The signifiers, whether they are images or characters or episodes, or even so called structures and archetypes, may be the same in different periods and regions, but the signification goes on changing.

– A.K. Ramanujan

A distinct South Asian literary identity, drawn from interconnecting languages, culture, food, music and oral heritage is emerging in modern South Asian fiction and in cultural trends seen in social media. It cuts across the boundaries of religion and ideology and stretches the limits of static political maps. Be it the commonality of Urdu through much of Pakistan, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, or Bangla along the shores of the Padma river, or Tamil – one of the classical Indian languages, prevalent through Tamil Nadu in India and Sri Lanka, South Asian literatures present an intricate web of interdependency. This complex linguistic arrangement is further complicated by the addition of the merging and blending dialects of spoken languages. Whether it is Saraiki, Multani and Sindhi across India, Pakistan and the Sindhi diaspora, or Maithili featuring as the second language in Nepal and the official language of Bihar, or the fact that Nepali is itself one of the twenty-two official Indian languages with a numerically larger base in India than in Nepal, the linguistic and literary topography of South Asian countries have a common imprint of tradition and creative imagination. Such an interlinked pattern in the region makes it difficult to study this phenomenon from a ‘western’ pedagogical model which inscribes hierarchies between the oral and the scripted, the epical and the modern, English and ‘other’ languages.

It is perhaps worth remembering that the word ‘India’ harks back to the ‘Indies’, for in the imagination of Portuguese and Spanish seafarers India was conceived only in the plural. The name ‘Indies’ (to describe the region) is derived from the river Indus and was used to connote parts of Asia that came under Indian cultural influence. Ancient languages transit into newer forms, as evolving cultural practices create ever-changing contexts, and power structures determine which language groups are given prominence. Hence, we see that the literary imagination of South Asia gets interpreted through a variety of perspectives as the ‘Indies’ of old yields to a flux of new political identities. We see today a constant straining for self-definition in each of the nation states of South Asia even though the common threads of the past tug at the expediencies of the present.

 

It is often observed that whatever one may say of India, the opposite is equally true. Linguistic groups and literary traditions collide and coexist with a tangled thread of connectivity described as ‘many languages and one literature.’ We need not enter into a discussion on Indian writing in English, the scope, accomplishments and aspirations of which are copiously documented. We may look instead at the other languages that porously inhabit each other across the political borders of South Asia.

 

The Urdu tradition, in the footsteps of Saadat Hasan Manto and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, mirrored both a determined social commitment and a strong sense of comic subversion. Pre-partition Urdu was a secular, agnostic language, one capable of both the most brutal irony and the loftiest romanticism. Post partition Hindi, the new national language of India, was shorn of its Urdu and Hindustani traces and influences, and was immensely the poorer for this loss. During the 1950s, as Pakistan entered into cycles of politico-military dominance, restrictions on free expression led to a heightened use of symbol and metaphor thereby avoiding direct conflict with repressive forces. Across the border, in India, Urdu stayed alive in Punjabi writing. Today, its ethos is alive in Hindi cinema in terms of settings, character, lyrics and music. In the field of literature, it is flourishing in both prose and poetry and in translation as well.

Pakistan today is witnessing a literary liberation, a brilliant blossoming of talent in its highly visible international English language writers. In the words of novelist Kamila Shamsie, ‘Pakistani writing is like the new fast bowler on the scene.’ There is vital interaction among Urdu writers across the border of Pakistan and India and a finer understanding of a nuanced past.

Other national literatures common to both India and Pakistan, such as Sindhi, have retained a distinct voice despite being marginalized for various political reasons. Among the retrievals of neglected languages one may also list Multani and Saraiki, both considered ‘regional’ in character and yet claiming a rich literary corpus.

A comparable weave of plurality is visible in Nepal. Like other South Asian literatures, Nepal too has its enduring epic, transmitted through versions of orality and now popularized as Muna Madan by Laxmi Prasad Devkota. Literary continuities in Nepal have been severely hindered by political upheavals. Writers have been vocal about this; therefore views of the country from within and outside are refracted through both Nepali and English.

Bhutan too carries the same double-edged relationship between English and the native tongue, Dzongkha that was declared the official national language in the 1960s. Religious texts, Buddhist hagiographies and classical commentary are still written in the sonorous Dzongkha, a language based on old Tibetan, and now compulsorily studied in schools.

 

The diverse and polyphonic expression of literary identity in modern-day India is both daunting and inspiring. This country has 22 official national languages, 122 regional languages, four classical languages, 1726 mother tongues and countless dialects. Although colonization and the imposition of English stifled the vitality and outreach of many Indian languages, today, after decades of suppression, writers are returning to their own tongues with new creativity and inspiration. Grassroots writers in the many languages have both a contemporary voice and an enduring connection with classical traditions – here it is essential to mention the Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Odiya, Assamiya, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri and Urdu traditions. Novels, short fiction, poetry and experimental writing are flourishing in each of these, along with a robust practice of literary criticism.

Mythology remains a constant on Indian bestseller lists. The passionate exploration and reinterpretation of epics within different languages and genres is often surprising to western academia which tends to categorize myth as a static area of study. The entire South Asian region revels in its peculiar versions of the Ramayana binding it in a narrative fabric where the main strands are recognizable and lend themselves to a vast number of sub-narratives within the larger one. The Mahabharata likewise gives infinite range in imagining the possibility of developing narratives where the Pandavas spent their years of exile and specially the period of agyatvasa. Languages, geographies and epics all coalesce into dramatizing a timeless cultural trope, that of good versus evil.

Groups that have been historically marginalized – whether they are women, Dalits or writers from linguistic and cultural minorities – are standing their ground and upholding their literary identity, not wanting to blend into an undifferentiated homogeneity. Consequently, Dalit writers have emerged as a distinct group protesting their rejection by mainstream Indian literature and are now asserting their sensibility. They are, in a sense, the conscience keepers of a democratic India. Where many feel so passionately about the country’s multiple literatures, it is crucial that common spaces must be available for society to share its problems – and anger is an important part of the process. In a similar strand, women writers today are vociferous in protesting against inequities that are legacies of a social schema no longer acceptable in a global modernity.

 

South Asian literature, in its many voices, languages and avatars, retains an underlying warp and woof of cultural connectivity. India is, and always has been, a bahubhashit multilingual society. The Vedas, the earliest remembered expression of our literary culture, urges invoking the Gods in many languages. Over the years, an unprecedented interest in South Asian literature and its increasing articulation have fuelled a need for vigorous interpretation of the contradictory, often conflicting realities of the subcontinent. Engaged levels of debate on literature and society in these regions, which are fractured by political and cultural identities and connected by linguistic legacies are flourishing in public forums and private settings alike.

U.R. Ananthamurthy captures this diversity: ‘There are at least three languages in our lives: one is the home language, the other is the street language, the third is the upstairs language.’ … ‘I cannot live in only one language. I live in English, I live in Kannada, I live in Sanskrit, and so many translations.’

 

The connections and conjunctions of this ‘upstairs, downstairs, inside-outside’ are mirrored in an array of over seventy literary festivals that have found voice and value across South Asia in the last decade. The inspirational Jaipur Literature Festival, now the largest free literature festival in the world, has created a platform and a model of multilingual literary celebration across languages, and the class and community divides that come with them in this part of the world. Literary festivals in Karachi and Lahore, Kathmandu and Thimphu, Galle and Yangon, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, are spaces that present continuity and change. The challenges of modernity are reflected through the emerging narratives in the cinematic, visual and literary arts. In an environment where writers and thinkers are butchered and hounded simply for the act of thinking and writing, these platforms are witness to the new roots and wings of literary experience across South Asia.

 

* The article draws upon an earlier publication, ‘Thirty Years of SAARC: Society, Culture and Development’, IIC Quarterly, New Delhi, Winter 2014-Spring 2015.