I began my training in academia as an undergraduate student of B.A. Honours English at Delhi University. Recalling a professor’s orientation remarks, I now see how it has informed three years of my literary education. He asserted that the course has inadequately been named English since we will primarily be dealing with not language but literature, urging that those of us who wish to study English instead, must reconsider our choice of course. With each classroom discussion, the professor’s words resonated more deeply and I grappled with the challenge of bridging the gap between the inherent alienation of reading texts requiring prior knowledge of their language and culture and my relationship with the text. For many students, including myself, this alienation is a result of the gap between the our unique comprehension and the narrative voice, often influenced by countless existing interpretations. Unlike Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which challenges such conventional interpretations, many texts in university curricula often neglect marginalised perspectives. Many academics have tried to bridge this gap by developing modules like Indian Literature in Translation or Commonwealth Literature. However, my question remains: is simply teaching a Rushdie or a Ngugi enough?
In this think piece, I will reason that the dissonance one feels in the classroom comes from one’s inability to locate themselves in a Western text and while diversifying reading lists has decolonized the canon to a certain extent, it cannot fully answer to the absence of the I. Does this mean we must go on looking for the I, or is there some scope to instead, bring the text towards the spaces that shape this I? Pankaj Mishra’s essay, ‘Edmund Wilson in Benaras’ (1998), discusses his struggle to articulate his thoughts about the author in a manner akin to an Anglophone. Reflecting on his experiences in Benares in 1988, immersed in Wilson’s writings, Mishra found himself capable of crafting a significantly improved prose. In such cases, I contend that if one were to read texts like ‘Edmund Wilson in Benares,’ the way Pankaj Mishra has, we would bring home a world that is spatially and temporally distanced from us. Localising the text in this manner will then not only allow the student to read the text better but also the world they occupy.
While Mishra’s writing is a result of his autodidacticism, I believe that this act of localisation can also be furthered in literary classrooms in India to inform a student’s understanding of both the local and the global. For instance, assigning Shakespeare’s Hamlet and prompting students to consider how the themes of power, revenge, and existential crisis might mirror or diverge from their own cultural narratives. Furthermore, such practices within the classroom can counter the imposition of universal values on the provincial student and thereby respond to the problematic implications of reading in a language as privileged as English. Though such universality has its own merits in reading different texts, my trouble remains mainly with the tendency within the classroom to restrict a student’s textual understanding to the same.
Why this becomes problematic is not only the institutionalisation of English Literature but also the location from which the student emerges, which is often provincial. While I started believing that my alienation, and that of others, is mostly contingent upon the fact that we are reading literature from a language that is not ours, the problem really lay with the fact that the provinciality with which we have grown up does not account for the ‘Englishness’ ingrained in the culture of the text. A sudden introduction to the Homer’s and Shakespeare’s of the world makes it difficult for the student to make sense of a world to which they have arrived a little late.
Mishra also talks about a similar frustration while reading Wilson when he writes, “Wilson’s books also assumed a basic knowledge of politics and history I did not have. They were a struggle for me, and the ignorance I felt before them was a secret source of shame, but it was also a better stimulus to the effort Wilson’s books demanded than mere intellectual curiosity” (Mishra 02). A disciplinary approach to the same book can rid us of our ignorance towards the literary background, but there remains a difference between merely knowing what accounted for the production of this book and how it makes sense to me as a reader of the 21st century.
I am suggesting that the pangs of this shame of feeling alienated are felt deeper within the institutionalised reader than in an autodidact like Mishra. This depth of feeling stems from the classroom performing as an island, where students are expected to divorce their readings from their immediate contexts. As partial stakeholders in the reading practices within classrooms, we bear a responsibility to carry the text with us to these shores.
Addressing the fact that different literary texts will be received differently in each spatial context can allow us to make note of both the commonalities and the departures, since they are, as Meenakshi Mukherjee points out, “bound to be of interest to us in the larger cultural mosaic of our country—which too is constantly dissolving into new shapes” (Mukherjee 237). This is where the ideological aspect of our reading comes to light. When I accommodate in the classroom a localized reading as my response to a text, I am doing so not only because I lack a certain historical context offered to literature students, but because my own positionality as a student in the 2024 Indian socio-political arena creates an exigency of utterance that is bound to come out in my responsive writings.
This exigency reminds me of Rajesh’s character in Mishra’s life and how whatever little he read, he connected it back to the life he experienced. After returning from his hometown, Rajesh told Mishra he had read Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, saying, “Yeh meri duniya ki kahani hai. Main in logo ko janta hoon” (Mishra 07), meaning, “It is the story of my world. I know these people well.” Mishra realised Rajesh saw parallels between Flaubert’s France and his own Uttar Pradesh, drawing unique conclusions. The struggles and aspirations of Flaubert’s characters engaged in a dialogue with those of a provincial Indian student seeking upward mobility. While Mishra, immersed in Wilson’s interpretations, struggled to reconcile the two contexts, Rajesh effortlessly navigated them, offering fresh insights into their interplay.
This raises the question of the classroom reader’s alienation, which stems from the very awareness of the text’s background. In her case, the classroom must play the role of the negotiator between the self and the archive. Promoting the reading of ‘apne logon ki kahaani’—stories of our own people—alongside building an archive of knowledge, can transform us from compliant readers to engaged conversationalists with literature. Creating a dialogue then, between the texts and our world enhances our understanding of both, without merely injecting subjectivity.
This reminds me of an anecdote Meenakshi Mukherjee recounted about her students’ engagement with the Bengali text Pather Panchali (1929) wherein American and English-oriented Indian students focused on the poverty leading to Durga’s death and Opu’s displacement. In contrast, students from provincial Indian towns noticed Opu’s joy and imaginative growth, seeing poverty as a familiar backdrop. This example highlights the importance of varied responses to a text, showcasing that localised readings offer alternative perspectives based on the reader’s lived experiences.
I would now return to the question I began with, which is, is reading a Rushdie or a Ngugi enough? As Western texts are brought forth in our cultural landscape, the necessity to include authors solely for their postcolonial origins diminishes. We would no longer need to rely on certain writers for the Indian-ness or African-ness they bring into the classroom. We can appreciate these writers for the knowledge they offer, beyond their identity markers. This allows us to engage with their work based on its inherent value and diverse perspectives, as Mukherjee’s provincial student observed. Devoid of tokenistic representations, these authors might also find themselves in modules other than postcolonial literatures. In this way, an ideal literature classroom may not be the one with a rigidly curated syllabi based on identity markers, but one where pedagogical influence brings forth readings that illuminate marginalised experiences.
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