Hello Friends my Presentation will be on G.N.

Devy essay Postcolonial Indian Approches One of the many cultural mutations caused by colonial experience is a selective amnesia. Through a complex pattern of interaction between the dominating culture and the dominated culture involving both conflict and collaboration- the dominated culture comes to believe that there is something wrong with its own civilizational dynamic and that its sense of history is inadequate and faulty. In field of literature we notice this tendency reflected on large scale imitation of British historiographical models for describing the development of literary arts in Indian languages. The contemporary literary historiography in India is seen following the periods models rather than using the school models of writing the history. Once this inadequate history gets se ttled as canonical truth about literary genius of the people and the literary development of the culture, inappropriate theories of literature start crowding the field of criticism. It is therefore necessary for us to investigate whether India did not really have a sense of history and in particular a sense of literary history, prior to the advent of the British rule in India. If we carry out the investigation with an open mind we are likely to observe that literary history was not an altogether foreign branch of literary criticism in ancient and medieval India. An attempt is made here to chart out the historical and historiographical attitudes prevalent in India on the basis of textual evidence. In any society, the emergence of history as a discipline distinct from literature also brings the awareness of alterity on the part of literature, an awareness that it is not history. In the process also evolves the awareness of the historicity of literature, of literary history. This process took place in Europe from the middle of the 18 century to the middle of the 19 century as convincingly argued by Linda Orr in her brilliant essay, The Revenge of Literature: A History of History (New Literary history, Volume 18, No1). This process took place in India about a century before it took place in Europe and in the 17 century, India started producing Literary Histories that would be acceptable to the modern scholarship as being proper literary history. This is not surprising considering, that the use of paper for writing, the development of the prose form used for history writing, a general discourse of history and traditions of literature about which to write, all, existed in India in the seventeen century. My presentation is concerned with the fundamental change taking place in the writings of the Indian writers. In fact it seems the old paradigms are replaced by the new ones. The purposes of this presentation are to look into the writings of the postcolonial period and locate the new paradigms by outlining them. The writers discussed here have broken the new ground and have an indelible impact on modern Indian literature and culture. Though they have challenged the conventional thinking and status quo of their own society, their writings represent the intellectual annals of modern India. Well Coming to the essay of G.N. Devy titled Postcolonial Indian Approaches where he clearly states that it is not the theory of literary history that he is discussing in his essay, rather the positions taken by historiographers, historians, critics and writers with reference to their encounter with literary culture in modern India. Though not an exhaustive review of literary history in contemporary India, different positions discussed in this essay only represent the trends and the tendencies in the field.

From the point of Language perspective, G.N.Devy put forwards two historiographical arguments, where he considers the literature as a universal entity and also a regional entity. By referring to Sri Aurobindos Future Poetry, a book that battles against the coercive influence of the English sensibility on Indian literature, G.N.Devy is able to build a sustained vision of literary history that logically requires any Universalist historiography to cease to refer to the specific social, political or cultural context. While a Universalist literary history is likely to leave any of its readers cold, it must be acknowledged that this kind of history can be produced only in a colonized culture, which has bottomless inner cultural resources to fall back upon as dream-world compensation. Appropriately, therefore the historiographer proposes poetry as Mantra to be ideal for the future. This Mantra according to Sri Aurobindo is a poetic expression of the deepest spiritual realty which is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, highest intensity of verbal form and thought substance of style and a highest intensity of souls vision of truth. Thus it must be clearly understood that Sri Aurobindos philosophy of evolutionary art progress the highest stage of subjective state, the time when man achieves the state of spiritual subjectivity which is not any form of propitiatory withdrawal form and renunciatory indifference to life, but the highest form of awakening of the self, that will give some meaning to dull existence. Though monolingual in perspective Vanmayetihasacai Sankalpana (an anthology of historiographical essays in Marathi edited by Dattatraya Pande) is a volume prepared so as to bring together important essays on literary history, to think afresh about the existing histories of resistance and nationalism in literature and to create a field of literary historiography in Marathi. G.N.Devy then gives the examples of V.K.Rajwade and T.S.Shejwalker to prove that during the discourse of Marathi history, a thought to literary historiography is also included. Rajwade in his essay History of Prakitic Language and Literature in Maharashtra co nsiders the history of literature is at once history of language as well as history of sociology. He also view history of creative writings as only one aspect of literary history while Shejwalker in his essay Literature, Writing and Life argues that literature cannot be allowed to become an end in itself without causing damaging effects on life itself. History of Literature for him is history of its relation to labour in a given society. G.N.Devy then also mentions about the most common trend in literary historiography in modern India and also the dominant one at present, is the trend of regionalism, which in a recent trend and it coincides with the colonial and postcolonial perceptions of Indias nationhood. Then comes the sociological and ideological perspective, which put forwards two types of historiographical models, where G.N.Devy considers literature as a web of divergent trends, styles and literature as national convergence of trends and styles. Here G.N.Devy refers to Sujit Mukherjees two books, Towards a literary History of India (1975) and Some Positions on a Literary History of India(1981) in order to put forward Mukherjees formulation of literary historiography, which requires to have : (1) an indigenous definition of history, (2) an indigenous critical formulation, (3) an indigenous historiographical perspective. Mukherjee looks at India as cultural unit rather than a political unit. He gives a brief account of origin and growth of historiography in the bhasas of India.

The kind of integrative national history of Indian literature that Mukherjee conceptualizes is to be found in 2 volumes by Sisir Kumar Das. He looks at the colonial hierarchy of languages from the perspective of oppressed and the marginalized. Subaltern historiography is thus the perspective of the marginalized, of many against the dominant one that fights the tendency to essentialize India. In the subaltern system of significance India is a changing concept, signifying a variety of social and cultural groupings of consciousness therefore when extended to cover literary history, the subaltern strategy tends to deny a common identity and a continuous diachronic self-cognition of all literatures in India which can then be collapsed into a larger category of Indian literature. G.N.Devy also specifies three of the new and progressive movements that narrate the untold story of deprivation: (1) Dalit Writings, (2) New Literatures in English and (3) Feminist Writing and Criticism. The sense of outrage in Salman Rushdies essay, Commonwealth Literature Doesnt Exist, is caused by what Rushdie himself calls the creation of the Commonwealth ghetto. This ghetto can be no less oppressive to writers who wish to relate themselves to the entire English canon and the totality of the English language the caste ghetto created for dalit writers or the gender ghetto created for woman writers. The three forms of protest, their explicit plea for equality, their desire to reconstitute the category of the aesthetic, go into their revision of history. Their literary historiography seeks to recast literary histories based on colonial, cultural and caste discriminations and in their own fashion they emphasize the texts of such deprivations against established historical narratives. From the cultural perspective G.N.Devy enlists the position as Heterodox Modernity and Foreclosed Traditions. G.N.Devy in order to illustrate these two antithetical views on literary traditions uses the writings of U.R.Ananthamurthy and Bhalchandra Nemade. If, Ananthamurthys essay Why Not Worship in the Nude constructs the modernity as a condition of knowledgeable ambivalence, the inability to decide which of the cultural pressures demanding his novelistic attention should be privileged. Nemade through his long essay, The Marathi Novel: 195075 implies that tradition leaves very little for the writer to choose. For Ananthamurthy tradition is freedom for Nemade tradition is necessity. For Ananthamurthy tradition in pluralistic societies is heterodox. For Nemade, tradition in postcolonial societies is a means of recovering the nativistic self awareness so as to be able to perform linguistic Kriti, creation of which is also action. G.N.Devy at last from philosophical perspective considers the literary tradition as Eternal Recurrences and Specific Occurrence. The critic whose work illustrates the view of history as a perennial recurrence is Ananda K. Coomaraswamy who thinks that essentially one philosophic thought can be inspired in the minds of different philosophers in different cultures and at different times. This concept of perennial philosophy has extremely important implications for historiography. By drawing on a plethora of evidence from ancient scriptural sources, Coomaraswamy does indeed build a case for the view that memory is not the storehouse of new experiences, but an outlet for knowledge belonging to an order of existence prior or superior to human existence. Memory is from the Self, and the Self Knows Everything. However it is not in any metaphorical sense that Coomaraswamy thinks of philosophy, knowledge and literature as eternally recurrent phenomenon. He thinks of history as a recurrence in the literal as well as philosophical sense. The historian

becomes, a prophet who must keep looking for immanence of the Self in all recurrences seen outwardly as history. While on other hand Rajeev Patkes essay published recently in Kavya Bharati is an attempt to make sense of the large crop of anthologies of Indian poetry in English and to provide a historical perspective to the process of canon formation in this new branch of Indian literature. What is worth appreciating in Patkes historiography is that he divides the poem into periods that match respectively with two criteria of sincerity and authenticity without any strained attempt to show them totally different from one another. Thus there is continuity between the two periods as well as a difference. Therefore each literary period is literary but not literary in the same way as all other periods are. Each literary period, author, text, or event is an occurrence by itself and never totally identical with any other period, author, text or event. G.N.Devy discussion of these postcolonial Indian approaches to literary history indicates the range and variety of critical responses to Indias literary past. These approaches, though not fully developed philosophies of literary history, indicate the direction in which literary historiography in India has been moving during the twentieth century. In short, a literary history in India, if it has to be a properly ordered illumination of the literary past, will have to be a history. One of the most important ingredients of postcolonial literature is the language in which it is written. It was the conspiracy of the colonial rule to introduce English with the intention of converting the colonized into mimic men, but this tool proved to be the nail in their coffin as Indians learnt how to pay them in the same coin. Niranjan Mohanty is well aware of the language of the language question and hence thinks that it is only through language he can find a link to tie the other members of his tribe. But today it is not the problem because English has become a global language and has become a medium to represent the east to the west in the emphatic manner. The writings of the writers are purely postcolonial in texture and structure as their writings deal with national and transnational themes. Poverty, superstition, injustice, hypocrisy, double dealing, east-west encounter and suffering of language and typical Indian ness in the contemporary society. All come within the purview of their writings. The contemporary Indian reality takes its significant mode in the writing of the golden trio Mulk Raj Anands Untouchables , Raja Raos Kanthapura and R.K.Narayans (also regarded as father figure in postcolonial Indian English fiction) The Guide reveal the better stand depicting such reality. The outcry of east-west encounter becomes prominent in Sehgals Into another Dawn and Rajans Too long in the west. Anita Desais Voice in the City deals with the exploration of native sensibility as her Indian situations and characters are models for postcolonial outlook. The same thing happens in Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things that depicts the picture of the downtrodden oppression or marginal group those stand with Spivaks colonial discourse the subaltern cannot speak. Salman Rushdie in Midnight Children deals with the memory and imagination to present versions of historical events and Rushdie handles the multiplicity and totality of experience in connection with nation. The postcolonial theory is also based on the consciousness of multilateral perspectives. Thus in end I would like to end my presentation by quoting Terry Eagletons conclusion in Literary Theory: An Introduction who says that literature can serve as a powerful means of establishing an enduring intellectual bond amongst the structures of civilizations, cultures, nations and groups of

people towards the emergence of an enlightened world community is in itself the most enviable and ambitious ideal ascribed to any one single human endeavour. Literature may be considered to have special complicity with political developments and the ideologies of revolutionary change in one special sense and that is the unique recognition given to the ability of literature to cultivate an illuminated consciousness in its reader.