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The Moment of Criticism in Indian Nationalist Thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of a Hindi Responsibility
- The South Atlantic Quarterly
- Duke University Press
- Volume 101, Number 4, Fall 2002
- pp. 987-1014
- Article
- Additional Information
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The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002) 987-1014
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The Moment of Criticism in Indian Nationalist Thought:
Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of a Hindi Responsibility
Milind Wakankar
Why was the moment of criticism in Hindu nationalist thought defined in terms of an "Indian" mode of responsibility? When Ramchandra Shukla (1884–1941), perhaps the most influential Hindi critic of all time, began writing his major essays in the late 1920s, the battle for Hindi against the claims of Urdu had already been won. The identification of the Hindi language with the idea of a homogeneously "Hindu" nation had been decisively established. For some decades, the rapid development of the Hindi canon, in which Shukla himself played a salient role, and the inclusion of Hindi in school and college curricula had been an accomplished fact. Coming at the end of this long process that began in the early nineteenth century, Shukla's major work exemplifies a new and hitherto unprecedented development in the cultural history of Hindi. It refers us to what I call the inaugural dimension of the critical act in the 1920s and 1930s, which is I believe closely bound to issues of Hindu (nationalist) responsibility and colonial wonder.
For too long, the emergence of modern literary critical thought in late colonial India has been [End Page 987] seen in terms of an impasse. The commonplace notion of this impasse is that indigenous thinking was stalled between the force of ideas derived from European modernity on the one hand, and the persistence of categories taken from non-Western traditions of rhetoric and philosophy, on the other. 1 The implication of this impasse would be, for instance, that modern Indian literary criticism in its many regional languages could only ever have been derivative of the West. At its worst, the critical labor of commentary, annotation, and interpretation have regressed by dint of its tradition-bound nationalism to the supposedly outdated modes of analysis taken from Indic aesthetics.
Now there are quite genuine problems with such readings centered on the idea of an impasse, especially since they overlook issues of responsibility and historical origin. In contrast, inauguration—at the very least, in the sense I wish to underscore—must mean breaking through an impasse, reaching some kind of decision in a moment fraught with courage and danger. For this reason my emphasis in this essay is on what can be "passed through" in an impasse. By this token, the "modernity" of the critical impasse in the 1920s in India refers us not to the mire of the impassable, but to the necessary activity of passage, and to unmasterable circumstances demanding difficult choices. Such, at the very least, ought to be the agenda for a pragmatic history of criticism. It follows that such a history must be aware of criticism's inaugural quality, its newness, and its ability to generate new concepts. In what follows, I attend to this inaugural quality in Shukla's work, and relate it to some of the most significant achievements of critical thinking in Hindi.
According to the received account, two phases in the development of modern Hindi criticism have been seen to precede Shukla. The first is the pioneering phase associated with the figure of the poet Bhartendu Harishchandra (1880–1885) in the 1880s. The second is the encyclopedic phase that is synonymous with the journal Saraswati in the 1900s and with its editor, Mahavirprasad Dwivedi (1864–1938). The world of Harishchandra and Dwivedi was still marked by the late-nineteenth-century question of social and religious reform. Both Harishchandra and Dwivedi played important roles—albeit at different times—in the literary public sphere of the Northwest Provinces, which was centered in Banares.
Sudhir Chandra has analyzed the social formation of this literary circle, which drew to itself most of Hindi's pioneering poets and writers, in terms [End Page 988] of the problem of its "ambivalence" toward the ideas of "European modernity" that underlay the question of reform. He argues that the ambivalence was a result...