Cocoonistan

[Jacaylbaro]

Years ago, when I was engaged in the pursuit of the Hindi PhD that I now have, I was approached for an interview by a reporter working for a local Hindi weekly. This was not because I was a notable scholar, but because my presence in the provincial city of Allahabad was odd enough to remark upon in print. At some point the reporter asked me how I liked Hindi literature in comparison to English literature, and if Hindi literature had even developed to a point that it could be compared to English. I tried to explain, in Hindi that was far from flawless, that if I thought Hindi literature was poorly developed, I wouldn’t have come so far to study it, and that in comparison to English it was perfectly good. When the article came out, the reporter had summarized my response along these lines:

 

Rockwell believes that Hindi literature has made great progress in its development and can even be compared to works of English literature.

 

The use of the kind of language we use to describe the economies and infrastructures of developing nations to discuss the literatures of so-called ‘third world’ countries is pervasive (pick up a copy of Aijaz Ahmad’s excellent book In Theory to read more about the third worlding of literature). How often do we hear about the development and progress being made in French or Italian literatures? This discourse is even endemic to the discussions about such literatures that take place among the very authors that write in them. Aside from the ludicrousness of talking about the development and progress of the novel or short story in the same style as one might discuss the building of bridges and the paving of roads, there is also the fact that very few literatures of the world are in their infancy. “Yes!” You might interject, “But surely the novel and the short story are quintessentially modern forms!” Indeed, perhaps they are (though there are many arguments to the contrary). Nonetheless, these forms date back to at least the late nineteenth century in most Indian languages. Other genres of writing in the modern Indian languages stretch back much further than that, some to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, or even earlier, to say nothing of the antiquity of Sanskrit.

 

English, as the most powerful international language, dominates world conversations on just about everything, but wraps its native speakers in a cocoon that renders them increasingly unable to hear conversations that were not meant for their ears. The cocoon can alienate us from cultural diversity and deafen us to voices that are not speaking directly to us. In this way, as in many others, globalization both broadens our horizons and shrinks them dangerously. Nowadays, development discourse is often used to discuss the great progress that is being made on the front of new writing in English in India, and more recently, Pakistan. Besides the fact that this discourse infantilizes the literary output of writers in English, it paves over the very existence of literary traditions in other languages. As an English-speaking person who likes to read non-English literature from South Asia, I often feel irritable on encountering pronouncements about the extreme youth and great promise of Indian or Pakistani literature.

[Jacaylbaro]

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