Indian Literary Historiography: Concepts, Languages, Histories

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

This volume of essays originates from a conference on the 1 subject organized by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, and held at the Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, on 28-29 September 2015. Of the papers presented there, three were eventually not submitted for publication, while the volume includes six other essays which were subsequently invited to ensure a fuller and more balanced representation of the various Indian languages. These include the essays on Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Konkani and Urdu. I am deeply grateful to all the contributors for their learned essays and for their gracious co-operation and patience during the protracted editorial process. Some of our major languages are still missing here but to wait for suitable essays on them would have delayed the volume even further.

When conceptualizing the scope and substance of the conference as its convenor, I received valuable inputs from Professor K. Satchidanandan, Professor E.V. Ramakrishnan, Professor Ipshita Chanda and Dr K. Sreenivasarao. As the volume has shaped up over the years, it contains a wide variety of perspectives and an astounding range of scholarship. I have myself learnt a lot from it and so I hope will its readers.

Literary Historiography because is an us place a piece it helps exciting field not only of literature in history and giving us a perspective of relationship between literary work and reality, but also in the scope of literary historiography as a social discourse revealing the identity politics of nations and communities.

The significance of Literary Historiography lies in that it does not merely represent the literary history of literary personalities, literary institutions and literary genres but also captures the evolution and changes in literary traditions, changes in cultural totalities and has the power to present before us commonalities in various literary traditions of a nation.

That is a traditional perspective. Interestingly, like other words, this technical term also has undergone changes in meaning. It was usually meant as a methodology of writing history of literature or literary history. But with the advent of Foucauldian theories on operation of power structures and recent writings of Homi Bhabha, Sheldon Pollock and Aijaz Ahmad the term Literary Historiography has grown to mean a non-fictional meta-narrative that attempts to relook at the history of a community or nation using literature as a single frame of reference.

If literary history is to Literature what historiography is Ito to History, literary historiography must be a discourse at the third remove from Literature. The fact that Literature and History are commonly regarded as being quite similar kinds of writing in some respects but radically dissimilar in others only complicates the picture. Both Literature and History offer a narrative representation of 'reality', with the vital difference that History has traditionally laid a claim to being 'true' while Literature is imaginative and inventive even at its most realistic. It depicts not only what meets the eye but equally what lies beyond physical cognition and can be perceived only by the 'inward eye' or antardrishti.

History is, or at least seeks to be, nothing if not objective while the distinction of Literature lies in its proclivity to be subjective in its very provenance, as proceeding from an individual subjectivity and a specific subject-position. The author of a work of History must sound authoritative and oracle-like to be persuasive while a literary author seeks to speak for all humanity when ostensibly speaking for only himself. It is symptomatic that in our postmodernist (or perhaps post-postmodernist) times, the (literary) Author is alleged to be dead (by Roland Barthes) while History too has been declared to have come to an end (by Francis Fukuyama). What that means in less rhetorical terms perhaps is that History and Literature are now thought to be equally forms of narration which are both contingent and (in Bakhtin's term) unfinalizable.