Abstract
This paper argues that literature is not just about romantic melodies or folk tales or narratives of universal truth; it has the veins of ideology, the blood of language, working in its own synergies to produce narratives of power and discrimination. English literature in India affected the learners negatively and led to vacuous and superficial intellectual growth because it failed to make concrete connections with minds and souls of the people engaged with this discipline. In this paper, an attempt is made to illustrate this idea through a personal narrative of a senior academician and scholar. The author argues that English (British) literature should be replaced with literatures in English and the contrapuntal method should replace the traditional method of reading literature.
This chapter is a modified version of the article which was published in The EFL Journal, Vol. 4; Issue 1, 2013. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of The EFL Journal.
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- 1.
The year 1968 was a year of insurrection and manifestos. Not only did the students and Renault workers swarm the Parisian streets, this was also the year in which Roland Barthes pronounced “The Death of the Author”, a text whose inherent ideas significantly contributed to the shaping of poststructuralism.
- 2.
The Naxalite movement shaped itself in Bengal in 1967. It was a radical movement led by a fringe group of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and was influenced by Mao Zedong’s success in China. Its advocates believed that armed struggle against large landowners was the only solution for achieving an ideal socialist state. A large section of the youth subscribed to this ideology and gave up their studies to participate in the struggle, initiating violence against ‘class enemies’ like landlords, police, shopkeepers and teachers.
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A term used by a famous scholar/activist in India when she learnt that I taught in Visva-Bharati which happened to be a central university but in rural India.
- 4.
The term is used by Susie Tharu in Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties, one of the prominent works which critiqued the discipline. She talks of alienation as “arising from the conflict of interests”, and as “an effect of the power relations structuring the discipline, its curricular theory and classroom practices as well as the world of which the classroom is only a part.” Tharu further says: “Alienation is therefore—and that is its magic rub—also a means of wedging open, interrogating and engaging with these power relations. It is not something either to be overcome or to be set aside. As a mark of exclusion or subjugation, as a border line, it is something to be confronted, elaborated and engaged with, politically and epistemologically” (28).
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- 6.
Professor Alok Bhalla, my colleague at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (then the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages) inspired me to think otherwise and include them in the course, and I still am grateful to him for that.
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Sengupta, M. (2019). Reading the World: Growing Up in the ‘Discipline’. In: Mahanta, B., Sharma, R. (eds) English Studies in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1525-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1525-1_2
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