172

The author’s tendency to accept testimony at face value is particularly constraining when it
comes to fan-clubs. In seeking to recover these institutions as expressive of the interests and
outlook of the poor, she distinguishes them from patronising middle-class service organisations;
rather than urge uplift, they realise that greater financial support is what matters to poor
people. However, on her own admission, the clubs claim to have achieved more than they
accomplish, and see themselves as distinct from the poor, patronising them in their own
fashion. An investigation of the resources and activities of the clubs, apart from their rhetoric,
would have been a useful corrective. The question of how power is wielded amongst the lower
classes, a hierarchy within a hierarchy, is therefore not addressed.

Centre for Study of Developing Societies RAVI S. VASUDEVAN

Delhi

SVATI JOSHI, ed., Rethinking English: Essays in literature, language, history. New Delhi:
Trianka, 1991. 348 pp. Notes. Rs. 280.

Rethinking English, a collection of ten essays edited by Svati Joshi, could be called a return to
the question of English and English literary studies broached in earlier works such as Masks of
conquest. But if so, it is a return inspired and novel enough to justify the word ’rethinking’ in
the title. Its ten contributors propose new terms and categories through which English in India
needs to be thought; they also propose a fundamental shift in focus from the oppressiveness of
the institution to the ways in which it has been resisted.
The ten essays, which will not be discussed in order, fall broadly into three groups. Svati
Joshi’s Introduction and the essays by Tejaswani Niranjana, Urvashi Butalia, and Kumkum
Sangari, together offer a historicised rationale for discussing English in India in the light of as
yet inadequately theorised material practices such as translation (Niranjana) and publishing
(Butalia), and of equally neglected questions about gender (Sangari). A second group of
essays, by Alok Rai, Badri Raina, and Aijaz Ahmed, pose a series of difficult and compelling
questions about the production of teachers, students and knowledges within the elitist
institution of English studies. Finally, the essays by Susie Tharu, Harish Trivedi, and Jasodhara
Bagchi shift the focus from the dead-weight of the institution to the ingenious ways in which it
has been sidestepped by indigenous literatures and writers, especially women. Particularly
welcome in this collection are Joshi’s rigorous Introduction: Sangari’s essay on the evolution
of the categories ’women’ and ’literature’; Butalia’s historical account of pub(ishing; Tharu’s
and Trivedi’s essays on specific cultural resistances; and, finally, Ahmed’s call to overhaul the
institution of English literature by transgressing against its two constitutive terms-’English’
and ‘literature’-in favour of a multilingual, materially grounded project of cultural studies.
There are inevitably some disappointments as well, the most surprising of which is the
tendency of a very few contributors to quote compulsively from the British canon and even, in
one instance, to credit it with ‘secularity’, ’refinement’, and other liberal humanist benefits.
This is offset by an equally occasional effort to address flourishing anglophone literary
traditions in other Third World cultures-a focus that one would have liked to see sustained
through the book. Similarly, one would have welcomed finding Tharu’s and Sangari’s attentive-
ness to questions of gender to be a rule rather than the exception in the book.
Nonetheless the book, like the recent collection The lie of the land, should be required
reading for many people: those who teach, administer, and fund English programmes; those
unsuspecting undergraduates who continue to flood them; and those expatriates, such as
myself, who profess Third World literatures abroad. For all of us, Rethinking English is not only
an uncompromising reminder of the paralysis that informs our profession of English, but also a
lifeline that somehow restores our faith in solutions in the midst of its sobering diagnosis.

Purdue University APARAJITA SAGAR

USA

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