction to various deliberations around World Literature.

Indian students may draw upon these critical re-conceptualizations, and look at the phenomenon like modernisms (as distinct from modern or modernity) in Indian literatures other than English. For instance, one can look at the writings of the immensely influential writers-scholars such as Suresh Joshi, Dilip Chitre, Agyeya, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Vilas Sarang  (Read my paper on Vilas Sarang by clicking here) , G.A. Kulkarni , Namdeo Dhasal ( Read my paper on Namdeo Dhasal by clicking here)  and Nirmal Verma ( many of their creative writings are available in English translation)  using the notion of world literature. It will help us to go beyond the stereotypical readings of these works in terms of ‘influences’ or ‘derivativeness’ and ‘inauthenticity’ that is associated with conventional understanding of modernism in India. One can even approach important literary movements of experimentation such as the Theatre of Absurd in various Indian languages using this theoretical approach. 

More specifically, this approach is also helpful in looking at specific seminal authors like Anton Chekhov,  T.S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Rabindranath Tagore as world literature and their reception in various Indian languages.

Read my paper on Gujarati modernism by clicking here 

My paper on Marathi modernism by clicking here 

5) Reception and the Impact of Poststructuralist, Postmodern Critical Theories on literary criticism in Indian languages (including performative gender studies)

Though English studies have incorporated the continental theories like poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies in its methodology, how have non-English literary studies ‘received’ these theories need to be examined in their cultural and historical contexts.   For instance, critics like Suresh Joshi, Suman Shah, Babu Suthar, Chandrakant Topiwala in Gujarati, Milind Malshe, Gangadhar Patil, Vilas Sarang , M.S. Patil and Harishchandra Thorat in Marathi draw upon these theories  extensively. What is their impact on the bhasha criticism? What does this reception tell us about the historical context and cultural politics underlying literary criticism in the bhashas?

6) Interliterary processes in the post-Independence Indian literatures

Like the notion of ‘world literature’, the notion of ‘interliterariness’ developed by Dionyz Durisin is extremely useful to understand formation of multiple Indian literatures, as it helps us to overcome the notions of ‘ influences’ that perpetuates the influencer-influenced hierarchies and also helps us to understand literatures as processes rather than products. I am grateful to noted Marathi critic late Prof Kimbahune for drawing my attention to this theoretical framework and its use in multilingual Indian context. Dionyz Durisin’s Theory of Literary Comparativistics (1984) is a useful book. One can also look up Amiya Dev and Sisir Kumar Das edited anthology on Comparative Indian Literature for its application in some places. Marian Gallik’s essays on interliterariness and Durisin are helpful.
Check out my own essay on application of the notion of interliterariness to Indian literatures  by clicking here.

Watch my lecture on translation studies and world literature 

7) Rethinking Bhakti literatures and English studies (beyond colonial paradigms of reading bhakti)

Most of the reading precolonial Indian religious literature tend to see it as ‘pan- Indian’ ‘bhakti movement’ and read ‘universal mysticism’ and ‘democratization’ into it. This anachronistic reading of ‘bhakti’ itself was a result of the nineteenth century colonialism and colonial nationalist modernity that projected such modern or quasi-Christian notions derived from the Reformation onto this body of literature. 
My own research on Narsinh Mehta is deeply coloured by this conventional reading of bhakti. However, when I rethink bhakti critically today, I find it more of a sectarian (or rather panthiya or sampradayik) propaganda rather than being a product of any universal mystical community . It will be a good idea to see how these 'bhakti movements’ in various Indian languages are constructed during the colonial period, especially in English. For instance, R.D. Ranade’s book Mysticism in Maharashtra is an influential book of this kind. There is a need to ‘de-romanticize’ bhakti and rethink the relation between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in Indian contexts. One also needs to take a second look at the dialogic/conflictual relation between ‘bhakti’ traditions and ‘ Indian Islamic traditions’.

8) Literary Historiography, Pedagogy and the History of literary canonization in Indian languages

Literary historiography in Indian languages began with pedagogical concerns during the late nineteenth century. How did such projects influence creation of literary canons in those languages? How does looking at historical contexts of historiographical writings reflect the changing poetics and politics of literary cultures? For instance, how do historiographical writings during the nineteen seventies and the eighties differ from the colonial projects? How does the historiographical writings of the nineteen nineties differ from those in the seventies or at the turn of the century? What does this difference tell us about literary culture of its times? How are pedagogical and canonizing concerns articulated in literary historiographies?

Watch my lecture on Literary Historiography in Indian vernaculars, Marathi Bhakti and  World literature

9) Anxiety of Influence and the Politics of Canonization in Modern Indian Literatures

Anxiety of Influence is a powerful theory developed by the American critic Harold Bloom that seeks to de-romanticize relationship between creative writers, and hence a very insightful ( non-Eliotian) take on the question of tradition and modernism. How does this quasi-Oedipal conflict between the authors and predecessors play out in literary arenas in India? My own writings of contemporary Marathi poetry highlight this love-hate tension between the influential modernist poets like Arun Kolatkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Dilip Chitre and Vasant Dahake ,and the new generation poets who emerged during the nineteen nineties like Manya Joshi, Hemant Divate, Mangesh N. Kale, Sanjeev Khandekar and Sachin Ketkar. How does this conflict play out in other Indian literatures?

10) Little Magazine movements and the Literary Avant-gardes in Indian literatures

As demonstrated by Benedict Anderson, print capitalism facilitated the imagination of ‘imagined community’ called nation in the context of colonial modernity. The little magazine movements in Indian languages were ‘non-periodical’ very often ephemeral ventures that were non-capitalistic in their orientation and outcomes of deep discontent with the cultural conservatism of the mainstream periodicals. The dissenting, non-conservative, sexually explicit and radical experimentation with cultural forms (including the visual) was articulated on such fringe, ephemeral platforms during the nineteen fifties and the sixties. In fact, important Dalit writing in Indian languages had to find space in the little magazines.   

( Read my paper on i) Marathi literary Avant-garde )

Great amount of such avant-garde modernist writings later on became ‘mainstream’ and even ‘established’ over a period of time. Little magazines in Marathi included magazines of the sixties and the seventies such as ‘a-ba-ka-da-ee’, ‘ aso’, vaacha’ and so on. My own research work in Marathi is on and through the little magazines of the nineteen nineties like Shabdavedh, Saushthav and Abhidhanantar ( Read my article on Abhidhanantar by clicking here)  that defined themselves as continuing the avant-garde tendencies of their precursors as well as expressing the need to reinvent the idiom of poetry and the need to deal with the altered life and cultural landscape transformed by the forces of globalization. They also expressed their discontent with the idiom of the modernist sixties by pointing out what was once anti-establishment had already become established and clichéd. How did the poetics and politics of the little magazines play out in other Indian languages? How do they compare with the little magazine movements in other parts of the world?

One can also examine ' post-print' (non) periodicals ( e.g. Hakara in Marathi) and blogs in other Indian languages and their cultural agendas when the digital promises to shape our imaginations as ' virtual-global communities'.

How to Read Literary Translation

Most of the discussions around translation in India, whether academic or otherwise, seem to be struck in an obsolete paradigm. (Check out my blog on why translation studies)

 It approaches translation from the perspective of practice- it sees translation as something to be DONE, and hence all the repetitive talk about ‘problems of translation’, whether particular translation is possible or not continues inanely.  Not enough discussion about translation from the perspective of theory and methodology is available in the Indian context, i.e. the questions about how to READ/STUDY/RESEARCH translated texts. There are notable exceptions of course. Here I want to discuss the basic questions of how to READ translated texts for the beginners who have just started researching translation studies. (Check out my blog on some possible areas of research on literary translation)

One obvious pitfall while studying translation is being judgmental (normative) , we are obsessed with the questions like whether a particular translation is ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘readable’. Being judgmental closes the door of the inquiry into the great significance of translations, however ‘bad’, as points of entry to the study a particular cultural history.

                  As translation is a decision-making process starting from the choice of the texts/ authors and the direction of translation (e.g. from Gujarati to English or the other way round) to the decisions involving choices of titles, cultural elements, idioms, literary devices and so on, one way of reading translation is to see how the history of target language culture has influenced these decisions.

                  A powerful theoretical tool in translation studies is Andre Levefere’s idea of translation as a kind of ‘refraction’. Translation, according to Lefevere, can be considered as one of the ‘ refractions’ or all forms of rewritings of texts from one language into other , including cinematic, televisions or comic book adaptations of the Mahabharata or The Godfather to critical commentaries, glosses, summaries of the texts in other languages. Critical articles on Baudelaire by the Gujarati critic Suresh Joshi or the Marathi writer Dilip Chitre ‘refract’ Baudelaire for Gujarati and Marathi audience. Once you see translation as ‘refraction’ you situate it within the larger cultural politics of the period and you can see the role it plays and the agenda behind it.

 

                  Translation, like all other ‘refractions’, Lefevere notes are done under certain constraints of translating culture (TL Culture) and the task of reading a translated text is to understand the strategies of translating ( the decisions made by translators) in the context of these constraints.  According to Lefevere these constraints are as follows: i)  the constraint of language  i.e. the verbal structure and texture of the translating language force the translators to make certain choices, ii)  the constraint of poetics i.e. the dominant poetics of the translating culture compel the translator to choose a particular mode of translation (e.g. AK Ramanujan’s choice to translate the oral -performative genre of Bhakti poetry where the word-music is an essential feature into the imagistic -ironic free verse developed by Eliot or William Carlos Williams), iii) the constraint of patronage – for instance the demand to conform to what your publishers want ( or the publisher’s version of what the reader/market wants) or even the state or political patronage ( what the Polit Bureau wants)  and so on. Refractions, Lefevere argues, are basically manipulative and have an agenda of influencing the audience.  Reading translations as refraction helps us to uncover the rich cultural history of the period. Reading multiple translations of the same literary text or author (e.g. Shakespeare, Sharatchandra or Tagore) over a period of time reveals the cultural politics of the period in which these translations were made and help us reconstruct the history of culture.

                  Another significant question while reading translated texts is to consider translation from functional point of view, i.e. asking the questions like what is the role and the function of the translated text in the development of literary tradition. What is the role of translation in inaugurating or consolidating a literary movement (like modernism or Dalit literature)? What role does translation play in establishing a particular poetics or genre (e.g. Romanticism, the Brechtian theatre, or the Theatre of the Absurd, or genre like the sonnet, the ghazals, the short story or the novel. How does translation influence not the author, but poetics and the form? As the term ‘influence’ is a problematic one (creating a hierarchy between the influencer and the influenced), more constructive way of looking at resemblances between literary traditions and cultures is to see them as what Dionyz Durisin terms as ‘interliterary processes’. (Click here to read my blog on application of Durisin's ideas to Indian literatures) 

                  Durisin’s view of literary and cultural phenomena as processes avoids the tendencies to create hierarchies. When we see that the product ‘Chai’ is produced by the process (mixing ingredients like sugar, milk or tea leaves and boiling it) we no longer see chai as being ‘influenced’ by ‘milk’. Hence, if you see the films like Dharmatma or Sarkar as involving the Hollywood ingredients, say the elements of The Godfather, you no longer create a hierarchy between Hollywood and Bollywood.   Hence while exploring the function of translated texts in the translating culture, we are interested in ways in which translation contributes to these ‘interliterary processes’.

(Also check out my blog on Theorizing Indian literatures using semiotics of culture as theoretical framework)

Check out my Video Presentation on  Contemporary Translation theory and Practice

On Theorizing Indian Literatures and Cultures

         As a researcher in Indian literarures, languages and cultures, my interest in Semiotics of Culture as a theoretical framework developed by the scholars of the Tartu- Moscow School of semiotics especially Juri Lotman ( 1922-1993) stems from the fact that it:

I) Sees meaning as being essentially ‘translational’ and ‘culture’ as essentially multilingual  by underscoring the fact that no meaning-making system can exist in isolation or can be autonomous ( in contrast to Saussure) ……this core assumption makes it pertinent to Indian society which is mindbogglingly diverse and multilingual

II) sees literature (printed or oral or performative) as belonging to a expansive category of artistic texts thus going beyond the restrictive and colonial print-centric view of literature ..it can allow us to understand the dialogic and translational exchanges between the printed or oral literary texts and  texts from cinema, paintings, dance or music

III) is of significant theoretical relevance to Comparative Indian Literatures.  The notion of vertical isomorphism of the semiospheres existing in dialogic interactions with each other at multiple levels  allows us to conceptualize a heterogeneous and stochastic ‘Indian semiosphere’ ( and consequently Indian literatures as being generated by the Indian semiosphere)made up of multiple semiospheres like ‘Marathi’ or “Gujarati’ semiospheres and these semiospheres can be conceptualized as being heterogeneous and stochastic in their own right, interacting dialogically with one another, different spaces within and interacting dialogically with cultural traditions and cultural histories that are neither specific to Marathi nor Gujarati (Sanskrit, Prakrit,  Perso-Arabic, European, Chinese, and so on).

The notion of semiosphere can also equip us to describe the cultural mechanisms underlying what Dionyz Durisin terms ' interliterary processes'. 

Similarly one can conceptualize ‘South Asian Semiosphere’ or ‘Asian Semiosphere’ or a Planetary Semiosphere that generates ‘ world literature’.

One can also understand gender, class and caste as semiospheres. 

IV) is a radical model of cultural historiography

 

a) It sees cultural historiography itself as a narrative and translational activity involving retrospective narrative reconstruction (translation) of cultural history (which is primarily unpredictable and irreversible) into the explanatory languages of the present ( e.g Habermasian sociology , Butler’s gender studies, Foucauldian analysis of discourse, governmentality or biopolitics )

b) it is a model of cultural change that highlights  differential and non-linear modes of development of the diverse co-existing meaning-making systems…for instance fashion, food and caste change at differential rates and poetry using the poetics of the 1940s ( the Ravi-Kiran Mandal lyricism ) can co-exist with the poetry using the avant-garde poetics of 60s in Marathi

c) It is a model of cultural change that views mechanisms of cultural change as being primarily ‘translational’….. it views the underlying mechanism in the generation of ‘the new’ as being translational

V) It provides tools and ideas for practical criticism of texts and their contexts

 The notions of semantic tropes, ‘the text-within-text, plot , the idea of symbol as plot-gene, continuous- discrete ( visual to verbal) dialogics and so on.

VI)

 The mainstream academic cultural studies in India due to its excessive reliance on French, American and British theories (which are monolingual, deterministic in orientation) has failed to come to terms with multilingual and chaotic social and cultural realities of India . 

Its lack of  critical self awareness can be seen in the fact that as it criticizes modernity ( with the ideas of nation or science) as being universalist, Euro-centric and elite on the one hand it has no  issues  uncritically accepting  ‘ Critical Theory’ whose roots go back to Frankfurt or Birmingham or Paris as if they are non-universalist, non-Eurocentric and non-elite.

The mainstream academic cultural studies have become reductive as it sees ‘political interpretation’ as the absolute horizon for all interpretation’ (as Jameson puts it)…. and extremely predictable almost conventional.  However the conceptualization of culture in semiotics of culture  subsumes the political as it sees cultural as fundamentally i) heterogeneous ii) asymmetrical iii) chaotically dynamic and iv) constructivist in terms of epistemology and cognition (seeing semiotic systems as ‘modelling’ systems)…in a sense subsumes political to the cultural rather than reduce the cultural to the political.

My Articles using Semiotics of Culture for Indian literatures :
 i) Indian Writing in English
ii) Indian Poetry in English
iii) Namdeo Dhasal and Dalit Literature
iv)  Modern and Modernism in Gujarati
v)  Avant-garde Gujarati literature
vi) Poetics and Politics of Self-translation

References:

Lotman,Juri. Culture and Explosion. Ed. Marina Grishakova. Trans. Wilma Clark.Berlin and New York. Mouton de Gruyter. 2009. 

--- “On the semiosphere.” Translated by Wilma Clark.  Sign Systems Studies 33.1, 2005

---‘ The Text within the Text’ . (1981) Trans. Jerry Leo, Amy Mandelker , PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 3 (May, 1994), pp. 377-384

---“ Technological Progress as a Problem in the Study of Culture”, trans.  Ilana Gomel Poetics Today, Duke University Press Vol. 12, No. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (winter, 1991), pp. 781-800. 

---Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1990. 

---‘Culture as Collective Intellect And Problems Of Artificial Intelligence’, trans. Ann Shukman, Russian Poetics in Translati0n,  No. 6, 1979, pp 84-96

---‘ The Poetics of Everyday Behaviour in the Eighteenth Century Russian Culture’, Translated by Andrea Beesing from “Poetika bytovogo povedeniia v russkoi kul’ture XVIII veka,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam, no.8 (Tartu, 1977), pp.65-89.

'The Age of OBCs in Indian Literatures'? Rethinking Indian Literatures and the Question of Caste Identity

The study of relationship between caste and literature in India has primarily been dominated by the Dalit Studies, which justifiably  interrogates the ' Sawarna-Upper Caste' hegemony in literary and cultural studies from the Ambedkarite position. Statistically speaking the Dalits, ( the former ' untouchables') who are usually categorized as ' Scheduled Castes' ( SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) by the constitution of India, form roughly 30% of Indian population as per 2011 census. Approximately 40 % of population in India comprises of a multitude of castes and communities classified as ' Other Backward Classes' or 'OBC'.  The Wikipedia graph about the OBC is informative.

Friends of South Asia or FOSA has put together a website Friendsofsouthasia.org which provides  useful information about this social category. It notes, " The OBCs comprise, by and large, the lower rungs of the Sudras who, in the past, suffered from varying degrees of ritual prohibitions applied to the a-dvijas (literally, those not twice-born) and remain till today socially and occupationally disadvantaged". It also notes, " "OBCs, by profession, being small cultivators, agricultural laborers, artisans and also being engaged in weaving, fishing, construction work, etc. and these occupations being common to SCs and OBCs, the status of OBCs cannot be treated as very much different from that of SCs ....OBCs constitute a majority of poor and backward population which produced a variety of goods and services, but on terms and conditions unfair to them."

However, in the study of sociology of Indian literature, the category of ' OBC' has not received the importance it deserves. One of the most significant statements comes from a renowned Marathi writer Vilas Sarang (1942-). In his provocative essay, " Marathi Sahityatil OBC Yug' ( in the magazine ' Khel' vol. 7, 2007) he attempts to theorize the relationship between this societal category and the poetics practiced by these writers in terms of the questions of identity. The essay is later anthologized as ' Marathi Vangmaiyatil Madhyamvarniya Yug' in his collection of essays Vangmaiyeen Sauskruti ani Samajik Vastav (2011).  

Sarang points out that this mass of ' Other Backward Classes'  is a heterogeneous and scattered one. It lacks any ' face of it's own'.  Historically, the modernist poets of the nineteen forties and the fifties in Marathi like BS Mardhekar or Vinda Karandikar were from the upper-castes. After the sixties, the Dalits and OBCs started making in-roads into Marathi literary world. While the Dalits were aggressive and assertive, the OBC writers were very often on the ' middle grounds'. Sarang points out that Bhalchandra Nemade, a major OBC writer of this period, failed to provide leadership as he remained closer to the identarian politics of ' grameen' writing and 'sub-culture' ( pot-sauskruti) politics.  As the time proceeds, the ' grameen (rural) literature' will give way to the category of ' OBC' literature, Sarang notes. In short, great shift in literary values is under way. 

Sarang remarks that in terms of literary practice, it did not have a poetics of its own. It often used the brahminical upper caste aesthetics, or used the Modernist idiom, or used the Dalit poetics or often followed the poetics of' grameen' or ' rural' literature. After 1980, Sarang argues, however the situation changed and the OBC writers started asserting themselves in poetry. Their preferred mode was 'realism' which gave rise to ' realistic  and unadorned poetry in Marathi.' They could not identify with the poetic idiom of the poetry of earlier generation be it conventional-romantic one or be it modernist one. It seems the OBCs' search for their own identity, their own face and their own voice will be critical for Indian cultural scenario.

Sarang's conceptualization, irrespective of its accuracy, is fascinating and has far-reaching implications for literary studies in India. It is interesting how he changed the title of his essay from ' OBC' Yug (2007) to ' Madhyam Varniya' ( of Middle Varna) in his collection in 2011, probably to avoid controversy. However, some questions need to probed further. For instance, why did the OBCs stay away from Dalit politics and poetics? What was the impact of the Mandal Commission implementation and the rise of OBCs as a force in Indian politics on the way Indian literature was read and written? What is the impact of  the swing of the OBCs towards the erstwhile upper caste party BJP ( see the statistics from the Hindu given below) on cultural politics of India, especially, the identarian ones? Specifically, with the OBC as a Prime Minister who has a thumping support from the upper-castes as well, what will be the trajectory of OBC identity politics in India? 

As the Friends of South Asia website tells us, the OBC is a dynamic category. What we need today is more contemporary sociological framework in the study of Indian literature to explain this dynamics and I don't think we are anywhere near to deal with this. 

Translation Studies in India: A Brief Overview

Translation studies in India is an evolving discipline.  Historically, it was only in mid-nineteenth century that the translation became a significant intellectual issue in India when the question of ‘imagining a nation’ became problematic with the realization of multilingual and multiethnic nature of Indian society. While the idea of nation as a linguistic and cultural unit based on the Eurocentric model started appearing clearly inadequate, translation started to appear as an urgent cultural necessity for nationalistic, indologicial and orientalist projects. The earliest writings on translation in India emerged during this period of the rise of print capitalism and Vishnu Shastri Chiploonkar’s Nibandhmala in Marathi in 1874 can be seen as one of the earliest attempts to intellectually confront the issue of translation. 

 Practitioners and thinkers of this period like Romesh Chander Dutt, and Sri Aurobindo reflected on translation from nationalistic, indological and orientalistic perspectives. The source language, needless to say, was largely Sanskrit and the target language was very often English.

It was only in post- independence period, that the dissatisfaction with the nationalistic, indological and orientalist idea of culture and nation made Indian intellectuals to search for alternative models of theorizing and reflecting on nation and civilization. The questions of regional and linguistic identities became prominent during the processes of linguistic reorganization of states. The questions of caste and gender identities and the movements against discrimination and injustice started gaining ground. In such a context, the idea of nation as an elitist upper caste, upper class and patriarchal construct started being vigorously interrogated. The little magazine movements challenging the predominant formalist and idealist poetics also started questioning the political underpinnings of the established literary culture. It was against this politics of interrogation and revision that the questions of translation started being posed. The major practitioners and scholars of this period like AK Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, Sujit Mukherjee among many others approach the questions of translation in the context of this shift from nationalist, orientalist elitist framework to more regional/ local and demotic outlook towards culture and nation. This shift is clearly noticeable in their choice of source languages and texts which are very often from the marginalized oral, folk and ‘native’ traditions or from bhashas instead of Sanskrit. Their reflections on translation also reveal these re-visionary attitudes.

However, most of the thinking about translation practiced by academics in this period not just in India was around the ‘problems’ of translation very often in a normative way and limiting itself to viewing translation as a process. Internationally, the shift from this normative, process-oriented and hierarchic view of translation to more descriptive, product-based, ideological and subversive view of translation emerged only with the rise of ‘translation studies’ as a discipline in the nineteen seventies.

The late nineteen eighties and nineties was an exciting period for the discipline of translation studies in India. Seminal writings like GN Devy, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature (1993), Sujit Mukherjee’s Translation as Discovery and Other Essays on Indian Literature in English Translation (1994), Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context  (1995)  and invaluable anthologies like  Promod Talgeri, and Verma.  S.B.  eds. Literature in Translation from Cultural Transference to Metonymic Displacement (1988),   AK Singh ed. Translation: Its theory and Practice (1996) , Dingwaney,  Anuradha and Carol Maier.(eds.)  Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (1996)  S.Ramakrishna ed. Translation and Multilingualism.  PostColonial Contexts (1997), Tutun Mukherjee ed. Translation: From Periphery to Centrestage (1998) and Susan Bassnett and Trivedi eds. Post Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. (1999) burst upon the scene. Most of these writing build upon the reflections and practice of translator-scholars like A. K. Ramanujan. These writings are not only informed by the ‘ cultural’ turn in translation studies but also draw heavily upon theorization of postcolonial studies, gender studies, Dalit studies and post structuralism.

With the twenty-first century, globalization permeated nook and corner of Indian society forcing people to seriously rethink the questions of nation, cultural identities, languages and civilization. The explosive growth of digital technology in form of the internet, cellphones and social media in the beginning of the twenty first century has altered the way people communicate and process information and knowledge. The economic reforms from the nineteen nineties of liberalization and privatization intertwined with the processes of globalization producing a new urbanized middle-class and a distinctive landscape dominated by multi-storied complexes, mega-malls and proliferation of multiple types of automobiles. The economic growth was not without its catastrophic implications. The rise of religious fanaticism, terrorism, alarming development of farmers committing suicide and environmental disasters accompanied by growing criminalization and corruption of public life raised new questions before Indian society. The politics of electoral democracy in the post-Mandal period when there was a reconfiguration of politics of caste and reservations has undergone substantial shift. The questions of very existence of Indian languages, marginal identities, ethnic minorities, and natural environment have become more acute than ever. At this juncture it will be fruitful to think of how translators and translation scholars engage with these new questions. It will be interesting to find out how translation studies scholars extensively and intensively deliberate upon the complex emergent issues like:

·         Translation in India and the Digital Revolution

·         Translation and the Fate of Indian Languages

·         Translation and the question of Literary Historiography of post-Independence Indian Literatures

·         Politics of Translation between the Bhashas

·         Teaching Translation Studies in Indian Universities

·         Poetics and Politics of Translation of translating marginal literary discourses like the Dalit literatures, the Adivasi literatures and LGBT writings into English and into Bhasha

·         Politics and Mechanics of Film and TV Adaptation and subtitling into Indian Languages

• Translation and Corpora Linguistics in India

Read More about Translation Studies Elsewhere on My Blog by clicking HERE
 Read my blog on using Semiotics of Culture as a Theoretical Framework for studying Indian literatures and cultures.