The moment of criticism in Indian nationalist thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the poetics of a Hindi responsibility

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 101, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 987-1014

  Wakankar, Milind ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950545195     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-101-4-987     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. See, for instance, the Marathi critic R. B Patankar's much-cited essay "Aesthetics: Some Important Problems," Journal of Arts and Ideas 6 (January-March 1984): 43-66, in which he laments the absence of an indigenous aesthetic theory in Maharashtra
2. A more strident note has been struck recently in G. N. Devy's polemical account of Indian criticism in his After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992)
3. See Sudhir Chandra, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992)
4. See Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhartendu Harishcandra and Nineteenth-Century Banares (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)
5. See Ramchandra Shukla, "Bhakti ka vikas," in Surdas (Banares: Nagaripracharini Sabha, 1969). Henceforth "BKV."
6. For the translation of Newman, see Ramchandra Shukla, "Sahitya" [Literature], in Shukla, Chintamani-3, ed. Namwar Singh (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1983), 25-33
7. For Shukla's version of Addison, "Kalpana ka anand" [The pleasures of the imagination], Ibid., 34-60
8. For Shukla's seminal "Kavita kya hai?" [What is poetry?], see Ramchandra Shukla, "Kavita kya hai?" Chintamani-1 (Agra: Hindi Sahitya Sarovar, 1992), 93-123
9. And for the so-called psychological essays, see Chintamani-1, 1-92
10. For Shukla's history of Hindi literature, see Ramchandra Shukla, Hindi sahitya ka itihas (Banares: Nagaripracharini Sabha, 1965)
11. See Gyan Pandey, "Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919-1922," in Subaltern Studies 1, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 168
12. And Philip Lutgendorf, "Interpreting Ramrajya: Reflections on the Ramayan, Bhakti, and Hindu Nationalism," in Bhakti Religion in North India, ed. David Lorenzen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 253-87. Shukla's was among the many different responses to the dominant role played by Gandhi in politics. He remained all his life a staunch proponent of the caste system, upholding the power and privilege of the landed aristocracy, and seeking to return again to an older, traditional north Indian life of social conservatism and religious belief. His intellectual universe had been shaped in part by the culture of Hindi/Hindu ecumenism inaugurated by Harishchandra, and his political instincts were still in large measure determined by the radical opposition of Bal Gangadhar Tilak to colonial rule in the first two decades of the twentieth century. So that when Gandhi began to propound a message of nonviolence, seeking to draw attention to the plight of the low-caste or so-called untouchable communities, Shukla was quick to see this as a threat to a traditional way of life, one in which hierarchy and obligation guaranteed a historical continuity to Indian society
13. For a general introduction to the Bhakti movement, see Karine Schomer, "Introduction," in The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition, ed. Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987)
14. For a fuller account of the poetry of Tulsidas and Surdas, see Ronald Stuart McGregor, Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), 76-80, 109-17
15. Shukla's introduction, "Goswami Tulsidas," to his edition of the Tulsi granthavali was published in 1923, the introduction to his Jayasi granthavali in 1924, both by the Sabha. His edition of Surdas's Bhramar-git sar was published in 1925
16. For the emergence of Hindi out of a colonial contest with Urdu, see Dalmia, Nationalization, 146-221
17. David Lorenzen argues in the course of his work on the Kabirpanthi sects that the nirgun tradition is more commonly associated with the "ideological resistance" of the subaltern classes, while the sagun Bhakti tradition has often articulated "a social ideology intended to serve as a sort of psychological glue that helps preserve both the harmony and privilege within the religious community and within society as whole (including its subordinate communities)." The sagun tradition remains in this sense the dominant tradition of north India. See Lorenzen, "The Historical Vicissitudes of Bhakti Religion," in Lorenzen, Bhakti Religion in North India, 13
18. See Milind Wakankar, "The Anomaly of Kabir: Culture and Canonicity in Indian Modernity," in Subaltern Studies 12, ed. Ajay Skaria, M. S. S. Pandian, and Shail Mayaram (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002)
19. For a history of the Chhayavad movement, see Karine Schomer, Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad Age in Modern Hindi Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
20. For a classic account in Hindi, see Namwar Singh, Chhayavad (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1979)
21. Shukla's "Kavya men rahasyavad" and "Kavya men abhivyanjanavad" contain extensive discussions of these issues
22. Shulda, "BKV," 56. All translations from Hindi in this essay are mine; the entirety of the Shukla corpus is as yet unavailable in English
23. Shukla, "BKV," 58
24. See Dalmia, "Hindi As the National Language of the Hindus," 338-429, for a rich account of European Orientalist attempts to assimilate sagun Bhakti to a Christianized and monotheistic idea of Hinduism as India's sole religion
25. See the discussion of Dayanand in Gyan Prakash, "The Impossibility of Subaltern History," Neplanta 1 (2000): 287-94
26. See Immanuel Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Immanuel Kant, Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54-60
27. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 173-75
28. Shukla, "Kavita kya hai?" 94-95
29. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "More on Power/Knowledge," in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 35; emphasis Spivak's
30. SamikshaThakur argues persuasively for this link: SamikshaThakur, Ramchandra Shukla ke Samiksha Siddhant aur Gita Rahasya (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1993)