Concept Note:
The intellectual order prevailing today is characterized by an exhaustion of Theory, if not its obsolescence, and a general scepticism towards dominant frameworks of organizing knowledge that have emanated primarily from the geographical-cultural region historically referred to as the “West”. Though not necessarily a new development, such doubt is productive in more ways than one. Within Western academia, this has been responded to in varied ways as in a return to Realism and the urge to historicise, marking a shift away from texts and towards certain strands of materiality. Or it dallies with everyday practices under the rubric of cultural studies, reimagining and reforming humanities by bringing in voices from the margins of the West. In India, this realization has almost led academics to embrace cultural studies (that includes the so-called visual turn) as a means of revitalizing humanities. However, such a move that replaces the textual with the visual and the social are still guided by the imperatives of difference, elisions, silences and the power/knowledge dyad. The change wrought thus neither offers a substantive critique of what Theory missed, nor can it find alternative paths that can converse meaningfully with theory at large and engage with it in equal terms.
Literature departments, in the thrall of Theory for a few decades now, stare at a crisis of sorts more than anywhere else. Such was the unabashed and uncritical acceptance of Theory that its ‘universality’ was never in doubt, nor was there any effort to explain specific local or national problems that produced decades of derivative scholarship and caricature of literary and cultural criticism. This creates the opportunity to deploy Indian aesthetic theory and, in the process, return to literature both as words on the page and the world they create through alternative idioms. Appreciating Indian or local cultures and literature through Indian aesthetics and poetics is not something new; in fact, during the successful run of Theory in Indian academia, critics like Balachandra Nemade, G.N. Devy, Makarand Paranjape, Harish Trivedi and later S.N. Balagangadhara have been making significant interventions. The current invocation of Indian aesthetics is marked by Western Theory’s weakness in the West itself. The shifting contours of the global order too gives a new salience to intellectual projects that seek to provincialize the erstwhile centres of dominance in an increasingly multipolar world. The quest is not to seek new forms of “universality” to supplant the ones on the wane, but to provoke and inspire fruitful dialogues across borders and traditions.
The march towards Indian aesthetics is a deeply alluring enterprise, and yet fraught with some fundamental challenges, if not contradictions. Is it a return to tradition – seen as timeless and frozen at best and regressive and revivalist at worst? Does an awareness of pan-Indian traditions empower us to transform literary studies or do they lead to epistemic violence by curbing the rights of local traditions and bhasa literary poetics in which Sanskrit monopolizes what is seen as “Indian”? G.N. Devy fears the latter and takes issue with the project of desivad which he believes does not do justice to India’s bhasa traditions. Devy’s anxiety is intellectually valid, if not strategically so. The effort to generalize that may silence different voices is not necessarily peculiar when one does Sanskrit poetics; it can happen while doing Marathi or Odia aesthetics that may silence attitudes that can threaten its representative character. Secondly, many regional literary and aesthetic traditions were articulated in Sanskrit. That explains when Ranjan Ghosh in his sophisticated prose battles for productive revivalism, something what we may also call strategic Indianization that will also lead to addressing slippages within. Moreover, deployment of pan-Indian vocabulary does not necessarily mean abandonment of Western aesthetics; it just means the latter’s relativization and conversation with Indian as well as bhasa aesthetics.
However, a workshop of this kind cannot do justice to the enormity of the task. At best, it can introduce alternative pathways by dealing with specific themes that can act as reference points for literary criticism and create conditions for their meaningful engagement with Western criticism and theory. Developing an appreciation for longstanding literary traditions may thus be a tall order. Some conceptual categories and modes of practice can be centred around topics such as Anukarana, Abhinaya, Shabda, Rasa, Dhvani, Vriti, Pravriti, Ananda among others. These topics will be discussed threadbare: how they evolved over time and what is their explanatory potential in terms of critical practice. Throughout the workshop, the focus will be on a practice-oriented approach that makes the lectures not an endless deferral of what is conveyed, but criticism in action.
