A peep into what is happening in India today in culture and what concerns move its most articulate citizens.

An omnibus on culture and identity in contemporary India that has some of India’s most famous scholars, activists and authors as contributors and a range of subjects that cover translation studies, the modern Indian novel, theatre, history of art, feminist activism and science is bound to be exciting. All the essays in this volume were given as public lectures on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai.

The editors are two well-known academics from Bombay University who have thematically arranged the various short and long contributions, and themselves written a thoughtful introduction that summarises the main concerns and the varying scholarly approaches to culture and self in today’s India. If there is one thread that binds this volume firmly then it is the contentious and plural nature of India’s cultural production. The editors too seem to concur with such a view.

A publishing phenomenon

The first part of the book, which really forms its core, comprises three long essays on literature, painting and music. The nature of these essays is such that they introduce both the subject and the author to the lay public. If the intention was to acquaint an interested but not necessarily scholarly audience with new intellectual work then this effort has certainly succeeded splendidly.

Meenakshi Mukherjee is a widely admired literary critic who has straddled the world of English and Indian literatures with great felicity. In this essay she comments on a publishing phenomenon that has certainly been striking. In the last decade or so there have been more translations of Indian fiction to English while the mutual exchanges between Indian literatures have declined relatively. Is this the power of the world market and English or do translations genuinely bridge unequal worlds?

There are obviously no clear answers and as Mukherjee shows one also has to grapple with India’s colonial heritage and ambiguous relationship with the West, Indian writing in English, Orientalist stereotypes and particularly the anxiety of Indian English writers to appear as authentic Indians to the outside world. Her essay can usefully be read with other shorter accounts on the same theme by U.R.Ananthamurthy and Dilip Chitre, which are printed elsewhere in the same volume.

Music encounters

Ashok Ranade’s fascinating essay jumps headlong into fusion music and he shows how various and varying have been music encounters within Indian society itself. His brief comments on primitive, folk, popular, religious and art music carefully delineate important attributes in these genres. Ranade demonstrates how fusion usually happens along the three axes of tone, tempo and language. His essay will certainly open up a new perspective for music aficionados.

The camps for and against fusion are usually at war, tempers often run high since these camps are also separated by generation. Ranade’s essay is very welcome since serious music criticism rarely finds place in books on culture. Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s is the longest essay in the book and the only one which has accompanying illustrations. Her essay addresses the problematic past of the modern in Indian painting.

Beginning with Raja Ravi Verma and his double legacy in high and popular art, through the rejection of this legacy in Abanindranath, the different trajectory of latter’s disciples Nandalal and Binode Behari, right up to the new modernism of Amrita Shergill, this essay is a critical account of Indian art history that helps us to understand how Indian painting emerged in post-Independence India.

A mixed bag

The shorter essays are represented by Anuradha Kapur and Vijaya Mehta on theatre who interrogate the inter- and intra- culturalism and the notion of Indianness as represented in performance. Claude Alvares has an eloquent essay on the violence of modern science. Uma Chakravarti makes a strong plea for going beyond compensatory histories of women.

Her detailed account of the historiography and the present state of feminist writing is illuminating. Usha Thakkar has a commentary on Gandhian politics that is also a useful compliment to Vimla Bahuguna’s short account of the Chipko movement reprinted in this book. Devaki Jain has a longer essay on feminist movements. Other contributors include Kapila Vatsyayan on tradition, Mariam Dossal on history writing, Vidyut Bhagwat on women bhakti poets and Gita Chaddha on post-Independence science criticism.

The essays in this collection are a mixed bag of various political ideas, scholarly preoccupations, activist interventions and most notably, currents within contemporary India that fall both within and outside the loosely defined category of culture. Reading this book one gets a peep into what is happening in India today and what concerns move its most articulate citizens.

Partho Dutta

Reference Link:
The Hindu Online
http://www.hindu.com/br/2006/01/03/stories/2006010300891500.htm
Tuesday, Jan 03, 2006