16458 Proseminar/Hauptseminar der Samuel Fischer-Gastprofessur

Amit Chaudhuri

Is There a Modern Indian Literature? (auf Englisch)

Mittwoch, 18-20 Uhr
Habelschwerdter Allee 45, JK 28/130

Beginn: 02. November 2005 (Änderung)

The title of the course is, provisionally, 'Is There a Modern Indian Literature?' I want to begin with a genealogy of the words 'modern' and 'Indian', and in what ways their emergence and usage in South Asia might be concomitant with each other. Related to this is the crucial idea of how the secular domain of 'culture' emerges in India: I'd like to trace it to a moment, using a text like Michael Madhusudan Dutt's "Meghnadabada Kabya". My purpose in dealing with 'modernity' is partly to pose the question: why, if it's been an elite and hegemonic discourse in India from the early or mid-nineteenth century onwards, has it almost no official status? I'd like to use 'modernity' and its specific emergence in India - with its notions of 'high' culture, ideas of self, and tensions between the demotic and literary languages - as a more fruitful paradigm for reading Indian literature, in both the vernaculars and in English, than, say, post-coloniality. As far as I'm concerned, to identify Indian literature with the English language, hybridity, and fantasy, and with a certain creation myth and narrative of the Indian English novel fashioned since the appearance of the "Midnight's Children", is both inaccurate and deeply unsatisfying. It's partly this narrative I wish to investigate, supplement, and complicate.

The one book it would be good to have as a companion to the course would be the "Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature", an anthology I edited.