Abstract
Considering Hindi as a major Indian language and the language of the nation, Cavaliere analyses the modern state as depicted in the works of Krishna Sobti. This great author of Hindi literature is among the writers who have seen India in its pre-independence, Partition and post-independence years, and the great changes that the country has gone through are reflected in her writings, which offer a comprehensive account of contemporary society. Sobtī’s novels, and their translations from Hindi into the other Indian languages, English included, convey new questions about femininity and power structures by depicting modern women continuously fighting to negotiate their own identity in the new nation. Offering an enduringly original outlook on the events, often with multiple points of view on reality, Sobtī proposes a narrative model that resists any hegemonic discourse, and represents a fundamental voice in Indian literary canon.
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Notes
- 1.
This kind of theorizing is not new to the Indian sensibility, since Rabindranath Tagore, addressing the National Council of Education on the proposal of an English education for British India, has already advocated the concept of viśva sāhitya, that is the notion of comparative literature as world literature, built up with interactions between literatures across and within the nations (Tiwari, 2012).
- 2.
Nirmal Verma translated several literary works from Czech into Hindi during his stay in Prague in the 1960s and claimed that it was necessary to acquire a direct agency in the choice of foreign literatures, removing the filter of English translations: ‘It seems to me that no solution to this problem will be found until we learn to translate directly into Hindi the literature of European and Asian nations. […] Another great advantage of this will be that we shall be able to free ourselves from that slavery of taste by which we have bound ourselves to English translators’ (Verma, foreword to Itane Bare Dhabbe: Sat Samakalin Chek Kahaniyan 1966, quoted in Trivedi, 1993: 223–224).
- 3.
‘If Comparative Literature is permitted to develop, it can be of service in bringing India and the world spiritually closer and it can make a small contribution to the growth of that cosmopolitan spirit which is much more discussed than achieved’ (Bose quoted in Tiwari, 2012: 47).
- 4.
When the Constitution of India came into force on 26 January 1950, the new republic was declared to be a ‘Union of States’ based on the administrative subdivisions of British India. With the State Reorganization Act of 1956, India was reorganized on a linguistic basis and new states have been created in recent decades, up to the proclamation of the twenty-ninth state of the Union, Telangana, in 2014.
- 5.
This formula was devised by the Union Education Ministry in 1968 in consultation with the individual Indian states. ‘This Formula […] provides Hindi, English and modern Indian language (preferably one of the southern languages) in the Hindi speaking states and Hindi, English and the Regional language in the non-Hindi speaking States.’ http://www.teindia.nic.in/mhrd/50yrsedu/u/47/3X/473X0I01.htm (Accessed 15 February 2017).
- 6.
The French sociolinguist Henri Gobard postulated a tetralinguistic model that envisions a vernacular or maternal language; a vehicular, urban language for business or bureaucratic transmission; a referential language ‘of sense and culture’; and a mythic language for religion and spirituality. In addition to that, Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 23–24) have observed that ‘what can be said in one language cannot be said in another, and the totality of what can and can’t be said varies necessarily with each language and with the connections between these languages’.
- 7.
Hindi is the official language of the Union (rājabhāṣā)—supported by English for some specific administrative purposes—and the official/regional language (prādeśik bhāṣā) of ten states of the Union (out of twenty-nine) and three autonomous Union territories. Cf. 50th Report of the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities (July 2012 to June 2013). Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities, Ministry of Minority Affairs, Government of India. http://nclm.nic.in/shared/linkimages/NCLM50thReport.pdf (Accessed 15 February 2017).
- 8.
The long-debated issue of the choice of Hindi as the language of the nation has been critically analysed by Das Gupta (1970) and Schiffman (1996). According to them, the Congress Party’s language policy favouring Hindi (not Hindustani as wished by Gandhi) in the 1930s brought out the tendency of Indian linguistic culture to deliberately diglossify languages that weren’t diglossic to begin with. ‘Thus the decision to make Hindustani the “national language” played into the hands of Hindi chauvinists and pandits, who inexorably Sanskritized Hindustani, making it impossible for non-Hindi speakers to master’ (Schiffman, 1996: 166). As Das Gupta points out (1970: 588) ‘a century of rivalry between Hindi and Urdu had resulted in both varieties purging themselves of the vocabulary of the other classical source, while moving toward classicization from its own source. Classicization was thus confused with standardization, and divergence from the language of common speech proceeded apace. Sanskritization of Hindi was, of course, inevitable (just as Persianization of Urdu […]).’ In parallel, there is a long history of protests against the ‘Imposition of Hindi’ as the language of neocolonial domination of the north over the south, to the detriment and suppression of the Dravidian languages. The anti-Hindi movement, which started in the 1930s in the Madras Presidency, gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, until the Official Languages Act was eventually amended in 1967 in favour of English. On this theme see, for example, Rajagopalan (2001: 133–157).
- 9.
Art. 343–351 plus Eighth Schedule. Cf. http://india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india/constitution-india-full-text (Accessed 15 February 2017).
- 10.
Concerning the formation of a literary canon for the modern nation, an inveterate prejudice ascribes all the major intellectual and cultural movements to the West, while India is supposed to have no historical attitude and reveals, on the contrary, an alleged proclivity for mythical narrations. According to this perspective, since canons are ‘part of movements and redefinitions in class and history, neither of which India possesses, apparently, in the “Western” sense’ (Chaudhuri, 2001: xviii–xix), India had to wait for the arrival of the English language to establish a semblance of coherence, unity, and modernity.
- 11.
This Indian-flavoured language represents that liminal space described by Bhabha (1994: 35–38) as the ‘third space of enunciation’ displayed at the time of liberation, which is ‘a time of cultural uncertainty, and, most crucially, of significatory or representational undecidability’.
- 12.
See below for details. Krishna Sobti was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 2010, which she declined, in order to preserve her independence, as a writer, from the establishment.
- 13.
The collective trauma of Partition is analysed, for example, in M. Hasan, ‘Partition: The Human Cost’, in History Today, vol. 48, no. 9, 47–53 (1997); S. Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India, New York: Columbia University Press (2010); G. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Delhi: OUP (1990); D.A. Low and H. Brasted (eds) Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence, Delhi: Vedams (1998); G. Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India, Cambridge: Cambridge UP (2001). A research bibliography on the Partition of India is available at: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/Independent/partition_bibliography.html.
- 14.
For example, Srivastava (2008: 130 ff.) analyses the ascendant trend depicted in the novels A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (1995), A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1993), Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981), and The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor (1989) as allegories of Indian history.
- 15.
When not otherwise indicated, all translations from Hindi works by Krishna Sobti are mine.
- 16.
Two of the five rivers of Punjab.
- 17.
On 6 December 1947, India and Pakistan subscribed to an inter-dominion agreement, the ‘Abducted Person Act’, to recover all women who had been abducted in either country and restore them to their families. Over four years, 30,000 Hindu and Sikh women from Pakistan and Muslim women from India were ‘recovered’. However, this recovery was even more tormenting for the women involved, because many of them were considered irreparably dishonoured and were repudiated by their own families. See Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, ‘An Exchange of Women. Abduction, Forcible Recovery, Silence: The Tragic Irony of Partition’s Unsung’, Outlook, 28 May 1997, (Online), Available: http://www.outlookindia.com/article/an-exchange-of-women/203611 (Accessed 15 February 2017).
- 18.
Throughout the struggle for independence in India, nationalistic movements associated the rhetoric of the ‘motherland’ with that of womanhood and saw it as central to the process of nation-making, since women’s bodies represented the cultural identity of the community which had to be liberated. See, for example, Sumathi Ramaswami, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2010); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black (2001); Sandhya Shetty, ‘(Dis)figuring the Nation: Mother, Metaphor, Metonymy’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 50–79 (1995); Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Reading Mother India: Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 6, 6–44 (1994).
- 19.
The women’s question as resolved by nationalist ideology in accordance with its historical project has been examined by Partha Chatterjee (1993: 116–134); see especially pp. 129–134.
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Cavaliere, S. (2017). The Voices of Krishna Sobti in the Polyphonic Canon of Indian Literature. In: Ciocca, R., Srivastava, N. (eds) Indian Literature and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_7
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