What is a cat? A cat is an animal with four legs. Why do cats say bow wow? Before answering this question we need to have a conversation about what it means to say bow wow. If that conversation internalizes a hierarchy of language, we exclude or silence a hermeneutic of bow wows which problematizes the very notion of a cat. In order to achieve inclusivity, we need to understand the following essay by Francesca Orsini- whom Modi has excluded from India so that poor bahishkrit Biharis will vote for his Fascist regime under the impression that they are cows rather than speakers of the Hindi language which, I need hardly say, is just a dialect of Quranic Arabic.
The multilingual local in world literature
World literature means literature produced in the world which has more than local currency. A particular example of world literature may be situated in a multi-lingual locality. It may itself use more than one language. But 'world literature', as such, does not have a 'multilingual local' any more than it has a particular author.
Francesca Orsini (SOAS University of London) Abstract This essay questions the geographical categories
in which case it is a work on geography or the methodology used by geographers
used to underpin current theoretical and methodological approaches to “world literature,” which end up making nine tenths of the world, and of literature produced in the world, drop off the world map or appear “peripheral.”
In that case it isn't about geographical categories. It is about people who talk about 'world literature'. Why do they say some examples of it are peripheral? The answer is that they don't consider them important or that they are 'outliers' (i.e. sui generis) . Wallerstein and Prebisch have explained why and to what effect a core/periphery distinction might arise. If you have a bone to pick with either you must address them on their own terms- i.e. by offering a better structural model of world systems of a geopolitical/ economic type. Gassing on about the shitty literature produced by the shithole you happen to have studied won't help more particularly if you are writing in English rather than the language of that shithole.
If a literature does not contain its own comparative literature- or at least the very best of it- it isn't much of a literature. As for World Literature, nothing which has been written about it qualifies as literature as opposed to shit produced by coprophagous shitheads teaching shite subjects.
Focusing on the multilingual north Indian region of Awadh
it had only one local language. Some people who lived there also knew, for professional reasons, a different religious or administrative language. But since those languages weren't local, the locality was not itself multilingual.
in the early modern period,
when one could just as well say that almost everybody born and bred in a locality spoke the same language though they may have had different idiolects.
it argues that an approach to literature and space that takes multilingualism within society and literary culture as a structuring and generative principle and holds both local and cosmopolitan perspectives in view is more productive for world literature than approaches based only on cosmopolitan perspectives of circulation and recognition.
But such an approach has achieved nothing save propound an intensional fallacy. The intension 'Avadh language' can have the well enough defined extension 'all the idiolects spoken in Avadh'. In this case, there is no multilingualism. To assert multilingualism (save among foreigners or members of particular professions) is to assert a more or less cosmopolitan perspective. Thus, if Orsini thinks there was a guy in Avadh who was speaking a different language, rather than idiolect, from some other guy who could understand him well enough, she has to show that there were people outside the region who would confirm this.
Put another way, the question is whether women spoke the same language at home. The answer is yes. Their husbands might speak another language as part of their job but when they came home they spoke a common mother tongue.
Thus, what Orsini has written is nonsense. One may as well say 'focusing on why cats say bow wow, the fact that dogs in Avadh were cats, enables us to embrace the notion that local dogs can be cats. This is more productive for answering questions like 'why do frogs roar in the manner of lions?' than approaches based on the cosmopolitan perspective of Zoologists.'
This essay stems from a discomfort with the geographical categories used to underpin current theoretical and methodological approaches to “world literature,” and with their implications.
If you think this essay represents scholarship, then dissertations on why cats say bow-wow should be awarded PhDs. Many people feel great discomfort because they are not being allowed to get PhD by writing on this engrossing topic.
“World literature,” a famously slippery,
unless it is given a well defined extension for some useful purpose. But this is true of any 'term or art'.
apparently expansive yet surprisingly narrow category, has been much theorized and re-theorized in recent years as comparative literature for the global age, with one foot in the US university curriculum and the other in theories of globalization.
I gave it a well defined extension for a useful purpose. Orsini refuses to do any such thing. Committing the 'intensional fallacy' allows her to talk utter bollocks.
Yet as it moves out of the Euro-American “core” of earlier comparative literature
World literature did not move out from anywhere. Different regions had different 'comparative literatures'. Japan was comparing itself to China. Iran was comparing itself to Arabia. English was comparing itself to Latin, Greek and French and Spanish and German and so forth.
to the Asian-African-Latin American “peripheries,” its theoretical approaches based on world space, system-theory, diffusion, and circulation produce pictures of literary culture in global “peripheries” that are unrecognizable, and impossibly limited when not distorted, to those of us who specialize in those regions (e.g. d’Haen).
d'Haen didn't include my favourite author in his handbook of World Literature. He is a big fat meanie. I hate him.
“World literature” excitingly spurs all of us to look out of our areas and consider wider trajectories of production, circulation, and recognition, but why does it so often get the rest of the world so wrong?
The people doing it are stupid and ignorant. But so are you. That is why you teach a low IQ subject to cretins.
Why does it feel like it imprisons non-Western literatures in categories, timelines, and explanations that do not fit, rather than genuinely interrogating them?
For the same reason that it feels like teechur is sodomizing me when he corrects my essay about my cat. He thinks it says 'miaow'. Actually it says 'bow wow'. Also it bites the postman and chases after cars. Daddy says it is actually a dog. I think he is lying. Dogs have wings. My cat doesn't have wings. Mummy puts a collar and leash on it and takes it for walks. She says I too will be allowed to take it for walkies after I have finished my PhD under the supervision of Orsini Aunty.
Precisely because geography is so crucial to world literature
it isn't. Literature is a high value to weight commodity and thus no 'gravity model' of trade applies. Perhaps what Orsini means is 'linguistic sprachbunde used to follow 'natural boundaries'.' But they don't anymore.
it is imperative that we think carefully about the geographical categories that we use.
No. Don't be silly. The appropriate categories have to do with translatability, Public purpose and, supply and demand determinants. This is the case with all 'invisibles' which don't follow a gravity model.
And if the problem with current approaches to world literature for people like me
stupid people teaching shit
rooted in the literature of a non-western region is that they end up making nine tenths of the world, and of literature produced in the world, drop off the map entirely or appear hopelessly “peripheral,” then my impulse is to think that it is the categories that are being used that are at fault.
Categories like 'stupid' and 'shit' are at fault. It isn't the case that I wasted my life by studying worthless shite.
Orsini had learnt Greek and Latin at School. There were plenty of European Universities where she would have spent her first two years as an undergraduate studying Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. After that, by all means specialize in one or two Indic vernaculars. Otherwise you will be just as useless at doing research on Hindi as people born speaking it.
It appears the quality of instruction at Venice University was poor. Then the poor girl went to Allahabad and New Delhi were there is zero scholarship of any type. She fell in with Armrit and Alok Rai and absorbed their absurd, paranoid, world view. Then, at SOAS, for her PhD, she felt obliged to jump on the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' bandwagon. In this paper she whines about some evil White Belgian who is implying that Hindi literature is shit. True, Indians openly say the same thing. But they are not White. This is totes unfair.
But what imagination of space will work better for and stimulate us to think more productively and imaginatively about literature in the world?
None. The thing is irrelevant. Books from all over the world stand next to each other on my bookshelf. Time and Space don't exist in the field of literary appreciation.
Are mapping and circulation beyond the original language/literary culture the only way?
Yes, if that culture is derivative. No, if it arises by 'convergent evolution' or simultaneous adaptation in many places.
Do local forms really tell us nothing about world literature?
They may do. They may not. Avadh doesn't tell us much about world literature. It does tell us a bit about specific types of Islamic or Hindu literature. But what it has to say isn't very interesting.
In this essay I first review the categories of space within current models of world literature before work through an understanding that I have found much more stimulating and productive for this purpose, geographer Doreen Massey’s argument in For Space (2005).
In 1983 I lived on Kilburn High Road. Some years later Massey published a hilarious article in 'Marxism Today' arguing that it displayed a 'global sense of place'. Around that time, I had gone into 'Molly MacGuire' with my Welsh girlfriend. When I returned from the Gents, I discovered she was discussing Oliver Cromwell with a bunch of Irish thugs. They wouldn't hit her but they would kick the shite out of me. The first question they asked was if I was Catholic or Protestant. I said I was Hindu. Catholic Hindu or Protestant Hindu? Catholic Hindu I firmly replied. I went to St. Columba's in Delhi. This pleased them. I bought a round. They bought round after round. We all ended up singing 'O Paddy dear' as we stumbled down the High Road. This wasn't a 'global' place. It was Irish and all the better for it. Indians picked a side- the Catholic side- and stuck to it. But it was Guinness which made the world go round.
I focus on one particular case, the multilingual north Indian region of Awadh
which wasn't multilingual at all. It had literatures in different scripts. That is a wholly different matter. My next door neighbour can read Quran Sharif in Arabic. A guy down the roads reads Torah. I read Veda. But the only language all three of us speak is English. This would still be the case if we were illiterate in English- which the Jewish bloke may well be. He is a Professor at Goldsmiths.
in the early modern period, to argue that an approach to literature and space that takes multilingualism within society and literary culture as a structuring and generative principle and holds both local and cosmopolitan perspectives in view is more likely to
be a complete fantasy. Avadh may had some Armenians and Englishmen and so forth who wrote in their own languages. But it was a 'sprachbund' with mutually intelligible ideolects. Some may have written in Arabic or Sanskrit but this did not mean either language had any currency in the locality. One might as well say that the 'Molly Macguire' pub in Kilburn was a veritable Babel where I spoke Tamil and my girlfriend spoke Welsh and so forth.' The truth is, it was an Irish pub. After a couple of pints, I ended up sending like Val Doonican. Sadly, it was my girlfriend who looked like him. Still, beer goggles permit even very ugly people to have sex.
produce “modest and accurate accounts” of world literature
No. It is likely to produce Orsini type dreck.
than approaches based only on cosmopolitan perspectives of circulation and recognition. While approaches based on single-language archives
are useful. Learning that Tagore is on Chilean as well as Chinese 'single-language' bookshelves tells me Tagore is part of 'World Literature'. The absence of Iqbal or Premchand from those shelves tells me he isn't.
Roberto Calasso has been translated into Hindi. He is part of, if not World Literature, then theoretical reflection upon it. Orsini isn't.
often tend to reproduce the literary and social biases of each archive,
Nope. It just reflects either public policy (i.e. what was Government mandated) or supply and demand.
a multilingual approach is inherently comparative and relativizing;
it is nonsense.
it highlights authors’ and archives’ strategies of distinction, affiliation and/or exclusion
the authors strategy is to get people to read his shite. The archive's strategy is determined by the people who pay for its upkeep.
and makes us look for what other stories and actors existed;
why not also look for cats who say bow wow?
and it shows which particular geographies—real and imaginary—were significant for each set of authors, genres in each languages (I suggest the term “significant geographies”) instead of positing a generic “world” or “global” elsewhere to which only very few had access.
Fairy land is one such geography. Kindly locate my cat there. It says woof woof.
While multilingual literary cultures are rarely (if ever) so fully interconnected as to be literary systems,
Unless that is what they are. I would say European languages were pretty fully interconnected. Even the Russians started learning Latin. A guy like Bulwer Lytton could inspire Pushkin. Interestingly, a book by Bulwer Lytton had a Gujarati version, written by the guy who would have taught Gandhi Sanskrit had he remained at Samaldas College, and that book which may have influenced the Mahatma's relationship with Kallenbach who came to the same idea from a different source. Since Gandhi, for good or ill, is part of World Literature, some scholar might find it worthwhile to write about this. What is hilarious is that a young Iyengar boy was accepted as the Universal Messiah by Lytton's grand-daughter.
their codes and trajectories help us think about local and “global” in more complex and yet accurate ways.
Nonsense! We already what happened. We don't need any help to think about the bleeding obvious.
For example, we will see how learning and connections enabled literati (adibs in Persian, kavis and pandits in Sanskrit and Hindi) to claim membership in an ideal republic of letters that could be actualized through travel, patronage, friendships, and meetings.
There is no need to see any such thing. We know that some people who wrote some shite went to visit some other people who liked their shite. The same thing was true of people who could sing or dance or perform acrobatics. Thus has it always been.
Thus one could be a local cosmopolitan or a worldtravelled one.
No. One could either travel or one could remain at home but be quite knowledgeable about the wider world. You couldn't be a local cosmopolitan anymore than you could be a cat which said woof-woof.
Tracing variations in textual inscription will reveal the difference between local and distant gazes,
which are already obvious to us
how location matters,
we already know how it does
and how cosmopolitan genres could be used to score local points.
You can write an essay on 'world literature' to score off against some Belgian dude he teaches equally worthless shite.
Further, a multilingual approach to narrative spaces allows us to follow the circulation and transcodification of motifs, imaginaries, and forms across languages and literary domains, from oral folk to literary Hindavi, Persian, Sanskrit, and viceversa, and the work that nonmimetic descriptions of places performed.
Sadly, this isn't the case. You'd need to be smart to do that. Orsini isn't smart. Maybe if she had done her first degree in a better Department and not wasted her time studying at JNU, she would be smart. But, in that case, she wouldn't have wasted time on a particularly boring shithole and its miserabilist literature.
Is there any actual content in this essay? No. She tilts at strawmen- e.g. the notion that Indian literature was 'crushed' by Europe.
In the case of India, a few Indian intellectuals may have been “crushed by English poetry” (Chandra),
no poet was.
but all around them theatre cultures, print culture and commercial publishing, poetic and musical tastes, even actual novel writing and reading, tell a very different story.
There was a modest demand a mostly meretricious supply of literature even in shitholes.
What is problematic about the way in which space is currently considered in world literature?
Nothing. The globe actually exists. That is how space is considered.
Let’s review the three most influential approaches—by Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti (2000, 2003, 2006), and David Damrosch (2003 and 2006). Both Casanova and Moretti work on the assumption that there exists, in fact, one single and integrated world literary space, visualized as a single world literary map with clear centres and peripheries on which difference is marked both spatially and temporally.
Nothing wrong with that. We understand that most American or Chinese or Egyptian literature has a merely local market. But one or two authors from those countries are translated into many languages. They are part of 'World Literature'.
Moretti draws on Immanuel Wallerstein’s “worldsystem” theory to argue that the onset of capitalism and European empires reduced the many independent local/regional spaces of literature to just three positions—core, periphery and semi-periphery—in hierarchical relationship to each other.
That was true enough.
While initially Moretti’s ideas on world literature were shaped by his theory of the diffusion of the European novel in the world (2003), more recently he has suggested that the “object” of world literature is best theorized through a combination of (a) evolutionary theory to explain the proliferation and diffusion of forms before the integrated world-system, and (b) world-system theory. Drawing on Wallerstein, he posits: Two distinct world literatures: one that precedes the eighteenth century— and one that follows it.
There are two types of cats. Those that precede the eighteenth century- all of whom are dead- and those who followed it- some of whom are alive. There's a good reason smart peeps don't bother with 'systems theory'.
The ‘first’ Weltliteratur is a mosaic of separate, ‘local’ cultures; it is characterized by strong internal diversity; it produces new forms mostly by divergence; and is best explained by (some version of) evolutionary theory. The ‘second’ Weltliteratur (which I would prefer to call world literary system) is unified by the international literary market; it shows a growing, and at times stunning amount of sameness; its main mechanism of change is convergence; and is best explained by (some version) of world-system analysis. (
This could be said about anything- food, music, clothes- but ignores the fact that the theory of comparative advantage predicts that particular places may export more literature than they consume. Will there be convergence? Chichilnisky supplied the answer- only if there is a Goldilocks condition for preference and endowment diversity. There's a good reason why this won't happen- viz. regret minimization militating for discoordination games for hedging purposes and arbitrage driven income effects.
That's Econ. It is worth studying. Study Hindi and you become stupider than a cow. At any rate, that's the opinion of people from Avadh. Obviously, Econ is still low IQ compared to Math or I.T.
To paraphrase, “local” or “regional” literary cultures existed before the eighteenth-century
as did World Literature. The Bible is a book.
and the most extensive reach of European colonialism but since then European economic and political economic domination has entailed the cultural hegemony and “stable subordination” in literary terms of the rest of the world.
This has never happened. Why not speak of the subordination of the Universe by my farts?
Since then, “local” or “regional” literary cultures can be understood
by cretins teaching shite
in terms of variations on the same pattern. But which sameness?
the sameness of their own shit in which they trace their own patterns and utter shrieks of joy.
And who is producing it here? Have at least three decades of rethinking the nature of modernity and its relation to globalization, of “provincializing Europe” and its narrative of modernity really left no trace?
Yes. It was stupid shit. There is money to be made in having a good structural causal model of 'globalization' with reference to any sort of information, commodity or capital flow. Smart peeps have this. Stupid peeps who teach shite to imbeciles don't.
Casanova systematically applies Pierre Bourdieu’s agonistic notion of “field”
coz saying 'lets just eat our own shit' doesn't sound scholarly at all
and his teleological model of the evolution of the French literary field towards autonomy to every other literary field, and to relations between national fields within the agon of world literature.
There is no such thing. Why? The thing is non-rival and non-excludable. You may as well fight over who gets to look at the moon.
In this model, “cultural accumulation” first allowed the literary vernacular to establish itself over the old cosmopolitan language
Nonsense! It was the Guttenberg revolution. The old cosmopolitan language had a limited market which could be served by scribes. The printing press- or lithography in India- was a game changer. There was a virtuous circle between more school books and more literature which meant economies of scope and scale could be achieved and the market could take off. But even if growth is endogenous, it does not militate for 'autonomy'. The reverse is the case. Something like the law of increasing functional information applies. These idiots are talking about 'teleology' because they study and teach worthless shite.
(I will return to this competitive model of vernacularization below), and gradually accrued to the vernacular literary field as inherited “literary capital.”
Rubbish! England was late to acquire a big enough market for the publication of Greek texts. It had less 'literary capital' but more widespread affluence. This proved a good thing for the rise of English. Still, even Elizabethan theatre looked pretty threadbare compared to that of Spain's Golden Age. Money matters. That's capital.
Literary capital then makes a literature more and more “autonomous” and dominant vis-à-vis other literatures, so that “peripheral” and “newer” literatures both draw upon the older and more established literary literatures, seek recognition from their “centres,” and rebel against them in a strategy of self-assertion.
In which European country was this true? None at all. There was 'increasing functional information' which, once the market for Greek instruction was large enough, meant publication of Greek texts without Latin commentary. This gave an impetus to fresh translations- e.g. those of Pope. But it was only much later, after you had generations of indigenous Greek scholarship in Schools and Colleges that you see much in the way of innovation or modernism in Literature. But, by then, there were no 'centres'. Modernism was frictionless. There was no Christaller plane. Everywhere was the centre of a circle whose circumference was nowhere. Then Einstein came along and proved this was also true of the Universe. There were no privileged frames of reference. Bergson cried and cried.
In this vision of literary fields, space is defined as “a set of interconnected positions, which must be thought and described in relational terms” both nationally and internationally: “each writer is situated according to the position he or she occupies in a national space, then once again according to the place he or she occupies within the world space” (Casanova, 73).
In other words, literature is well ordered. It is like athletics. Every athlete in a country has a national ranking as well as an international ranking. England has the fastest runner in the world. He is number one in both the national and the world 'space'. The second fastest runner in England is ten thousandth in the world space. We would be right to say, 'England has only one good runner.' Suppose Scotland has ten runners ranked in the world top 100. We would say 'Scotland is better at producing great runners than England.' If no other country has more than one runner in the top 100, we might well say 'Edinburgh is the global centre for running'. We would want to know what makes that country so special.
Can Literature be like athletics? No. We have an objective way to determine who runs faster. We have no such thing to decide whose book is better.
But these are presented as fixed positions on a single surface or map. Casanova draws explicitly on a cartographic imagination when she speaks of a “Greenwich-meridian of world literature” (75), a single space-time axis on the world literary map that determines how close or far each literary work and field is to the supposed centre of world literature, which is also the now.
We wouldn't use a map. We would just publish the ranking. Casanova is as stupid as shit. She assumes proximity to the centre is related to attainment. Why should this be so?
As in Fredric Jameson’s memorable statement that “we” perceive “Third-World authors” to “still write like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson”
We perceive Jameson as a stupid cunt. Thirty years before he was born, Indian authors were perceived as writing like Naidu or Tagore. Japs wrote like Okakura. Dreiser & Anderson were born into poor families and their realistic novels reflected this. But nobody thought poverty in the Third World was qualitatively similar. Dhan Gopal's autobiography came out about 11 years before Jameson was born. Clearly his father was as poor or poorer than Dreiser's dad. But Gopal's childhood was lyrical and spiritual. Kazantakis took the idea that in India there is a 'tiger melody' which is played at eventide to heal the wounds dealt by the dimming day from Dhan Gopal's book.
Anyway, by the time I was born, Dorothy Parker was writing that she could no longer read the New Yorker because it was stuffed with stories about the author's childhood in Pakistan. But, those stories weren't written in the manner of Dreiser. They were 'modernist'- i.e. as boring as shit.
, difference is translated into delay.
This is silly. We get that early translations of Proust or Doestoevsky will sound dated. That's why we shell out a few bucks when a new translation comes out. But this is also true of Homer. Sadly, this doesn't work for Hindu texts. Newer translations are worse.
Moreover, positing the existence of a single, inter-connected world literary space allows Casanova to claim that there is one Great Game in which all writers participate and a single universal currency of literary value.
This is obviously false. Some write for money. Some for fame. Others may wish to advance a particular cause or merely give expression to their own disillusionment with it.
David Damrosch has championed an alternative and dynamic approach to world literature that focuses on circulation. One of his definitions of world literature is “any work that has ever reached beyond its home base,” and he continues “A work has effective life in world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within another literary system beyond that of its original culture” . That the circulation (and transculturation) of texts across languages, literatures, and areas should be a major area of research for world literature is beyond doubt.
Research done by retards is useless. The fact is, if a particular foreign work finds a lucrative market, its publisher will try publishing one or two other works similar to it. If you liked Marquez, you are bound to like Bolano- right?
What to me is problematic in this formulation is the implication that what does not circulate, or is not translated, is not part of world literature.
Because it is problematic for Orsini that stuff she studied was shite. My concern is different from hers. Why am I not a bigger star in Hollywood than Jennifer Aniston? Is it only because I've never been there? Is that fair?
“Literature” is an archive as well as a current state of play. In the context of literary history and of the current world publishing market (on which more in a moment), this formulation also places too great a burden, and too high a hope, on the ability of translation to make a work circulate. If the work does not circulate even after it gets translated—the implication is—it must be because it does not stand on its own in the eyes of “world readers” (on whom more below).
Even suppose I went to Hollywood, I might not be cast in any blockbuster movies. Does this really mean I am not as big a Hollywood star as Jennifer Aniston?
Again by implication, if the world system is indeed one, then what is not translated, or what does not travel even after it gets translated, must be somewhat deficient, speak only to local or provincial tastes, be distant in spacetime from the here-now.
Just because I am a fat ugly man, doesn't mean I am deficient in beauty, acting talent and femininity.
When we move from the study of languages to that of literature and culture, in many of these cases— certainly in the Indian one that I am most familiar with, to insist on terming the bilingual situation an “encounter” or a “contact zone” risks reproducing a historical consciousness that, perniciously in the case of India, views Persian and Sanskrit and Hindavi (and their speakers) as belonging to “different cultures,” only to be surprised by the amount of “contact.”
Hindus belong to a different religion from Muslims. This meant that, once Schools and Colleges introduced a choice of Classical language, Sanskritized Hindi became the 'i-language' of Hindus while Persianized-Urdru became the ideal for Muslims. But partition occurred even in Bengal where the script and language was the same. Religion matters. Mono or Multilingualism does not.
For this reason, here I prefer the framework of a “multilingual local”
it is meaningless. Nobody cares if Hindus in Pakistan read in Devanagari or if Muslims in India read in Nasthaliq.
in relation to its wider significant geographies. Doreen Massey’s conceptualisation of space as dynamic and relational has been the most productive to think with. Her three initial propositions in For Space are: First, that we recognize space as the product of interrelations;
Interrelations can exist without a topology and vice versa. Why recognize nonsense?
as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny…
Dark Matter doesn't exist because it doesn't interact with us. Also, Beyonce doesn't exist because she didn't come to my birthday party.
Second, that we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality;
e.g. Space should be understood as the place where I am a bigger star than Jennifer Aniston. Also Beyonce came to my birthday party. I let her read my diary. She agreed with me that boys are yucky.
as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity.
Mummy does not understand my coexisting heterogeneity. She think I am a big fat homo who should get a fucking job you lazy piece of shit.
Without space, no multiplicity; without multiplicity, no space.
Nonsense! There can be a space pervaded by a singular being or, at the very least, there was an intitial 'singularity'. Indeed, some physicists agree with theologians this is a necessary condition for Space-Time.
If space is indeed the product of interrelations, then it must be predicated upon the existence of plurality.
No. Self-interaction is enough.
Multiplicity and space as co-constitutive. Third, that we recognize space as always under construction
which involves recognizing some entity as the constructor. Please Miss, is it Neo-Liberalism? No. It is Patriarchy.
… Perhaps we could imagine space as the simultaneity of stories so far. (Massey, 9, emphasis added)2
Stories about what me and Beyonce got up to after she read my diary?
One of the implications of this view is that we can understand the mutual implication and co-constitution of the local and the global only from specific vantage-points,
i.e. there are privileged frames of reference
rooted in a place but looking outward, concerned with the local and the empirical but not necessarily a-theoretically.
Einstein was wrong. He should have studied Hindi at JNU instead of Math from Minkowski.
This is I will try to do in the rest of the essay by focusing on literary culture in early modern Awadh (now eastern Uttar Pradesh [: I will see its space as relational, as a plurality of stories, and as a vantage point to explore the dynamic relationship between local and cosmopolitan tastes, authors, genres and practices in vernacular and cosmopolitan languages (specifically Hindavi and Persian).
You have set yourself up to fail. Awadh wasn't important. It was passive, not active. Had the I857 revolt led to the Brits running away, this would not have been the case.
Like other regions of India, Awadh was a case of “multiple diglossia” (Gallego-Garcia): with several High languages (Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic)
There was only one 'High Language'- English. True, a Sanskrit Pandit or Arabic Moulvi might be able to earn a little money as a clerk or translator for a White officer, but he was anxious that his sons learn English.
and a general spoken vernacular (what I call here Hindavi) written in either Persian, Kaithi, or Devanagari scripts.
Urdu was the language of administration. That's what people learned in order to gain some humble type of employment.
Sanskrit textuality in the early modern period included ritual texts and narratives—the latter most accompanied by vernacular exposition--, a continuing production in large range of “knowledge 20 systems” (Pollock 2002), and courtly production of histories and poems for courtly patrons, from small rajas to Sultans and Mughal emperors (Kapadia, Trushke). In the case of Sanskrit, “low textuality” and Sanskrit-vernacular written and oral bilingualism still await systematic research, particularly for north India.
The thing is unnecessary. Everybody knows Brahmins and Baidyas- and some Kayasths- went in for it. There are claims that particular sects encouraged Sanskrit literacy in agricultural and mercantile castes. It may be, at the margin, there was some caste mobility on this basis.
Conversely, literary vernaculars seem to have been cosmopolitan from the start and to have circulated across separate polities over wide geographical areas.
In other words, there was no local market for writing in the local dialect. This isn't quite true. A particular administrator might order the production of newsletters in Hindi & Urdu script for some particular purpose. The language might be the local dialect but the script was different. But this was for local distribution.
Indeed, the programmatic statements prefacing medieval vernacular translations speak of dissemination, not localization.
This is because stuff that is local is not translated. Locals understand it already. Only if it has been disseminated from elsewhere would it need to be translated.
Rather than a story of vernacularization, sharp diglossia, and supersedence,
which is what actually happens
in both Europe and southern Asia it seems more accurate and productive to study history of literary culture through a multilingual lens,
even if there was only one language
attentive to the specific dynamics of cosmopolitan and vernacular languages in terms of producers, patrons, audiences, and literary forms.
Not in Avadh. There is linguistic continuity, not replacement. There may be greater diglossia but then some people there also speak very good English.
Partly in order to avoid reifying cosmopolitan and vernacular
if you reify 'cat' and 'dog' you have to avoid saying 'cats say bow-wow'. That's why Orsini will have no truck with reifying
and tying them to specific cultural and political orientations that in many cases would be anachronistic, I reserve these terms for languages, mindful of the range of registers within each of them, of their oral dimension and reach (which in many cases exceeded their written), and trying to work out in each case what their intended and actual audience was.
In other words, Orsini is giving herself license to commit cascading intensional fallacies.
I then also use cosmopolitan and local as locations and orientations (no neutral maps or aerial views here). For individuals, as hinted at the beginning, learning in a High language and connections gave one access to the ideal Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and Hindi republics of letters and made you a cosmopolitan adib, kavi or pandit; travel, authorship, and lofty patronage and/or position increased your eminence.
Nonsense! Only a few talented people achieved any such thing. Learning in a 'High Language' didn't get most students squat.
Though distant origins were claimed and treasured by most elite groups in North India (Brahmins, Sayyids, Kayasths), “world-travelled” (jahangasht) individuals who moved in the top circles, like Amin Khan Razi below, represent the most cosmopolitan perspective, whose view of the provinces was, as we shall see, selective and accidental—but without the modern political connotations of “citizen of the world” rather than “son of the soil.”
Subjects of the Brits weren't citizens of shit. Nobody wanted to be a 'son of the soil' if this meant something like serfdom.
For genres instead I have tended to use the term “universal” (as in geographical compendia), and the term 29 “metropolitan,” for early modern cities like Delhi, Agra, or Lahore and the Mughal travelling camp-capitals that were cosmopolitan in that they attracted and valued traders and scholars from other parts of the world.
Metropolises attracted traders and scholars. Camps had camp-followers. Perhaps Orsini means mercenaries and soldiers of fortune might turn up at such places.
The local for me is an arena, a space constituted by social relations and a “multiplicity of stories” (Massey);
In which case, the world wide web is 'local'.
A multilingual encounter in the archive
Thankfully it was not cunnilingual.
So if we think of literature in Awadh from a relational, plural and multilingual perspective that holds together local and cosmopolitan, what points emerge?
None. The place had a bit of literature. It wasn't very good. That's all that can be said.
Let me begin with an encounter that will get us thinking about the archive and poetic practices. Around 1680
i.e. around the time of the accession of Aurangazeb
in Jajmau, a very small town in central Awadh, the district administrator Sayyid Diwan Rahmatullah from Bilgram
which is about 100 km away
was acting as deputy for his grandfather. Rahmatullah was, we are told, a connoisseur of Hindi courtly poetry.
his ancestors had liked the local poetry for some five centuries because they themselves were locals.
On one occasion when a disciple of a famous Hindi poet, Chintamani Tripathi,
who is believed to have translated a Sanskrit translation of a Telugu work into Braj.
recited a couplet of his master, Rahmatullah pointed out an error in the use of a figure of speech.
Sadly, most poetry of the period was filled with nothing but such errors. The thing really wasn't a high IQ occupation. If an error had been found in Rahmatullah's accounts, he might have been beheaded. Accountancy mattered. Poetry did not. It was merely a type of sycophancy such that the arse-licker had an incentive to lie about having received a vast reward in the hope that his next target would be fooled and actually give him some cash.
The disciple reported the correction to the poet, who was impressed and wished to meet that Hindi-knowing administrator:
I was impressed by a correction that King Charles made to one of my poems. I went to meet this English-knowing Monarch. He welcomed me to Bucking palace and cooked me nice biryani. I wrote poem on him- King Charlie is so nice, In biryani he is putting nice nice spice. He immediately gifted me ten million dollars, payment to be made next week. If you could lend me a thousand today, I faithfully promise to return two thousand in a week's time.
Chintamani betook himself with his family in Jajmau with the intention of bathing in the river Ganges, which flows above Jajmau, and informed the Diwan. The Diwan did all that is necessary in terms of hospitality. Chintamani remained with the Diwan for a while, and they conversed on the appropriateness of [poetic] themes. And he composed a poem (kabitta) in the jhulna metre in praise of the bravery and chivalry of Sayyid Rahmatullah. Here is the poem: Garaba gahi singha jyūn sabala gala gāja, mana prabala gaja-bāja-dala sāja dhāyau, 31 Bajata ika camaka ghana ghamaka dundubhina kī taraṅga khara/ghira dhamaka bhūtala hilāyau. Bīra tihi kahata hīya kampi ḍara jo risana sain kau sūra cahūn aura chāyau. Kahū cala pāī taja nāha sanāha? iha Rahamatullā saranāha āyau. Proud like a lion, strong, roaring, with forceful mind he laid out his elephants and army Lightning strikes, blows fall fast, drums strike hard—the earth shook Their hearts tremble at his anger and call him a hero, a champion who masters all directions Where can I go, leaving my lord’s armour? I seek refuge with Rahmatullah. [Afterwards] The Diwan sent some gold coins and a heavy golden robe to the house of Chintamani as a gift for the poem, but he [Chintamani] expressed the wish to appear in the exalted presence [of the Diwan] so as to be properly invested with the robe. The Diwan recused that the robe was not really worthy of him and he should accept it in secret [a polite expression]. In the end Cintamani came in the presence of the Diwan, and in front of the assembly he recited the kabitta, put on the robe and accepted the reward.
This is the reason poetry of the period is not respected. Still, there was some political angle to this. There was a new Emperor in Delhi. New alliances were necessary.
This poem is recorded in [his collection] Kabitta Bicāra after the one in praise of Sultan Zayn al-Din Muhammad, son of Shah Shuja’ [i.e. grandson of the previous emperor]. (A. Bilgrami, 366) We can read this episode as an ordinary ritual of incorporation between poet and patron, in which connoisseurship and poetic skill are the currency of the transaction, sealed by the cleverly alliterative but fairly standard poem that praises the courage and military strength of a patron before whose deafening drums enemies and the earth itself tremble. (As Allison Busch has shown, such poems were multi-purpose, and poets could easily recycle them by inserting the name of a different patron (forthcoming)). But this is actually an extraordinary textual event.
Sadly not. The one good thing about the Brits is that they cracked down on the practice. It must be said, some Brits in the early Seventeenth Century- e.g. Coryate- showed extraordinary facility in learning Indian languages. There's a good reason Indians see themselves as provincial by comparison. Cosmopolitanism is about curiosity as much as it is about commerce.
It occurs in a tazkira of Persian poets devoted in large part to poets from the author’s own town of Bilgram (Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami’s The Freestanding Cypress or The Cypress of Azad/Sarw-i Āzād, 1752/1166H), written about seven decades after the event. This particular tazkira has a separate chapter on the Bilgram Persian “connoisseurs of Hindi” and quotes their Hindi verses at length, to my knowledge the only Persian tazkira ever to do so. Why?
I suppose the writer was being paid by the page. Still, there may have been a political angle to the thing. The times were uncertain.
Partly because the author wanted to display his own and his fellow Bilgramis’ multilingual knowledge of poetry and poetics in Persian, Arabic,
which it would have taken them some little effort to learn
and Hindi,
which they imbibed with their mother's milk.
and partly because this knowledge of Hindi poetry and poetics was in fact something that made Bilgram Indo-Persian literati stand out from the mass of Persian literate scribes
Does this silly lady really not know that Bilgramis were local 'Qadhis' for centuries? Unlike Persian immigrants, they had to apply themselves to learn Persian. Incidentally, 'country bottled' Brits spoke the local Indian language. They did acquire some English from Mum and Dad but needed to go to school and study hard to write it well.
Hence the investment in the “local” of Bilgram
he was born about a 100 km away. He was local.
by a highly cosmopolitan intellectual
he was a pious Muslim descended from Qadhis.
who prided himself on his knowledge of Arabic
necessary in the family profession
as well as Persian poetry and poetics
Persian was the language of the administration in which he served.
and who by this point had lived about a thousand miles away in central India for three decades.
But his birthplace hadn't changed.
And while the intended meaning of the episode lies in the ability of the Indo-Persian administrator to trump the famous Hindi and Brahmin professional poet, there are other elements to be drawn out from this encounter.
Sadly, he could not tell the story about how the Emperor of China visited him after he corrected one of his poems. This was because nobody would have believed him.
First, the Indo-Persian administrator and the Hindi poet appear as part of a shared world
because they lived on the same planet
of Mughal employment (naukri), courtly etiquette, and poetic practice and pedagogy.
This Bilgrami dude gets on with Hindu accountants and treasurers. He may be useful in keeping an eye on them.
The kabitta was one of chief types of Hindi courtly poetry to gain currency and popularity in Mughal and provincial circles from the second half of the sixteenth century (Busch). Poets like Chintamani doubled as poetry teachers, and the treatises they wrote acted both as instruments for teaching poetic ornaments and sentiments and as proofs of their mastery, since they wrote the definitions as well as the examples. And the assemblies mentioned here and elsewhere in tazkiras show that the ability to quote, compose but also discuss the finer points of poetics in Persian but also in Hindi was much appreciated and a sign of distinction in this social world.
That, at any rate, was the pretence. Guys who were good at killing didn't have to bother with it.
Earlier in the text, again exceptionally for an Indo-Persian tazkira, Chintamani was properly introduced in terms of residence, family, authored books and employment with a Mughal prince.
Locals felt he was a local celebrity. That's because they were locals.
Thus he was also part of the personal-bureaucratic Mughal administrative network just like Rahmatullah.
So there are no multiple language here. Nor is there any cosmopolitans. Two people in the same line of work get on well with each other. Why? They belong to the same locality.
Second, Rahmatulla and Chintamani also shared the larger geography of Mughal travel and connections, which both of them entered from their small towns in Awadh. Jajmau is thus “local” but not unconnected to the cosmopolitan world of the Mughal polity,
like every other place ruled by the Mughals.
and the encounter features in an encyclopaedic work written thousands of miles south in the Deccan (Burhanpur) in the cosmopolitan language of Persian.
The court language. So what? How is this interesting?
Third, both individuals are multilingual, though in different ways: Rahmatullah studied Arabic and Persian, worked in Persian, and practised poetry in Persian and Hindi; Chintamani was educated in Sanskrit and among the first to adapt Sanskrit “literary science” to courtly Hindi poetry and poetic treatises (Busch, 107, 153, 193-194). Yet this a rarely textualised example: Chintamani is one of only three Hindus, and the only Hindu Hindi poet, mentioned in this dictionary-anthology of poets—no Hindu poets of Persian from Bilgram or elsewhere are mentioned and no Hindu is given a separate entry. And while Azad Bilgrami’s inclusion of Hindi is part of his programmatic comparison of Arabic, Persian, and “Indian” poetics (Azad, Sharma, Ernst), placing the three traditions side by side in theory does not amount in practice to upsetting the linguistic hierarchy and social imaginary of this Indo-Persian intellectual.
Then why mention it? There is nothing interesting in any of this unless there was some sort of political angle to it. But that would have been a purely local matter about keeping control of some small office of profit or confounding the intrigue of some clique.
While the text presents the encounter in a particular way, it reveals the multiple trajectories of Indo-Persian poet-administrators (for whom courtly Hindi was an additional feather in the cap) and of Sanskrit-Hindi poet-scholars looking for patronage. By its unique presence in the text the encounter makes us notice how exclusive the protocols of the Persian tazkira genre are: whereas only three Hindu poets of Hindi make it into this text, modern Hindi literary histories list at least fifteen other poets with similar profiles up to this point. As a result, we wonder about the other poets who did not “make it.”
No we don't. Tazkirahs relied on what was ready to hand. Some were better than others. Few were exhaustive or showed great editorial ability.
Silence is not absence.
Nor is sodomy. So what?
Spaces that look empty are in fact teeming with other people and their own tastes, stories, and trajectories.
Spaces that look empty of talent or distinction may indeed be so. On the other hand, if you enter my house and say 'this space is empty of Beyonce' you would be wrong. She is my bestest friend for ever and ever. The place is teeming with her.
We just need to look elsewhere.
Very true. Avadh was teeming with Shakespeare and Goethe. You just have to look for them elsewhere.
India did have multi-lingual localities when my father was a boy. He could recall his exhilaration when he found he was able to decipher the headline in the English newspaper his father subscribed to. Then, one magical day, he was able to read a whole story in his Mother's Tamil magazine. But when his father was posted to Bombay, he found there were newspapers in other languages- Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, even Chinese and so on. Cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were cosmopolitan. They were multi-lingual. Avadh wasn't.
As a diplomat, my father would encounter people in many different countries who had fond memories of these three cities. They had been 'local' to them as my father had been 'local' to Madras and Bombay. But, unlike Alexandria or Shanghai, this circumstance did not contribute anything to literature- or, at least, not world literature. Why? Well, Alexandria was part of the Greek and Italian Oikumene and so Cavafy and Ungaretti are easily explained. China was exotic and hadn't yet found its Meadows Taylor or Rudyard Kipling. India's cities were commercial where they were not bureaucratic or pervaded by the spirit of the Public Works Department. But what made them dispiriting was the slow pace of economic growth.
Avadh did have literary treasures and in the conclusion to her worthless essay Orsini mentions Nirala returning to his ancestral home and being impressed by the commentary a local cobbler can give him on Nirgun bhajans of Saints like Kabir. Nirala doesn't reproduce that commentary. We understand why. The thing has to do with esoteric psychology or, in my view, open problems in mathematics. That's high IQ stuff. But you can do that anywhere. Indeed, you don't even need to have a language to do it. But you do need a brain.
If you don't have one you can ponder the question of why cats say woof-woof and how this relates to some stupid bee in Alok Rai's ancestral bonnet.
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