Postcolonial South-Asia: Interrogating Identities/Experiences

In the Humanities, South Asia is usually understood as a set of plurilingual, multicultural nations. Each constituting nation is internally differentiated or socially stratified according to its economic and sociological power hierarchies. In other words, differences exist in different ways: caste, religion, gender, geopolitics, economics, etc. are a few of the markers. Reciprocal to these markers, different categories of ‘literatures’ are assumed to be the subsets of the broader category of ‘South Asian literature’. 

The principle inquiry of this panel is to make an attempt to critique and contribute to this very categorisation. What makes a text “Indian”? What makes a text “Dalit”? Beauvoir says that each (literary) text bears the mark of someone. If literature gives each of us a voice, then can there be a literary study that recognises a voice as a voice and not the voice, whether minority or otherwise? For example, can we rethink ‘Dalit literature’ in a way that can admit the plurality of Dalit writings and experiences? Putting the ‘reader’ at the centre, discourses in reception aesthetics have already contributed much to our understanding of the plural nature of literary reception. Derek Attridge’s conceptualisation of the ‘event’ of literature shifted the focus to the reader’s relation with the ‘work.’ As Barthes suggests, a literary ‘work’ can be performed as infinite ‘texts’ because each reader in each instance of reading is capable of having a singular relation with the work. We recognise the comparative method to be an ethical choice for engaging in such a literary study because it takes into account, quite importantly so, the ‘more-than-oneness’ that deeply permeates the life and literature of the area. Difference, then, is perceived, acknowledged, and engaged through the comparative framework.

Despite the emergence of formative literary frameworks that accommodate what Gourgouris refers to as the poiein nature of literary reading, disciplinary norms have necessitated theory in the academic ‘readings’ of literature. Comparative Literature continues to survive despite disciplinary “deaths” through its method or practice rather than any specific theory. The comparative methodology thrives owing to its perpetual openness to the plurality of what Derrida calls the ‘disjuncted’ and ‘disproportionated’. The practice of poiein is perpetually open to the plurality of identities and thus it transcends the categories and hierarchies. Thus, unlike other disciplines, literature and literary study recognise the ethics of plurality as foundational to our ‘study’ of ‘South Asian literature’ and its subspecies. 

Feel free to agree or disagree with the proposed notions. We welcome abstracts of around 250 words that engage with South Asian studies, Dalit Studies, Postcolonial Studies, India Studies and other areas pertaining to the geographical and experiential ‘categories’.