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.

Texture of Forgetfulness: A New Poem by Me

Texture of forgetfulness

Slips away from my fingers

I don’t even remember how it felt

Probably it was like sand or silk

Or like a young woman’s curves

Or like nothingness

Or like feathers of a dead sparrow

Texture of forgetfulness is like daylight

Inside which we can see everything clearly

For instance when I am on my bike

I don’t see the vacant spaces between vehicles

The spaces which would be vacant

And those which are already vacant

Texture of forgetfulness

Is like the eyes

Limpid and sharp

In their absence

I don’t even see

What I am not seeing

Even the invisibility

Is invisible to me

Texture of forgetfulness is like a poem

We have forgotten to write

We don’t even remember what it was

And how it went

Or where it went

I dream of touching forgetfulness

Which is full like a cup of tea

Or empty like the forgotten sea

I smell the texture of forgetfulness

It smells the touch of mother’s saris

Before she went away to sleep

Or dad’s trousers

When he used to take me out for Bruce Lee movies

I listen to the texture of forgetfulness

It sounds like the music of the forgotten son

Which you can’t even replay in your heads

Texture of forgetfulness grows like a cobweb

On a winter afternoon

I feel like a lazy spider

Spinning the web of my forgetfulness

Trying to trap some unknown buzzing words

Which I don’t even know

They exist.

19 December 2010

2.55 pm

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues: A Poem by Sachin Ketkar

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues

Sachin Ketkar

Ocean is an old discarded myth.

I hear the leisurely blue songs

Of the whale swimming

Serenely

At the back of my mind

I view her sprout jets of love

As she dives and crashes

I thought she was an island

On which I could live

But she fled.

I have gone down under the waves of sleep

Waters as voluptuous as death

Have engulfed me

When I open my eyes

The world turns its back upon me

They say

She is just a blue apparition

On an inky night

Her songs are the merely moving ridges

Tumbling over one another

Plug your ears they say

Now that I am just a pallid corpse

Floating like a weed under the sea

I will reach out to her

And let her secret songs

Run like silk through my veins

12 August 2010                     12 pm

REMEMBERING AK RAMANUJAN FROM THE OTHER SHORE OF GLOBALIZATION

UGC SAP DRS-I of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The M S University of Baroda organized an AK RAMANUNAJAN NATIONAL PAPER READING COMPETITION in the memory of one of its most illustrious faculties for the students of the Master of Arts in English course in the various university departments on 30-31 January 2009. Why did we organize such an event? This is what I said on 30th Jan 2009 regarding AK Ramanujan.

Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan (1929-1993) is one of the foremost Indian poets in English, translators, cultural theorists and linguists. He belongs to the galaxy of first generation modernist Indian English poets which included internationally renowned names like Nissim Ezekiel, Jayant Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Keki Daruwala, AK Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, and R Parathasarty.

The quest for an authentic cultural identity and negotiation of multiple cultural heritages were prominent preoccupations in his writings. This theme is typical of the postcolonial generation of modernist poets. This quest was different from the quest for national identity of their precursors, the poets of colonial period like Sri Aurobindo, the Dutts and Sarojini Naidu in the sense that these post colonial poets looked beyond the high-textual Sanskritic traditions. They sought to identify and enter into a dialogue with the rebellious spirit of the Bhakti poetry and the marginal oral traditions which they saw as more authentic and true. In a sense they sought to discover or rather invent a native modernity which was non-colonial and non-Brahminical at the same time. In this process of identification and negotiation they sought to decolonize and debrahmanize themselves and the culture in which they wrote. Translation became a very important tool in their hands to achieve this purpose.

Today however, there are two reasons for remembering AKR:

First is that he was one of the faculties in this Department. Before leaving for the United States in 1959, he worked in many Indian Universities, including the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara. In 1962, he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he was affiliated throughout the rest of his career

The second reason for remembering AKR is that the very idea of memory seems to be getting obsolete in contemporary times. The meaning of memory today seems to have changed. The injunction of ` improve your memory’ seems to imply upgrading your RAM or cache memory of your motherboard. The whole idea of `quest for identity’ appears quaint and distanced. The idea of search for identity is replaced by the idea ofsurfing for identity. We seem to be living in a perpetual present where the breaking news of this moment is forgotten with the next. History is what is telecast live and reality means reality show. In such a state of affairs, it is necessary to reread and rewrite figures like Ramanujan in much the same way they reread and rewrote the Bhaki poets. There is a need to translate these writers into a contemporary language. It is important to tell the younger generation that these poets were the ` breaking news’ once and that they were ` brand names’ in their times and they `hacked’ into multiple cultural codes and languages.

GN Devy, another prominent faculties of this Dept, uses the phrase ` after amnesia’ to describe the post-colonial generation’s awakening to true identity. Amnesia is not exactly the term one can use today. It seems to be Alzheimer’s that we seem to be up against and in such a situation, re-membering Ramanujan, his legacy and his work is one way of remedying the premature memory loss.

Appointing Authors The Pathare Way

Ranganath Pathare a well known novelist, short story writer and critic in Marathi in the latest issue of New Quest, has attacked young urban poets in Marathi like Manya Joshi, Hemant Divate, Salil Wagh and myself among others saying, `They dont recognize any authority other than themselves. Barring one or two exceptions, their reading and understanding of the Marathi literary tradition is doubtful. Based on their pseudo-witty remarks, one tends to feel that writing poetry at deeper levels is not their cup of tea.....These are self styled dons and "Mafiosi", who live in their own shallow, illusionary universe. Obviously, nobody other than themselves and their samll coterie has any reasons to question their "junky" theories or their "funky" observations.They are their own self appointed critics and thinkers. They are a new post-1990 band of postmodern flag bearers, who make use of modern means of communication like blogging on the internet or websites of their own.' ( New Quest: 169, July Sept 2007 pp. 19-20)

I would like to know from Pathare if the `post' of a writer and critic or thinker is `appointed' after an ad in newspaper, interview, `fixing' and all that. Probably thats how he got `appointed' as a novelist and critic. With friends in high post in Sahitya Akademi and academia, Prof Pathare himself has managed to `post' himself as a `major' voice in fiction. Apart from one good novel, Pathare has written extremely mediocre short stories.

Using technology for publishing our writing and thoughts also seem to have hurt the old man. If he and his goons cant keep up with the changing technology, its too bad for him. It is also interesting how contemporary technology can become anti-establishment and liberating.

I would also like to know if we require Pathare's under-the table-recommendation to get an `appointment' in literary scenario.
I feel that people like Pathare are the ones who claim to be authorities ( we dont accept authority means that we dont accept people like Pathare) are self appointed, or are appointed by their friends in academia, official institutions and award-giving organizations. Otherwise, how come after writing mediocre stuff they manage to become `reputed' and sole bearers of Marathi traditions? If we are behaving like Mafia dons, they are behaving like milatary Junta and rejecting them involves rejections from their chamchas and `appointment' walahs. Any wonder we are not getting any awards etc and most ridiculous thrash is being celebrated as `great writing'?

Sorry Mr Pathare, cant help it. We dont recognize you or your agents as our authorities and neither do we need your `appointments' for the post of writers and thinkers.

War Veterens and the Epehebes

Dilip Chitre, the grand old man of Indian Poetry, is bringing out a big fat collection of poems in English on Friday. The collection is awesome and superbly brought out by Poetrywala. After Arun Kolatkar's mind blowing Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra, Chitre's 'As Is, Where Is' is a landmark work in Indian Poetry in English. Chitre has brought out three collections of his 'collected works' running into more than seven hundred pages, he has also translated hundreds of pages from Marathi and has translated some seminal poets from all over the world into Marathi. I wonder if our generation will ever be able to reach this quantity and quality. It not only requires total dedication to art, but also immense passion and fire in the soul. This fire and passion and this dedication is missing in our generation. We also lack wide ranging scholarship that these people possess. Most of my contemporaries are myopic and their understanding of literature is very crude and gross. Their scholarship is zero. These War Veterans and their works are Himalayan obstacles and it will be an Herculean ordeal for our poetic strength to cross these ranges. I am going to Mumbai, the day after tomorrow for the book release function and hoping to meet my dear friends. Do I have enough RDX in my soul to better and on a bigger scale then these people? Time alone will tell. The small bulk of poetry I have written is a product of extremely intense, dark and passionate moments of my life. It is, I believe, like those moments which produced it. What is the place of my poetry in Marathi literary tradition? What is its place in the International arena of poetry? I wish I knew. Till then, dig dig deeper into my soul, my grave digger, and talk to the skull of Yorick you find......