Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages ed. by Hans Harder (review)

When nationalism came to the colonial world, it had no easy passage. In the Indian case, certainly, it was very complicated. Was India a nation or not? If it was, what was the basis of the nation? If not, what were the nations in India? These continue to be issues that haunt Indians. If Manipur is an integral part of India, and if Manipuris are our brothers and sisters, why are we imposing the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and protecting soldiers who rape and kill at whim? If Manipur is indeed a part of India, and if Amiya Dev was right in suggesting that Manipuri authors should be Manipuri writers and, first and foremost, Manipuri readers in order to be party to Indian literature,¹ what sort of nationalist ideology did India create, and what was the role of literature in creating such an ideology?

Literature and Nationalist Ideology, edited by Hans Harder, sets out to answer many such related questions. Nationalism in India has often moved uneasily between linguistic nationalism and the idea of an overarching unity, both of which have been contested from different locations either simultaneously or from different times and spaces. This collection of essays deals with three aspects of this area—the notion of a pan-Indian national ideology and the role of literature in constructing the identity, and of literary historiography in the mapping of such an identity; the ever-present pull of single language nationalism; and the creation of divisions through literature and the conceptualization of the methods and categories applicable in literary historiography itself.

The editor's introduction claims, "A history of modern literary histories would arguably soon single out two of these categories—language and nation—as the most powerful ones" (6). The problem that immediately arises when dealing with India is that the idea of the nation, tied so closely to the single national language in West Europe, hits a wall. Literary historiography, developing since the nineteenth century, saw its task as bringing to consciousness the heritage of the nation as a linguistic community. Of course, for India, the question was whether India was the nation, or whether the nation was the smaller unit based on Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, or other languages. One response, noted by Harder in his introduction, was to take ancient Indian and classical Sanskrit literature as "tradition," to produce books and journals in modern languages in a systematic program of sorts, and to look for and evaluate the past achievements of nonclassical Indian languages.

The writing of literary history was a self-consciously political act. Udaya Kumar's essay on Malayalam notes that the existence of a literary history, along with a grammar, a dictionary, and a prosody, was viewed as necessary in order to establish the status of a language. A number of other essays deal with the politics of literary historiography in other ways. Two of these essays are Ira Sarma's on Sir George Abraham Grierson ("George Abraham Grierson's Literary Hindustan") and Navina Gupta's on Ramchandra S'ukla ("The Politics of Exclusion?: The Place of Muslims, Urdu, and its Literature in Ramchandra S'ukla's 'Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas'"). Though Grierson was ostensibly simply presenting a compilation of material, his selection, presentation, and comments added up to a framework for historiography (176-77). The creation of this framework, however, also meant the creation of a political category.

Grierson's personal interest in Indian languages and his engagement with the comparative aspects of Indian languages resulted in his being designated editor and superintendent of a projected linguistic survey of India. This was a typical colonial project of measurement and classification. The project was massive in scope. Grierson did not claim to be writing literary history, feeling that such an act required a degree of comprehensiveness missing from his work. But Sarma notes that in effect he contributed vitally to a literary history of Hindi and Hindustan...