Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India

10.1057/9780230118348 - Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature, Edited by Satya P. Mohanty

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Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature



A timely series that represents the most innovative work being done in the broad field defined as “minority studies.” Drawing on the intellectual and political vision of the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Research Project, this book series will publish studies of the lives, experiences, and cultures of “minority” groups—broadly defined to include all those whose access to social and cultural institutions is limited primarily because of their social identities. For more information about the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) International Research Project, visit www.fmsproject.cornell.edu.

Series Editors Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College, CUNY Michael Hames-García, University of Oregon Satya P. Mohanty, Cornell University Paula M. L. Moya, Stanford University Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan Identity Politics Reconsidered edited by Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya Ambiguity and Sexuality: A Theory of Sexual Identity by William S. Wilkerson Identity in Education edited by Susan Sánchez-Casal and Amie A. Macdonald Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture by Daniel Enrique Pérez The Future of Diversity: Academic Leaders Reflect on American Higher Education edited by Daniel Little and Satya P. Mohanty Minority Reports: Identity and Social Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Michael Borgstrom Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India edited and with an introduction by Satya P. Mohanty

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The Future of Minority Studies

A View from India

Edited and with an Introduction by Satya P. Mohanty

10.1057/9780230118348 - Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature, Edited by Satya P. Mohanty

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Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature

colonialism, modernity, and literature

Copyright © Satya P. Mohanty, 2011.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61904-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Colonialism, modernity, and literature : a view from India / edited and with an introduction by Satya P. Mohanty. p. cm.—(Future of minority studies) ISBN 978-0-230-61904-3 (hardback) 1. Indic literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. India— In literature. 3. Colonies in literature. 4. Imperialism in literature. 5. Postcolonialism in literature. 6. Postcolonialism—India. I. Mohanty, Satya P. (Satya Prakash), 1954PK5416.C6 2011 891.4—dc22 2010035295 Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: March 2011 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 Printed in the United States of America.

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All rights reserved.

10.1057/9780230118348 - Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature, Edited by Satya P. Mohanty

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To U. R. Ananthamurthy, who provided the inspiration . . .

10.1057/9780230118348 - Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature, Edited by Satya P. Mohanty

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Introduction: Viewing Colonialism and Modernity through Indian Literature Satya P. Mohanty

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I Views from Below: Comparing Literary Perspectives 1 Critical Realisms in the Global South: Narrative Transculturation in Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude Jennifer Harford Vargas

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2 Views from Above and Below: George Eliot and Fakir Mohan Senapati Paul L. Sawyer

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3 Two Classic Tales of Village India: The Realist Epistemology of Chha Mana Atha Guntha and Godaan 91 Himansu S. Mohapatra 4 The Emergence of the Modern Subject in Oriya and Assamese Literatures: Fakir Mohan Senapati and Hemchandra Barua Tilottoma Misra 5 The Indigenous Modernity of Gurajada Apparao and Fakir Mohan Senapati Velcheru Narayana Rao

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6 “Why Don’t You Speak?”: The Narrative Politics of Silence in Senapati, Premchand, and Monica Ali 153 Ulka Anjaria

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Contents

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contents

7 The Representation of Women and Gender Relations in Six Acres and a Third Claire Horan

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8 Rediscovering Ramachandra Mangaraj and Historicizing Senapati’s Critique of Colonialism Gaganendra Nath Dash

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9 The Tradition-Modernity Dialectic in Six Acres and a Third Debendra K. Dash and Dipti R. Pattanaik

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Appendix: Fair Without, Foul Within: Bahire Rongsong Bhitare Kowabhaturi 229 Hemchandra Barua List of Contributors

257

Index

259

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II The Many Contexts of Six Acres and a Third

Viewing Colonialism and Modernity through Indian Literature Satya P. Mohanty

A

few years ago, during his visit to Cornell University, the leading Indian writer U. R. Ananthamurthy asked a group of South Asia specialists why Indian literary texts are so rarely given the kind of careful attention critics give to major texts in European and American literature. In the discussions following his public lecture to students and faculty, in which he spoke at length on two works he sees as “foundational” in the history of the modern Indian novel, Senapati’s Chha Mana Atha Guntha (1897–99) and Tagore’s Gora (1907–09), Ananthamurthy went on to talk about the need for extended textual readings as well as cross-regional analysis of the literary traditions in India.1 He called for textual comparisons that highlight similarities and differences in the way common themes and similar social situations are treated in fiction. Part of his point was that several strands of cultural and social influence run through Indian literary texts and it is impossible to see these strands clearly if our focus remains confined to any one work, or even to the works of any one linguistic and regional tradition. Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India is in some ways a response to Ananthamurthy’s call. It provides close and attentive readings of a uniquely representative work of modern Indian literature, one of the two Ananthamurthy’s lecture focused on, and it develops its analyses in a resolutely comparative framework. The authors in this volume focus on the achievements of Senapati’s late nineteenth-century Oriya novel, the most recent translation of which, Six Acres and a Third, appeared in 2005.2 Many of them also develop

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Introduction

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Satya P. Mohanty

The Major Themes Focusing on literary, and primarily comparative, analyses, this volume presents one distinct and complex view from the Indian context, but it is a view with wider implications. The first of the general themes this volume addresses is the relationship between colonialism and sociocultural modernity in the colonized world. A recent spate of writings has challenged the view that the “modernity” colonialism brought with it is the only viable or genuine modernity that exists, and that what was destroyed, both good and bad, was incompatible not only with capitalism as an economic system but also with such cherished modern values as egalitarianism, democratic individuality, and rational social organization. There are colonialist versions of this thesis, versions that justified colonial conquest and rule: the utilitarian thinker James Mill and a whole host of colonial officials come to mind here. But the thesis is also developed in more benign versions by such figures on the left as Marx and his more recent followers (see, e.g., Jameson). The basic assumption shared by all versions of this thesis, however, is that what the modernity that was imposed by colonialism replaced or destroyed belongs to the irretrievable past and is irrelevant for our purposes. In contrast to this view, the recent literature on “alternative modernities” and the “provincializing” of Europe raises the strong possibility that more fine-grained historical, cultural, and philosophical analyses will show how distinctly modern values such as individuality and radical egalitarianism were articulated in contexts other than the capitalist West. Questioning the notion of “a singular modernity” (Jameson) does not have to involve a retreat into cultural relativism. What it suggests, instead, is an empirical and theoretical hypothesis that socalled premodern societies have been looked at through speculative and ideologically distorted lenses and that a more rigorous empirically based analysis can drastically revise our understanding of them. Literary and cultural texts, both high canonical and popular or “folk,” can play a major role in this revisionary analysis, revealing the alternative and nondominant layers of modernity to which scholars have remained blind.4

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their textual analyses through a comparison of Six Acres with other Indian and non-Indian texts, shedding light on Senapati’s novel, its historical moment, and more general themes concerning colonialism, modernity, and what may be called the “literary view from below.”3

3

Looking carefully at Six Acres in a comparative context, drawing on similar texts produced around the same time elsewhere in India, some of the essays in this volume (see, e.g., Narayana Rao; Dash and Pattanaik; Misra) show that the colonialist ideological opposition between native tradition and western modernity was challenged forcefully by several nineteenth-century writers in their literary creations—prose sketches, novels, and plays, for instance. While many Indian writers of the period implicitly accepted the ideology of “colonial modernity,”5 others, as is evident in Senapati’s novel, provided a more complex defense of what we may call the “rationality” of some traditional Indian social institutions. Modernity is thus a layered and complex phenomenon, according to such writers as Senapati, and analysis of traditional culture needs to be nuanced and contextually sensitive. These writers in effect prise apart the many layers of modernity in order to analyze them critically. Instead of identifying modernity with what colonial rule brought with it—and choosing to either accept it in its entirety or reject it outright—many in the colonized world defined modernity for their times through their complexly mediated critiques of their own social traditions, both the old and the newly invented ones. Implicit in their work is the idea that accepting such modern values as egalitarianism or the spirit of critique and inquiry does not require us to accept the colonialist ideology that most native traditions need to be rejected. I believe that the idea of an alternative or indigenous modernity is ultimately based on the perfectly plausible hunch that the concept of modernity does not constitute one tight unity, comprising a cluster of properties that are causally bound together in such a way that they are inextricable from one another. My hypothesis is this: the implicit view of theorists of alternative modernity is that the crucial features of the concept of modernity can be disaggregated; they can even be recombined in a number of different ways, shaped by differences in sociocultural context. So if we can find modern values and ideas articulated in socioeconomic systems very different from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European capitalism, part of the challenge for us as scholars is to trace the provenance of such values and ideas in these non-European contexts and to examine the alternative institutions and cultural forms that supported them. “Alternative” or “indigenous” modernity points to a project of historical retrieval and imaginative philosophical reconstruction. A critique of colonial ideology, the ideology that is a constitutive element of colonial modernity, is meant to clear the ground for such retrieval and reconstruction. As will be evident in the analyses contained in this volume, several Indian writers in the nineteenth century were engaged in just such a project.

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Viewing Colonialism and Modernity

Satya P. Mohanty

The second major theme of this volume concerns the forms in which social critique is articulated in literature, and in particular how it defines a literary view from below, the perspective of the lower orders of society, the subalterns, as expressed in literary modes and forms. Comparative analyses reveal, for instance, that the very narrative forms Senapati develops (extending some indigenous oral and written traditions) are similar to those associated with the Latin American writer Gabriel García Márquez, who was challenging— some sixty years after Senapati—the dominance of neocolonial power in his own society in Colombia (see Vargas, this volume). Senapati’s narrative forms are also specified through contrast: Sawyer situates Six Acres and a Third in relation to the work of the English writer George Eliot, who was writing a couple of decades before Senapati, from the geographical center of imperial power, about the lives of the humble and the poor. Sawyer shows how Senapati is able to arrive at a more adequate narrative form for representing subalternity than Eliot and suggests, without tracing any lines of influence, that Senapati’s “heteroglossic” narrative anticipates major strands of European modernism. Narayana Rao compares the satirical stances of Senapati and his contemporary, the Telugu writer Gurajada Apparao. Tilottoma Misra provides a comparative account of Six Acres and a prose satire written in a very similar tone by the Assamese writer Hemchandra Barua some three decades earlier (Misra says that indigenous Assamese oral traditions may have influenced Barua). In these and other essays, social critique and narrative forms are shown to be closely linked, and what emerges is an account of subaltern ideas, perspectives, and values as expressed through the literary forms in which they are developed. Social critique is not just a thematic aspect of Senapati’s novel, for instance; it is encoded in the way it is conceived and executed. Close comparative readings of literature can help guide our conjectures about subaltern agency, exploring some of the subtler forms of subaltern expression while avoiding hyperbolic speculations based on an inflated theory-driven skepticism. Such literary readings can alert historians and social scientists to the range of expressive forms that disempowered social agents can employ, even when their power to shape their material lives is severely limited.6 The third theme the volume deals with follows from the previous one, and it concerns the “epistemic” dimension of literature. Most of the essays explore the layered nature of literary texts, focusing on formal elements that are not always visible to someone approaching the text as a mere document conveying information about its historical period. These essays take for granted that literature, often through

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its formal experiments, develops social and moral theories, ideas that engage with others popular in its time. Mohapatra makes explicit how this focus on the epistemic dimension of literature goes against the grain of dominant schools of criticism such as poststructuralism, schools that approach literary texts as self-deconstructing and hence incapable of being epistemically reliable conduits of ideas and values. By contrast with that approach, even those authors in the volume who do not address poststructuralism explicitly provide a cognitivist reading of the texts they analyze, a reading that highlights and explores the ideas, and even theories, literary works explore, criticize, and develop. In his comparative study of Eliot and Senapati, Sawyer shows how a more satisfactory moral position can be articulated through the elaboration of increasingly subtler narrative strategies in fiction. Vargas sees “narrative transculturation,” as used by Senapati and García Márquez, as a rewriting of dominant social meanings and values.7 Anjaria explores the epistemic implications of silence in her comparative study, while Horan analyzes the subtle feminist politics evident in Senapati’s narrator’s discourse. Without arguing that the epistemic dimension of literature makes all of its other dimensions irrelevant, the authors in this volume implicitly make a case for reading literature, even at the formal level, as continuous with social, moral, and epistemological theory, as the extension or revision of prevailing ideas and ideologies. This particular literary “view from India” will thus have general implications for how we read and interpret literature and its contexts. Finally, the volume’s comparative method itself points to a significant theme: the strategic political value of comparison in the study of literature as well as its broader implications. These essays may suggest to readers nonethnocentric—and, in the modern Indian context, nonchauvinist—ways of approaching literary study. In the nineteenth century, many cultural nationalists in both Europe and India assumed that the ultimate rationale for literary analysis was the construction of national or regional literary histories, with long lines of continuity and influence suggesting the “greatness” of a particular literary tradition and the culture that produced it. By contrast, the readings in this volume try to avoid such crude and outdated ideologies; they show how comparison can be the key to both greater specification and a more expansive understanding of the contexts of a particular work. A contemporary approach to the study of “world literature” may well need to leave in the background, at least for the moment, the project of producing national and regional literary histories. That will enable many relevant sociological, historical, and philosophical themes, such as the relationship between modernity and colonialism, or the nature

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Viewing Colonialism and Modernity

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Satya P. Mohanty

of subaltern agency, to become more salient and urgent. While literary histories can be illuminating, they need to be reimagined without the ideological baggage they have often brought with them.

Considering this volume’s historical and theoretical concerns, why is Six Acres such a uniquely representative text? Written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and focusing on the period of radical social and cultural transformation that colonial rule brought to Orissan society in the early part of that century, Senapati’s novel provides a view from below during a period of radical transformation and turmoil in Indian history. But even though Six Acres is praised by many critics as the “apex” of realism in the history of the nineteenth-century Indian novel, Senapati’s radical experiments with language (drawing on a range of linguistic registers in Oriya, and alluding both playfully and seriously to the hegemonic languages Sanskrit, English, and Persian), as well as with narrative modes, make this text unusually resistant to generic classification. Its realism, as has been argued, is primarily analytical (see Mohanty 2005; Anjaria; and Mohapatra) rather than descriptive or mimetic; at the same time, in literary-critical terms, the text—playfully challenging the conventions of the contemporary European novel—is closer to the reflexive “postmodernism” of a Salman Rushdie than it is to the naturalism of a Mulkraj Anand. Because of both its historical focus and its generic playfulness, Six Acres and a Third is a rare text that invites close analysis and comparative readings.8 It is difficult to grasp the main features of Senapati’s novel after just one reading, because it is a text where the obvious level—the story of an evil landlord, his rise and subsequent fall—is almost insignificant compared to the levels of meaning that are constituted by the narrator’s digressions, jokes, and seemingly trivial asides.9 Six Acres and a Third tells a tale of wealth and greed, of property and theft. On the surface, it is the story of the landlord, Ramachandra Mangaraj, who exploits poor peasants and uses the new legal system to take possession of the property of others. But this story is simply one among many similar ones in the novel, and as the text unfolds it reveals several layers of meaning and implication. Although it contains a critique of British colonial rule, the novel offers a powerful indictment of many other forms of social and political authority as well. What makes Six Acres unusual is that its critical vision is embodied in its narrative style or mode, in the complex way the novel is narrated and organized as a

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Six Acres and a Third

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literary text. The story of Mangaraj and his evil deeds is presented in the narrative as one among many such stories, but the thematic resonances of the other stories and histories can only be appreciated by an alert and attentive reader. Central to Senapati’s literary method is the role given to his narrator. Wily, loquacious, and often unreliable, the narrator challenges readers to be active and on their toes, looking for subtle cues behind the humor and the garrulousness. I have said in my introduction to Six Acres that this narrator is our key to the novel and its rich metaphorical subtext, the subtext that articulates a politically sophisticated subaltern perspective. In creating him, I have argued, Senapati has drawn in part on an existing social type—the touter in Oriya culture. From the point of view of the middle class, the touter (the word’s etymological connections in Oriya are with both the English “tout” and with “lawyers,” a new profession in late nineteenth-century Oriya society) is the disreputable wit who inhabits the lower rungs of society and is always a bit unreliable (a bit like the Fool in European drama, or the Signifying Monkey in West African traditions). Senapati transforms this rather unsavory type into a new kind of social agent; indeed, in his novel the touter is the only person who can survive Mangaraj’s oppression and chicanery. He survives by using wit and intelligence to disguise his motives. He not only survives, but ends up being an effective social and cultural actor as well. Writing from the vantage point of the downtrodden poor—the laborer or the peasant—Senapati transforms the disreputable touter of the Oriya middle-class imagination into a self-conscious satirist, social critic, and moral philosopher. The touter-narrator enters the modern Indian novel from the world of oral discourse; his rhythms and shifting moods make him the quintessential satirist who reaches beyond the delicate sensibilities of the middle class to create a new kind of reader and a new kind of self-critical social subject. Thus it may be argued that the seemingly “postmodern” reflexivity of the narrative represents a carefully fashioned narrative, epistemic, and ethical stance toward the various forms of power and authority that colonial modernity produces in Orissa. This stance is based on a new and active relationship between reader and narrator. As a literary creation, Senapati’s narrator is almost certainly a descendant of the vibrant oral traditions of India (see Narayana Rao on the puranic narrator); he is most probably influenced by such popular performing traditions as the Oriya pala, in which lead singers (gayakas) and their accompanying musicians not only recite but explain, criticize, and humorously parody texts from Sanskrit and Oriya (see Misra for a brief discussion of oja-pali, the Assamese tradition that is

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Viewing Colonialism and Modernity

Satya P. Mohanty

very similar to the Oriya pala).10 At the intersection of popular-oral and canonical-written traditions of literature, and situated historically in a moment of profound change in power relations brought about by colonial rule, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third provides a unique vantage point from which to analyze the relationship between literature and the shifting meanings of modernity, both colonial and traditional.11 The essays in this volume explore these relationships in a variety of ways, building on the work of previous critics of the novel but taking the discussion to a new level where text and history, the local and the general, are made to throw light on one another.

The Essays The first two essays in the volume provide comparative readings of Senapati’s novel that illuminate both his text and its wider resonances, going beyond the boundaries of India. Vargas compares Senapati’s text to the well-known Latin American novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, showing how even though six decades or more separate the composition of the two works, the profound similarities in their narrative strategy—what Vargas, drawing on the Latin American critic Angel Rama, identifies as “narrative transculturation”—suggest an underlying continuity of vision and purpose. Through their narrative strategy of placing “various worldviews . . . in critical relation at the levels of both content and form,” Senapati and García Márquez indicate what a genuinely “critical” realism would look like, one that exposes the workings of both “colonial and neocolonial modernity.” Vargas identifies a commonality that may define a major feature of literature of the “Global South”; she shows how both writers define projects of “self-determination and decolonization” through their “underground” modes of storytelling, “mainly oral, ironic, dialogic, and parodic ones,” to question and challenge hegemonic cultural meanings and values. There is no doubt that García Márquez had not read Senapati; Vargas’s implicit point is instead that comparative readings, across cultures and historical periods, can sometimes reveal deeper textual layers of intention and meaning than are possible through purely intracultural comparisons. Indeed, in some exemplary cases we see how the literary view from below takes us beyond the limiting borders of nation and region to illuminate the general features of the modern world, shaped as it has been by colonial and imperial domination. The second essay in the book, by the Victorianist critic Paul Sawyer, also focuses on narrative techniques and strategies, but a detailed

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comparison of Senapati with George Eliot reveals to Sawyer how, despite her genuine moral sympathy for the socially humble and the poor, as well as her extraordinary achievements, Eliot’s imaginative power was “limited” by the narrative conventions of the realist novel she inherited. A world away, at the very margins of imperial culture, Sawyer sees Senapati developing narrative techniques that more adequately represent “characters low on the social scale.” Senapati, he says, opens up “possibilities for representing the lives of the impoverished and oppressed that Western fiction was not to notice (or find worthwhile) until after Eliot’s lifetime.” What emerges through this comparison of two novelists who are not linked by any line of literary influence but whose goals and projects are similar in one major way, is a view of how literature is a common human endeavor, and one that is historically situated. Eliot’s inability to adequately imagine the perspective from below, Sawyer indicates, is socially and historically localizable, and it is only when we interpret her efforts in the context of Senapati’s that we begin to see her precise angle of vision, the vision that is developed and exemplified in her novels (in particular, The Mill on the Floss). One does not need Senapati to discern Eliot’s political opinions. But without knowing Senapati, it would have been harder for me, given the immense scope and moral cogency of Eliot’s fiction, to imagine what a powerfully realized fictional view from below might have looked like in Eliot’s century—one that could give us something other than grim naturalism or a fantasy of uplift, and that could surprise us with wit, deepen our understanding of history, and, finally, move us.  .  .  . [Comparing the two reveals] the ways Eliot’s view from above reproduces the structural tendency of the Victorian novel to represent social life through the lens of an idealized gentility. That lens, so to call it, naturalizes class distinctions even as it renders them more flexible by using formal methods . . . to link the acquirements of privilege (status, income, education) with the novel’s virtuous protagonists—characters whose moral imagination makes them bearers of their own history and therefore (as members of a potential elite) bearers of melioristic historical change. By contrast, Six Acres and a Third evacuates the possibility of any such elite of either privilege or ethical insight, relying instead on an ironic narrator, a documentary presentation of character, a relish for folk culture (earthiness, gossip, local legends), and sarcastic allegories of power to produce a view of human experience from below. These differences depend in part on a different relationship to the “strong culture” of Britain, filtered and idealized in the one case by a supremely informed narrator, and ironized and subverted in the other by a wily

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Viewing Colonialism and Modernity

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Satya P. Mohanty

The essays by Vargas and Sawyer suggest what a critical comparativism would look like and how we may go on to develop a method to talk about “world literature,” one that is attentive to national contexts without being limited by cultural-nationalist agendas. Whether it be in the form of a “South-South” dialogue of the kind Vargas suggests, or as the kind of contrast between two differing perspectives on a common moral and imaginative project, which Sawyer develops, this kind of comparative reading takes us beyond both the ethnocentric use of comparison that was typical of the imperial period (see Melas, All the Difference) and the narrowly circumscribed local studies whose ultimate rationale is often a disguised form of cultural particularism or relativism.12 The third chapter, by Himansu Mohapatra, continues the kind of comparative analysis we see in Vargas’s and Sawyer’s essays, and while it provides brief contrasts between Senapati’s analytical realism and the approaches of Charles Dickens and the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (in his poem “Dui Bigha Jami”), its primary goal is to compare Senapati’s realism with that of the Hindi novel Godaan (1936) by Premchand. Mohapatra makes explicit what is assumed by Vargas and Sawyer—that a novelist’s explorations in form and technique have profound epistemic implications, that they are often explorations of sociocultural themes and theories. Mohapatra’s provocative analysis suggests that while both Godaan and Six Acres and a Third are canonical examples of realism in the history of the Indian novel, Premchand’s text is less successful in its social and historical analysis than Senapati’s mainly because it often confuses “symptoms” with social “causes.” In effect, Premchand’s novel takes colonial presence for granted and substitutes “character analysis for social analysis.” Drawing on the “postpositivist realist” theses of recent philosophers and literary theorists, Mohapatra suggests a way of going beyond an author’s stated intentions or ideological position to examine the formal and analytical work that the literary text does. The “real achievement” of Senapati’s text, Mohapatra argues, is “epistemological”: “its self-conscious narrative discourse [is] the main force behind its attempt to reorient the reader by clarifying connections among social phenomena that ignorance or ideological

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village tout. By accomplishing all this, Six Acres and a Third prefigures the dramatic developments in European modernist fiction that would achieve in different ways some of the effects I have described—a fact that makes Senapati’s novel an exemplar, one might argue, of nonEuropean modernism.

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mystification has obscured.” This “epistemological work,” he clarifies, “characteristically takes the form of (literary) postmodernist frame breaks without that accompanying (theoretical) postmodernist skepticism about truth claims.” The novel’s “truth claims” are about “the historical process of change of social class and power viewed through the lenses of land and language.” What is revealed through the novel’s experiments in narrative technique is something about the underlying causes that shape the historical process of change; “the ‘causal joints’ of the society that the novel deals with are . . . laid bare.” The next two chapters provide comparisons of Senapati’s novel with two nineteenth-century Indian texts (one written in Assamese, the other in Telugu) and show how all three works draw on an indigenous modern sensibility, one that is wary of the colonial modernity of westernized babus while being receptive to many of the positive values for which European culture was also known. Misra compares Senapati’s novel with a satirical prose-sketch, “Fair Without, Foul Within,” written in 1866 by the Assamese writer and scholar Hemchandra Barua. The first-ever English translation of this text is published in this volume (see Appendix). Even though Misra does not suggest this possibility, readers of Senapati will easily recognize Barua’s text as one that must have influenced him: Barua’s narrator uses the same ironic and satirical tone to describe his subject, and some of Barua’s lines are echoed in Six Acres and a Third. By the middle of the nineteenth century, British missionaries who set up the first printing presses had discarded the older Assamese script and adopted the Bengali one instead, and Assamese books were now printed in Bengali script. Senapati, who read Bengali, would no doubt have had access to Barua’s works. What is equally interesting is Misra’s suggestion that Barua draws on a popular performing tradition native to Assam, oja-pali, through which rural audiences had been exposed, at least since the fifteenth century, to a dialogic and critical narrative voice, that of the main singer. Oja-pali is similar to the Oriya thiapala; in both, a group of five or six performers dance, enact scenes, dramatize themes, and recite poetry, while the lead singer goes on to provide both serious and parodic commentary on the recited texts and contemporaneous subjects, both high and low. It is reasonable to speculate that for Senapati as well as Barua, popular rural performance forms such as oja-pali and pala provided inspiration for their satirical voices and their antihegemonic values; through the rich critical strands of satirical writing these forms embodied, they provided Barua and Senapati a link to a tradition of humor and social critique that predates colonialism by several centuries. Misra talks in particular

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about the humor and the “mock-heroic tone,” which draws upon “the carnival spirit” of the peasant culture of Assam. Reading Senapati and Barua together sheds light on the sources of Indian prose satire as a critical social practice, and it suggests new research projects on the enabling influence of popular cultural forms, both oral and written, on many canonical texts of Indian literature. Velcheru Narayana Rao, who has been arguing for years that a careful study of precolonial Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada literature reveals a robust tradition of modernity in precolonial Indian culture, one that has been eclipsed by the assumption that British rule brought modernity to India, compares Senapati to his contemporary from northern Andhra, Gurajada Apparao. Apparao, who wrote in Telugu, lived in a bilingual culture on the border of modern Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, and Narayana Rao attributes to both writers a form of “indigenous modernity [that is] distinct from the colonial variety.” Focusing on Apparao’s canonical 1890s play Kanyasulkam (Girls for Sale; see Apparao) and Senapati’s Six Acres, Narayana Rao shows how both writers reveal a critical sensibility that refuses to “moralize” or consider indigenous culture and society as hopelessly corrupt and in need of reform from above. Drawing on an ironic stance and tone that is informed by indigenous, especially oral, traditions, these texts adopt a critical perspective on both their social world and the colonialist approach of the western-educated Indian babus. For Narayana Rao, both Senapati and Apparao provide a counter to the “cultural amnesia” of the babus and the upper castes who, under the influence of the new education, “rejected their immediate past in favor of colonial modernity”: “The new middle class accepted the colonial representation of Indian society as stagnant and decadent, with Indians as a group of people steeped in superstition and immorality. Committed to changing these conditions, social reformers in several areas of India began to lead movements to improve the moral and social conditions of Indians.” Identifying this kind of “social reform” movement as a movement of mainly the upper castes, Narayana Rao locates its colonialist ideology in the works of some Hindi and Bengali writers of the late nineteenth centuries; he goes on to distinguish from it the more complex critical approach of Senapati and Apparao, which he defines as an indigenous noncolonialist strand of modernity. Central to Narayana Rao’s reading of the two texts is the thesis that they develop an ironic attitude that “liberates the reader” and abandon a purely mimetic mode:

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[T]he two authors, Apparao and Senapati, do not produce their works in a naturalist-realist mode. Neither do we find an authorial intention nor an omniscient author who sees and reports it all for the reader to receive. They do not unequivocally condemn the society as decadent and superstitious, nor do they invite the changes introduced by the colonial administration as liberating and uplifting. They do not reject Western influence in a blind patriotic stance, eulogizing everything traditional. Rather, they adopt a critical perspective that liberates the reader to read their works unfettered by an overpowering authorial sermon, while they take inspiration from the traditional oral forms of literature, including the epic performances with their multiple voices and polyphonic characters.

This thesis about an indigenous modernity is developed elsewhere by Narayana Rao and his colleagues David Shulman and the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and it opens up exciting questions for the study of precolonial social and cultural formations (see Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time). The conclusions of this chapter are consistent with those of Misra’s work on Barua and Senapati; in both (as in the chapter by Dash and Pattanaik in this volume), the thesis about alternative forms of modernity is developed through close textual analysis and supported by new interpretations of the heterogeneous ideological contexts of nineteenth-century Indian literature. The essay by Ulka Anjaria focuses on one intriguing aspect of Senapati’s novel, what Anjaria calls “the narrative politics of silence.” The analysis of the representation of women is developed comparatively by looking at a similar use of silence in Premchand’s 1927 novel Nirmala as well as the 2003 Bangladeshi–British novel Brick Lane by Monica Ali. While “giving voice” to and privileging the “interiority” of the oppressed and the weak is often assumed to be liberating and silence is seen as antithetical to such liberation, Anjaria’s close reading questions this assumption. It argues that Senapati and Premchand “revalue the ethics of such silence within the world of [their novels].” Her central argument traces an alternative interpretation of the relationship between social marginality and the representation of the characters’ agency: In its more explicit critique of the oppressive conditions faced by women in early twentieth-century India, Nirmala thematizes the question of silence by implicating it with agency in the novel, resulting in a bleak interpretation of what it means for women to gain voice under socially unequal conditions. By contrast, Brick Lane offers a more clearly empowering story with fewer of the earlier novels’ tragic

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Satya P. Mohanty overtones, yet in doing so it ultimately restricts its political impact by offering the novel form as a sort of utopian world in which silence is no longer a barrier to knowledge about characters. By setting into dialogue three South Asian novels, written in different languages over a span of more than one hundred years, which all at one level thematize silence, my larger goal is to delink an empowering politics from certain narrative conventions that are often taken for granted in a global study of the novel.

The question is less relevant for the writing of a specifically South Asian literary history and more for the theoretical understanding we glean by looking at novelistic conventions cross-culturally. The narrative politics of silence, Anjaria suggests, is not clear cut; ambiguities of social meaning and the subjective ambivalences that refer to them need to be looked at closely in these novels. Attentive textual readings complicate our received assumptions and suggest alternative trajectories for feminist critical practice. The next two essays are not comparative in scope; instead, they offer new and original interpretations of aspects of Senapati’s novel. Claire Horan focuses on the representation of women and gender relations in Six Acres, and mainly through an analysis of the narrator’s discourse comes to a conclusion that will surprise many of Senapati’s readers. She argues that Senapati “presents vivid, complex, and nonsexist portraits of rural women” rather than conventional ones. Originally published in 2006, Horan’s essay anticipates counterintuitive feminist readings such as Anjaria’s, and her argument is firmly grounded in the details of the text. She argues that Senapati’s portrayal of women will not always satisfy today’s readers, but he “never implies that any failings of the female characters are due to a natural or innate disposition of women.” Senapati, she points out, refuses to “generalize the identities of rural Indian peasant women to women in any other walk of life. Instead, he points out the challenges that even his less sympathetic women characters have faced because they were born female in a patriarchal society.” Horan’s thesis is defended through close reading rather than through theoretical argument, and some of its implications are startlingly original. Read together with Anjaria’s reinterpretation of the uses of silence, it provides an unusually perceptive feminist interpretation of Senapati’s novel. The following chapter by veteran Oriya scholar Gaganendra Nath Dash provides an incisive reading of another aspect of Senapati’s novel. Dash focuses on the contrast between the two words that are used to characterize the novel’s central character, “zamindar” and “mahajan,”

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and by looking at the semantic and historical specificity of the two terms suggests that while they may sometimes be interchangeable as forms of respectful address, they refer to radically different kinds of social meaning. Zamindars were traditional landlords, while mahajans were money-lenders. Dash shows how Senapati traces the rise of a class of “neomahajans” under colonial rule, and through the lenses of this particular class represents the cultural and historical upheaval that colonialism brought to Orissan society. Six Acres, he argues, is “primarily a critique of the land-tenure system introduced by the colonial government.” Situating Senapati’s sociopolitical views in relation to those of James Mill, Dash makes the point that the novelist rejected the utilitarian ideology that was used to buttress arguments in support of colonialism. Arguing against many of Senapati’s readers in Orissa, Dash shows how Senapati was a critic of exploitative relationships in rural Indian society without being “antifeudal,” without seeing all feudal structures and institutions as inherently unjust. The concluding essay, by Debendra Dash and Dipti Pattanaik, provides a synoptic account of many of the issues that have been raised in this volume. Dash (the editor of most of the volumes of Senapati’s collected works [the Fakir Mohan Granthabali]) and Pattanaik (a leading Oriya writer and scholar) situate Senapati’s first novel in the context of some of his other works and come to the conclusion that while Senapati was personally conservative in some ways, he provided a searing critique of colonial modernity from a perspective that was quite radical. His sympathies lay with the ordinary peasants and laborers of Orissa’s villages, and his cultural vision was that of an empowered subaltern class, the class that is now “disempowered and . . . downtrodden.” While he was critical of babu culture, he was more interested in “a thorough reinvention of the colonial subject who could be rooted in universal ethical principles provided to him by his native tradition, even as he internalized the new changes through an attentive reading of the signs of those changes.” Senapati’s sympathies lay with the contributions of heterodox Orissan traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism, they argue, rather than an “essentialized” Hinduism. He was critical of colonial ideology but open to the best values of the modern West. Here is how they summarize his complex political thought: A . . . careful reading [of Senapati] would reveal that most of the farcical representations of western epistemology in his writing relate to the hegemonic dimension of that knowledge when it is accompanied by power. . . . It would be safe to argue that Senapati did not reject western

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Satya P. Mohanty epistemology and the changes it initiated per se, but rather that he resisted its hegemonic character and arrogance, when accompanied by colonial power. He believed that all manner of knowledge or change either grafted or mediated with power would have either a deleterious effect on the people or would be fruitless. Its status would be no better than the superstitions that were part of the so-called traditionalist view of life. Only those changes or knowledge that could find resonance in the living tradition of the common people and were chosen by them as active and self-conscious agents would gain the status of legitimate knowledge. The populace in a state of mental slavery can turn any mode of knowledge into rumor and superstition as they are capable of turning the ideals and values of a living tradition into meaningless rituals. Thus, rather than bringing in so-called better knowledge and historiography, Senapati emphasized the creation of active and conscious agents who could choose whatever was beneficial in tradition and modernization.

There were thus many forms of “tradition” and many forms of “modernity.” The Senapati that Dash and Pattanaik describe—a Senapati who will seem familiar to readers of the previous essays in this volume—is a “traditional modernizer,” not one who rejects indigenous cultural and social institutions but sees in them many of the strengths that an anticolonial and nonethnocentric modernity can cherish and develop. The “view from below” that his works provide contains a persuasive social and cultural theory, a theory that emerges from a moment of acute social crisis. U. R. Ananthamurthy’s call—or rather, his challenge—to students of Indian literature led to the collaborative work of this volume. Our hope is that the close readings and theoretical explorations will inspire more such engagements with important literary works and their multiple contexts. As “postcolonial” critical analyses, all these essays depart from the “colonial discourse” approach that, inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), dominated and defined the field of postcolonial studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Their authors’ focus on subaltern agency and their textually and empirically grounded approach suggests a framework that may be called “radical humanist”; it is a departure from the Foucauldian theory of social power on which Orientalism had drawn. Our hope is that the analyses are convincing enough to suggest a more capacious theoretical approach to the study of colonial and postcolonial culture than was possible within the Foucauldian framework, one that led many to neglect the rich layers of subaltern agency and thought and to focus one-sidedly on colonial power.13 Second, if the arguments about indigenous or alternative modernity are convincing in this one instance, with a focus on one related

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group of texts, they will indicate why the sharp conceptual opposition between tradition and modernity is misleading and needs to be rejected. Empirically grounded studies of the rational basis and social function of indigenous, especially rural, institutions, as well as of the rich body of ideas contained in folklore and popular forms of dialogic and interactive performance (of which pala and oja-pali are examples), may reveal robust expressions of democratic and egalitarian values present in rural Indian life and suggest similar possibilities elsewhere in the world. Such “traditional” values point to noncapitalist sources and forms of “modernity,” and they suggest alternatives to our dominant conceptions of what it implies. Finally, the readings and analyses in this book are invitations to a critical dialogue, since they are meant to provoke as well as to illuminate. They invite and encourage alternative textual interpretations, seek to reinvigorate debates, and open new avenues of cross-disciplinary research in which literary criticism is part of a collaborative project to define the features of the world we—all of us—have inherited from the Age of (European) Empire. This particular “view from India” may suggest how the study of literature is essential to our varied inquiries into the tangled relationship between colonialism and modernity, as well as into a genuinely democratic postcolonial future.14

Notes 1. Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Oriya novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha was serialized in Utkal Sahitya in 1897–99 and published as a book in 1902. Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali novel Gora was published serially in Prabasi in 1907–09 and as a book in 1910. In his Fall 2000 lecture at Cornell, Ananthamurthy compared Senapati’s and Tagore’s languages and stylistic choices, since Senapati’s deliberate use of a range of Oriya dialects, from the rural colloquial to the Sanskritized, offers a contrast to Tagore’s sadhu bhasa or pure Sanskritized dialect of Bengali. Senapati was deliberately inventing modern Oriya prose in a democratic idiom (see G. N. Dash, 2006); sadhu bhasa was conventional among the dominant segment of Bengali writers until very recently. However, despite their differences in choice of style and idiom, both novels explore themes related to modernity and colonialism and offer valuable critical perspectives on Indian society under colonial rule. 2. Three other translations of Chha Mana were previously published in India: by B. M. Senapati and A. M. Senapati in 1967 (Six Acres and a Half); by C. V. Narasimha Das in 1967 (The Stubble under the Cloven Hoof); and by Nuri Misra in 1969 (A Plot of Land). Six Acres and a Third, done collaboratively by four translators, Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P.

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Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St. Pierre, is both the most recent and the one available to a worldwide readership. It was published by the University of California Press in 2005 with an Indian reprint by Penguin in 2006. 3. On this theme, see my introduction to Six Acres; see also the introduction I coauthored with Harish Trivedi to the special section of the journal Economic and Political Weekly on “The Literary View from Below,” published in November 2006 (pp. 4780–81). The special section contained four new essays on Senapati (a revised version of one, by Claire Horan, is reprinted in this volume). Conferences on this theme were held at the University of Delhi in January 2007 and at Cornell University in May 2008. 4. The literature on the subject of alternative modernities is growing rapidly; for some significant mileposts, see “Early Modernities”; “Multiple Modernities”; Gaonkar; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; and Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, as well as the afterword by Narayana Rao to his edition and translation of Apparao, Girls for Sale. I outline some of the main issues in an essay that analyzes a radical religious text, the Oriya Laksmi Purana written by Balaram Das in the sixteenth century; see Mohanty, “Alternative Modernities.” For a sense of the broad range of positions on this topic, see also Quijano and Ennis; Mignolo; and Nandy. A helpful assessment of European modernity is provided by Taylor in his Modern Social Imaginaries, a study that is intended to clear the ground so that comparative cross-cultural work can be done on modernity in its various manifestations. Susan Friedman’s 2010 article, “Planetarity,” is a useful guide to multiple forms of cultural modernism and their relationship to social modernity; for an innovative approach to European modernity’s self-image, as represented in eighteenth-century literature, see Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes. 5. Since the term “colonial modernity” is sometimes used very imprecisely, almost as a slogan, I would like to offer the following definition: the term refers to the particular combination of modern social institutions and colonialist ideology that European colonial rule brought with it; this ideology was based on a wholesale devaluation of traditional social institutions in the societies that were colonized. This ideology was used to justify colonial rule, but it is possible to separate the ideology from the institutions (and laws, values, etc.) associated with modernity. This is the sense in which the term “colonial modernity” is used by the authors in this volume. 6. For an example of primarily theory-driven skepticism, see Spivak’s widely cited “Can the Subaltern Speak?” For an insightful study of the same range of issues, and an account that balances theory and empirical analysis in such a way that each clarifies and guides the other, see James Scott’s

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work, especially The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. 7. Vargas adapts Rama’s notion by pointing to Senapati’s and García Márquez’s “selective absorption and transformation of hegemonic written forms through their dialogization with subaltern oral forms, codes of perception, and cultural values.” 8. For an analysis of how Senapati revises and implicitly critiques the apolitical mimetic realism of Lal Behary Day, an Indian novelist who wrote (in English, in the 1870s) about Indian village life, see Mohapatra and Nayak, “Writing Peasant Life in Colonial India”; Mohanty 2005; and Mohanty, “The Dynamics of Literary Reference.” 9. The account of Senapati’s novel in this paragraph and the next incorporates several sentences from my introduction to Six Acres. 10. For a good short account of Oriya pala, see Sitakant Mohapatra, “Pala: Poetry as Performance,” in his The Rainbow of Rhythms: Folk Art Tradition of Orissa, 29–46. On oja-pali, see Manohar Laxman Varadpande, History of Indian Theatre, Volume 2 90–91. A slightly different kind of pala, where the performers remain seated and do not draw on theatrical forms, is also popular in Orissa and West Bengal. 11. Senapati’s satirical mode may have been influenced by the eighteenthcentury Oriya writer Brajanath Badajena, whose well-known “Chatura Binoda” was one of a group of texts that marks the rise of modern prose in Orissa. Debendra Dash pointed out to me that such authors as Nilambara Bidyadhar and Baladev Rath, who wrote prose works roughly around the same time as Badajena, were from southern Orissa and must have been influenced by the literary developments in Telugu that Narayana Rao and his colleagues analyze in southern India. Senapati, writing almost a century after these authors, had scholarly familiarity with Telugu, in addition to Sanskrit, Oriya, Hindi, and Bengali; although he knew English, he lacked fluency in it. 12. While Melas provides a valuable critique of ethnocentric comparatism, I think her case would be stronger if she were to distinguish what she calls “the representative universalism of high humanism” (19) from nonethnocentric versions of universalism. In my view (see Mohanty, “Universalism, Particularism, and Multicultural Politics,” 234–47), ethnocentric forms of universalist concepts are quite different from the kind of radical universalism on which some of our best current notions of human rights are based. Such radical universalism also provided some of the best arguments against colonialism and slavery. 13. In Discipline and Punish and in interviews, Foucault was deeply skeptical of such notions as human agency, since he viewed that notion—much like all notions related to subjectivity—as symptoms of a “humanism” that was willfully blind to the pervasive presence of power. The most revealing statements of his theoretical beliefs, however, appear in his 1972 conversation with Noam Chomsky. In my analysis of these statements and the

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exchange between Foucault and Chomsky, I show how Foucault’s views about the ubiquity of power and the impossibility of gaining enough distance from it to achieve a measure of objectivity are underwritten by an untenable and “extreme form of epistemological holism.” See Mohanty, “Can Our Values Be Objective?” 14. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, I thank Laura Brown, Vasudha Dalmia, Debendra Dash, Susan Friedman, Priyamvada Gopal, Himansu Mohapatra, and Harin C. Song.

Bibliography Apparao, Gurujada Venkata. Girls for Sale: A Play from Colonial India (Kanyasulkam). Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Dash, Gaganendra Nath. “Six Acres and a Third—Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Discovery from Below: Decolonisation and the Search for Linguistic Authenticity.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4801. “Early Modernities.” Daedalus. Vol. 127, Issue 3 (Summer 1998). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies.” Modernism/Modernity 2010 (forthcoming). Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity. New York: Verso, 2002. Melas, Natalie. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Mohanty, Satya P. “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy.” Diacritics 38, no. 3 (2009): 3–21. ———. “Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics.” New Literary History 32, no. 4 (2001): 803–33. ———. “The Dynamics of Literary Reference: Narrative Discourse and Social Ideology in Two 19th-Century Indian Novels.” In Thematology, edited by Sibaji Bandyopadhyaya. Kolkata: Dept. of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, 2004. ———. “Introduction.” Six Acres and a Third. Translated by Mishra et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

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———. “Universalism, Particularism, and Multicultural Politics.” In Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Mohanty, Satya P., and Harish Trivedi. “Introduction, Special Section on Six Acres and a Third.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006). Mohapatra, H. S., and J. K. Nayak. “Writing Peasant Life in Colonial India.” Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad (Spring 1996): 29–40. Mohapatra, Sitakant. “Pala: Poetry as Performance.” The Rainbow of Rhythms: Folk Art Tradition of Orissa. Jagatsinghpur, India: Prafulla, 2005. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus. Vol. 129, Issue 1 (Winter 2000). Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Dean Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Textures of Time: Writing History in South India. New York: Other Press, 2003. Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80. Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Senapati, B. M., and A. M. Senapati. Six Acres and a Half. New Delhi, India: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1967. Senapati, Fakir Mohan. A Plot of Land; [A Short Novel]. Translated by Nuri Misra. Cuttack, India: Cuttack Students’ Store, 1969. ———. Six Acres and a Third. Translated by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St. Pierre. New Delhi, India: Penguin Books India, 2006. ———. Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel about Colonial India. Translated by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St. Pierre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ———. The Stubble under the Cloven Hoof: An Imaginative Recast of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Masterpiece in Oriya Fiction, Cho Mano Atho Guntho. Translated by C. V. Narasimha Das. Cuttack, India: Sahitya Samsad, 1967. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Varadpande, Manohar Laxman. History of Indian Theatre. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1992.

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Viewing Colonialism and Modernity

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Views from Below Comparing Literary Perspectives

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Part I

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Critical Realisms in the Global South: Narrative Transculturation in Senapati’s Six A cres and a Third and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude* Jennifer Harford Vargas

I

n his Nobel lecture, “The Solitude of Latin America,” Gabriel García Márquez begins his remarks on his literary craft by first giving a moving account of the invasions, massacres, disappearances, and dictatorships suffered by Latin Americans. He focuses on this historical reality of violence to comment on Latin America’s often mistakenly attributed and romanticized magical nature, purportedly represented by his fiction. García Márquez claims that he has attempted to provide in his fiction an accurate portrayal of Latin American reality in Latin American aesthetic terms. Arguing that his form of representation is as important as what he represents, García Márquez declares, “We [in Latin America] have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.  .  .  . The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”1 His rejection of imported and imposed * An earlier version of this essay appeared in Economic and Political Weekly in 2008. I thank Satya Mohanty, who encouraged this project and provided crucial feedback on earlier drafts, and Ulka Anjaria, as well as the 2007 FMS Summer Institute participants.

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Jennifer Harford Vargas

“patterns” in favor of indigenous ones is anchored in his belief that colonization is perpetuated when Latin American history and literature are written and interpreted in the modes, discourses, or imaginaries of Europe or the United States. The appropriate aesthetic project, as García Márquez articulates it, is to develop more adequate forms of literary representation—that is, “means” for representing local realities that are generated out of local “conventions” and are more faithful to those realities. Startlingly, Gabriel García Márquez develops a mode of representation remarkably similar to the one developed more than half a century earlier by Indian writer Fakir Mohan Senapati. The 2005 publication by the University of California Press in a new English translation from Oriya of Senapati’s novel Six Acres and a Third has made the text widely available beyond India.2 Six Acres and a Third, which was originally serialized from 1897–99, reveals compelling similarities with García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), another novel of pivotal significance written in the global South.3 Senapati and García Márquez respond in similar ways to colonial and neocolonial socioeconomic relations and ideologies by generating literary forms of what I will be calling “critical realism.” Whether in the nineteenth-century context of the British Raj or in the twentieth-century Latin American context of banana republics, both writers are invested in critiquing the dependence of the local economy on an exploitative foreign economic power (a phenomenon that has been analyzed in the Latin American context by such theorists as Raúl Prebisch, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Anibál Quijano). Colonial India and neocolonial Colombia share a position of economic dependence within a transnational system of capital that exploits the periphery and benefits the center in an uneven modernity. They also share the subordination of their knowledge production and the manipulation of their political and legal systems by those tied into the (neo)colonial regime in power. Linked to larger sociopolitical projects of self-determination and decolonization, Senapati’s and García Márquez’s literary productions provide a lens through which to examine forms of cultural intervention in the global South as well as an opportunity to meditate on the ways in which subalternized subjects critically negotiate (neo)colonial modernity. Written under British colonialism and set in Orissa in the early nineteenth century, Senapati’s novel chronicles the wealthy landowner and moneylender Ramachandra Mangaraj’s expropriation of a small plot of land, the eponymous six acres and a third owned by the peasant couple Bhagia and Saria. Punished by the courts and his landed

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estate seized, Mangaraj subsequently falls from power. While the plot is ostensibly about this exploitative relationship between the landed class and the lower class, the text spends as much time detailing and analyzing the larger social landscape as it does linearly following the events surrounding the seizure of land. It explores a variety of topics ranging from the socioeconomic impact of British land-tenure laws to the economic structuring of village religious practices, from the relationships between peoples of different castes to the corruption involved in the judicial process, and from the hegemonic imposition of English on an Oriya-speaking society to the creation of a class of English-educated middle-class Oriya babus. In short, the novel is a richly textured and often humorous creative analysis of nineteenthcentury Oriya life. At the same time, it is about much more; it is also about literary realism and the ways in which the traditional European realist novel must be modified in order to adequately represent local Oriya colonial modernity. Gabriel García Márquez’s aim to develop modes of representation that emerge out of Latin American imaginative and experiential worldviews resonates with Fakir Mohan Senapati’s literary project. One Hundred Years of Solitude is also precisely about the transformation of literary realism under the conditions of a local Colombian neocolonial modernity. Given the fact that Senapati in no way directly influenced García Márquez, it is crucial to consider the striking similarities between Senapati’s and García Márquez’s forms of realism. Placing these two writers from the global South in conversation, we see how the premises of their realist endeavors are ineluctably critical precisely because of their geosocial locations in colonial India and neocolonial Latin America. Closely examining the deep affinities between their literary practices allows us to understand the types of literary realism produced under conditions of sociocultural domination and economic dependency as well as the kinds of oppositional narrative tactics marshaled in response. Both authors reimagine colonial society from “below,” constructing this view from below out of subaltern(ized) modes of telling and seeing. They employ underground types of storytelling—mainly oral, ironic, dialogic, and parodic ones—developed by those on the underside of power to resist, negotiate, and transform relations of oppression. While scholars have examined the connections between Indian and Latin American marvelous realisms (comparing, for example, Rushdie and García Márquez), placing Senapati beside García Márquez reveals resemblances between Indian and Latin American realisms. Ulka

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

Jennifer Harford Vargas

Anjaria points to the specific relationship between satire and politics in Six Acres and a Third—what she characterizes as “the complex interaction of forms of narrative humor and socio-political critique” (4797). If we interpret her observation more generally, we can see the ways in which forms of narrative realism and sociopolitical critique complexly overlap and even interact in novels from the global South. As a result we understand that Senapati’s and García Márquez’s development of literary (to modify García Márquez’s phrasing) “patterns of our own” are not so local after all. Reading these two authors together forces an expansion of the context translocally, in such a way that the notion “our own” connotes a larger community of realist literature in the global South. Analyzing these two authors from the global South using literary practices as a prism helps us understand the practice of “transculturation” as a tactical subaltern cultural response to (neo)colonial modernity. Frequently employed by Latin American anthropologists to analyze the encounters between dominant and subalternized groups, especially under colonial conditions, the concept of “transculturation” describes how marginalized peoples creatively produce cultural forms in dialogic interaction with dominant culture.4 By focusing on literature comparatively in a South–South paradigm and, in particular, on the ways in which critical consciousness vis-à-vis colonial domination is produced through the formal structure of a literary text, we begin to understand the varying particulars of transculturation as a mode of anticolonial critique and a form of cultural agency in the global South. Senapati’s and García Márquez’s representational modes produce types of literary realism rooted in local vernaculars and epistemologies. The forms these realist modes take—in Senapati’s case “analytical realism” and in García Márquez’s case marvelous realism—interrogate (neo)colonial power relations and Eurocentric representational paradigms. I examine in particular the ways in which both writers dialogize European literary and local oral modes, a technique Latin American literary critic Ángel Rama calls “narrative transculturation.” Using narrative transculturation to validate spoken and vernacular genres as well as subaltern perspectives enables the realist novels Six Acres and a Third and One Hundred Years of Solitude to function as powerful social critique. Senapati’s and García Márquez’s distinctly realist literary forms generate an “anticolonial and demystificatory social thought,” importantly allowing the global South to speak in its own cadences not only about itself but also about the global North.5

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

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Both Fakir Mohan Senapati and Gabriel García Márquez write their novels within a tradition of what I call “critical realism.” Critical realism, as I see it, is socially engaged realism and, therefore, a form of literary representation that depicts social reality in such a way as to analyze and critique that social reality. In short, it is narrative realism that “thinks” oppositionally and dialogically. I shall compare two forms of realism produced in varying historical moments and geocultural locations under this rubric of critical realism: analytical realism and marvelous realism.6 As Satya Mohanty has already cogently demonstrated at length in his introduction to the novel, Six Acres and a Third is written in the style of what he terms “analytical realism.” Implicitly drawing on the work of Georg Lukács, Mohanty distinguishes analytical realism from naturalistic realism.7 Naturalistic realism is more descriptive and mimetic, since it “builds on the accumulation of details” (2); in contrast, analytical realism “explains and delves into underlying causes” (2). Put simply, analytical realism “seeks to analyze and explain social reality instead of merely holding up a mirror to it” (2). Mohanty argues that Senapati achieves this analytical realism through “a selfreflexive and even self-parodic narrative mode” that emphasizes not only the tale being told but, in particular, “the way it is told” (2–3; emphasis mine). Senapati focuses “not only on the ‘what’  .  .  . but also on the ‘how’” of representation and reference—on both Indian society and on “the mediating layers that shape our perceptions and judgments about [that] reality”—by delving beneath the surface to “reveal a more self-reflexive concern with ideological distortion and the possibility of objective knowledge” (15). Rather than being “simply mimetic or descriptive,” this “complex” realism, Mohanty argues, makes Senapati a successful literary and social-theoretical realist (15). Just as important, Senapati’s focus on the “what” and the “how” creates readers who are consciously forced to engage with the text’s ironic style, latent meanings, and alternative social vision, thereby becoming active, critical readers and social subjects. While I will not explicate here the specific textual examples undergirding Mohanty’s detailed articulation of it, I do want to stress that analytical realism uses particular narrative modes, not just thematics, to interrogatively represent society. Narrated in a highly ironic, selfreferential, and parodic voice, Six Acres and a Third engages a wide tonal range and a plethora of literary tactics. It is filled with tangential

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Critical Realism: Forms of Analytical Realism and Marvelous Realism

Jennifer Harford Vargas

stories, biting jabs, village gossip, quotes, deliberate mistranslations from the Shastras and classical Indian literature, comical asides, scenes of village life, allusions to colonialism, mock intellectual meditations, and lengthy digressions. “Playing logic off against hearsay, science against superstition, learned discourse against plain speech,” Senapati’s varyingly dialogized narrative modes structurally generate the text’s critical framework.8 Senapati’s analytical realism, then, emerges from the how of representation—from the ways in which he constructs representations of social inequalities and obfuscating ideologies. Similarly, it is not just the “what” but also the “how” of representation that makes García Márquez’s particular form of marvelous realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude a type of critical realism. Since 1949 when Alejo Carpentier first coined the term lo real maravilloso Americano, or the marvelous American real, the term has been used by critics to define a set of literary practices alternatively called marvelous or magical realism.9 While notoriously slippery to define, marvelous realism has, in general, been considered a type of literary representation that reveals the marvelous within ordinary life and that interrogates the limits of hegemonic western categories of perception, classification, and imaginative representation.10 As Robin Fiddian asserts, marvelous realism contains “an overtly political character in its challenge to the rationalist assumptions of western culture, and makes a categorical assertion of the difference of Latin American and other post-colonial cultures vis-à-vis the hegemonic values of imperialist cultures.”11 My intent here, however, is not to offer a definition of marvelous realism but to examine the shared politics and representational tactics of García Márquez’s and Senapati’s realist styles. Similar to Six Acres and a Third, One Hundred Years of Solitude employs the oft remarked upon stylistic strategies of irony and defamiliarization as the basis for its critical realism. This structuring of representational perspective provides the means for challenging western conceptions of modernity and reality from the standpoint of Latin America. For instance, one of the most poignant and humorous episodes in the book occurs when western technology is introduced to Macondo. In recounting the events García Márquez stages a “contact” encounter from the Macondoians’ vantage point. The narrator describes the scene: Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo did not know where their amazement began.  .  .  . They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater . . . for a character who had died

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

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Ironically signifying on the colonial trope of marvelous wonder found in imperial “discovery” narratives, García Márquez turns the tables, subjecting the West to the logic of the marvelous trope.12 This perspectival switch renders the products of western technological modernity irrational and utilizes the people of Macondo as interpretive agents. They prefer “real” drama, music, and voices to the “advancements” of film, phonograph, and telephone. Doubting the validity and usefulness of technologies of “progress,” they even judge the captive balloon a “backward” invention in comparison to the gypsies’ flying carpets.13 Their visceral emotional reactions to the technologies—ranging from indignation, curiosity, and discouragement to excitement, doubt, and despondency—indicate an alternative network of meaning about modernity. This provincializes European modernity, othering its discourse to show its limits. The ironic representation of the encounter with modernization critiques the West’s superior claims to civilization and progress, revealing that the selfcongratulatory obsession with innovation is not necessarily espoused by those seeing from a nonwestern position. García Márquez balances this ironic narrative tone with an earnest one. His critical marvelous realism challenges traditional western assumptions of what is real by incorporating into the everyday naturalized reality of the novel virgins who ascend to heaven, plagues of insomnia, and children who are born with pig tails. These events are treated as believable and rational by the narrator, who juxtaposes them with the unbelievable and irrational products of western technological modernity. While the novel’s realism is grounded in Latin American paradigms for establishing reality and truth, it is precisely the narrator’s implied awareness of differing worldviews in the global North and South, evident in the complementary tonalities of irony and earnestness, that makes his representational modes socially engaged. Whether he pushes the limits of what qualifies as reality or whether he simply represents it, García Márquez toys with these two responses when he signifies on the “magic” of state violence.14 In the most haunting section of One Hundred Years of Solitude, he exposes the manipulative actions of the U.S. banana company and negates the legal logic of the state that together justify exploitation and authorize

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and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience  .  .  . would not tolerate that outlandish fraud. . . . They already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings. (229)

Jennifer Harford Vargas

massacre.15 When the exploited banana workers go on strike, the lawyers dismiss their demands with “decisions that seemed like acts of magic” (306; emphasis mine). García Márquez demystifies such acts by detailing their machinations as he depicts the company variously employing delaying techniques, false identities, and jailings to avoid addressing the workers’ accusations. When the workers bring their complaints before the higher courts, the lawyers discount their demands with the “proof” that the banana company “did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were hired on a temporary and occasional basis . . . and by a decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist” (307; emphasis mine). The definition of “worker” is legally made to signify differently such that it retroactively applies to the past, scripts the present, and determines the future of all company relations with its employees. García Márquez exposes the “magic” for what it is: the manipulation of legal categories via legalistic loopholes through which the state, in collaboration with the banana company, establishes a legal basis to disappear thousands of banana workers. The disappearance of the workers does not occur as a result of the speech act itself (the decree) but as a result of the speech act granting the authority to disappear all dissenting workers. That is, the workers do not simply disappear because the state has declared they do not exist; instead, because they do not exist as legal subjects there are no repercussions for disposing of them. As such, the protesters are massacred and discarded into the sea “like rejected bananas”—the very commodities and objects of consumption they once harvested (312). The novel’s critical-realist mode, which lays bare the mechanisms of hegemonic discourse and power, is based in the marvelous-realist technique of making the seemingly unbelievable believable and vice versa. As forms of critical realism, García Márquez’s marvelous realism and Senapati’s analytical realism are similar because both authors use a narrator who maintains an ironic and parodic distance from Eurocentric ways of interpreting reality in the global South. Both authors “provincialize Europe,” as South Asian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed it, in order to adequately represent what cultural theorist Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar would call their local “alternative modernities.”16 Enacting these sociopolitical processes through literary means, both authors craft texts that deconstruct, to use a phrase from Paul L. Sawyer, “hierarchies of power, knowledge, and class privilege” by exposing how domination functions (4782).

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

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These critical realisms emerge from the strategic combination of varying forms of expression. As I have suggested, both authors’ realisms are composed through what critic Ángel Rama terms “narrative transculturation.” In Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, Rama argues that while Latin American literature is produced out of a dynamic colonial and anticolonial dialectic, it does not merely imitate or completely reject European literature. This is because Latin American narrative is also forged through particular idioms, oral traditions, and worldviews drawn from Latin America. Critical realism thus functions through narrative transculturation as various genres and worldviews are placed in critical relation at the levels of both content and form. In crafting the transculturated composition of Six Acres and a Third, Senapati tactically combines a variety of narrative modes ranging from rumor to religious scripture, from health manuals to cultural sayings, from colonial histories to subaltern histories, and from legal discourses to individual testimonies. The overall structure, however, is most heavily shaped by storytelling.17 The fact that Senapati’s novel does not strictly work through written prose but also through oral modes is important in considering the type of knowledge validated, as I will demonstrate shortly. Here I would like to stress its conversational tone. Frequently, the narrator directly addresses various readers, and in one instance he18 tells the reader “your face reveals everything,” implying that his audience is, in fact, physically present (88). The ability of the narrator to interpret the reader’s facial expressions evokes the sense that the narrator is not writing the story in private but telling his tale before a listening audience. The narrator’s manner of speaking to the reader and his use of “we” and “our” give the book a structure of communal orality, which is additionally evident in the narrator’s repeated use of “some say,” “it is said,” and “people say.” The structuring of Six Acres and a Third occurs predominantly through verbally circulated gossip, suggesting the validity of hearsay and conjecture as appropriate explanatory paradigms. From the novel’s opening paragraph the narrative turns on a moment of gossip. The narrator introduces us to Mangaraj as “a very pious man indeed” who observes every holy fast, consuming nothing but water and some sacred plant leaves (35). In the sentence immediately following this description, we get a very different view of Mangaraj: “Mangaraj’s barber, Jaga, let it slip that on the evenings of ekadasis a large pot of milk, some bananas, and a small quantity of khai and nabata are placed

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Narrative Transculturation in the Novel

Jennifer Harford Vargas

in the master’s bedroom” (35). The laborer Jaga’s knowledge, which is disseminated as gossip, challenges Mangaraj’s exemplary moral status. Though the narrator hedges the evidence provided by Jaga— purportedly condemning it on the basis of there being no witnesses physically present in the room to confirm Mangaraj’s breaking of the fast—the reader is from the very outset presented with a spoken chain of alternative meanings. In the next chapter, the narrator pits what “some say” about the quantity of money Mangaraj loaned against the significantly lower figure officially recorded in the “Income Tax Department” (41). The novel, therefore, uses oral sources to place pressure on official, often textual, sources of authority. The consistent suggestions of Mangaraj’s underhanded deals and lack of scruples are left unconfirmed by the narrator but can be discounted only if the reader chooses to reject knowledge disseminated via word of mouth as accurate evidence. In order to take the narrator’s stated comments in earnest, the reader must dismiss not only spoken information but also irony. In suggesting that the reader “grasp the main technique of getting at a matter through inference” to fully understand the truth of the story, the narrator suggests that the reader must essentially read against the grain, reading for the inferred instead of the stated (90). Claiming on the surface that popular knowledge is mere “slandering” (38), the narrator uses irony to force the reader to go below the mock critique of gossip and recognize what Henry Louis Gates Jr. would term the narrator’s “signifyin’(g)” tactic of employing dual surface and latent layers of meaning.19 Mohanty characterizes the novel’s narrator as a “touter-narrator,” linking the narrator to the touter in Oriya culture who “use[s] wit and intelligence to disguise his motives” (7). The narrator’s multivalent stories force the reader to be skeptical of his direct statements; they also teach the reader how to be a more effective social critic by being receptive to oral narratives, for only through their espousal can this be accomplished. Senapati’s overall use of hearsay and colloquial Oriya to construct the novel indicates that the stories recounted by “ordinary people” provide probing insights into relations of domination (152). For example, before a member of the state court arrives to investigate the death of Saria and the theft of the six acres and a third, a village “secret” circulates telling of the court official’s arrival (152): “Knowledgeable people remarked gravely, ‘Do you think this matter involves ordinary people like us? . . . No doubt a lot of people from the village will be arrested’” (152). The people’s fears are, in fact, corroborated later in the chapter when mass arrests occur. Senapati

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accordingly suggests that the verbal manner in which the common villagers communicate, and in communicating analyze their social world, must be validated not only as forms of knowledge but also as forms of representation. His use of an Oriya village-based storytelling structure transculturates the novel’s written narrative, inserting a subaltern Oriya worldview that is embedded in its vernacular genres.20 Gabriel García Márquez constructs his narrative transculturation by dialogizing an array of literary and oral modes ranging from colonial discovery chronicles to testimonio, from popular legends to migrant corridos, from scientific investigations to vallenato music, and from modernist techniques to regional colloquialisms. Akin to Senapati, who chose to write in colloquial Oriya and employ a folknarratorial personality, García Márquez utilizes regional Spanish from the Caribbean coast and a narrator whose stylistic tone and worldview are connected to the mamador de gallo.21 Similar to the Oriya touter and the African American signifying monkey, a mamador de gallo is a figure particular to García Márquez’s native Colombia coastal region. While often simply an irresponsible jokester, the mamador de gallo also subverts power relations most commonly through irony, parody, and overexaggeration, often recounting stories with a deadpan seriousness that nevertheless permits the underlying mocking joke to peek through.22 García Márquez’s narrator variously functions as a mamador de gallo, exaggerating colonial worldviews in particular.23 He evokes historical personages ranging from Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh to Alexander von Humboldt, in addition to the fictional characters of Mr. Herbert and Gastón. The narrator parodies this history of colonization by appropriating the motif of scientific documentation and representing the European encounter with the “new” from the Latin American villagers’ humored point of view. When Mr. Herbert, owner of the captive balloon, arrives at the Buendía house and sits down to eat, he tastes a banana for the first time. Taking out “optical instruments” and looking at the banana “with the suspicious attention of a diamond merchant[,] he examined the banana meticulously, dissecting it with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist’s scale, and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith’s calipers. . . . It was such an intriguing ceremony that no one could eat in peace” (232). The narrator realistically exaggerates Mr. Herbert’s strange investigations of something as familiar and ordinary as a banana in all seriousness but with an underlying ironic humor that invites the reader to doubt the assumed rationality of such actions. Using guineo, the coastal term for banana, the mamador de gallo-narrator subtly

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

Jennifer Harford Vargas

scripts Mr. Herbert’s actions as ridiculous, satirizing the scientific investigation (represented by the pharmacist’s scale) and violent conquest (represented by the gunsmith’s calipers) known all too well in Latin America. In another instance, García Márquez signifies on European colonial discourse by incorporating the trope of the cannibal, directly exposing the cognitive limits of the colonial imaginary. As a child Aureliano Babilonia emerges from his captivity “naked, with matted hair, and with an impressive sex organ that was like a turkey’s wattles, as if he were not a human child but the encyclopedia definition of a cannibal” (299). While he is depicted as an “atropófago,” or cannibal, with the same stereotypical descriptions found in colonial texts, the reader soon learns that Aureliano Babilonia is not ontologically “primitive” nor does he have a “barbaric” nature. He has merely suffered material neglect because the class-biased Fernanda has locked him away. In fact, it is the atropófago24 Aureliano Babilonia who learns how to decode Melquiades’s scripts by combining his local historical knowledge with his capacity for foreign languages.25 This transculturation enables him to decipher the entire history of the Buendías, thus discounting the imperial logic that would classify him as an inferior savage. Senapati and García Márquez both give analytical and aesthetic substance to the ironic and parodic vernacular styles of the touter and the mamador de gallo. Transculturating the novel form with these oral forms enables the valorization of subalternized archives of knowledge and manners of expression such as gossip and exaggeration that are traditionally not granted much epistemic importance. As creative valuations of subalternity and, as such, in affinity with the South Asian and Latin American scholarly subaltern studies projects, both novels consider subalterns “active social, political and heuristic agents,” as subalternist Ileana Rodríguez characterizes them.26 The novels represent subalterns as critical knowledge producers, valuing subaltern consciousness as an organizing narrative perspective.

Subaltern Perspectives and the Geopolitics of Knowledge Complementing the transculturated structuring of narrative perspective, the texts validate producers of knowledge and types of knowledge that are traditionally dismissed as irrational or unscientific or that are simply not taken into account. The geopolitics of knowledge privileges knowledge generated in the global North as well as epistemological modes that conform to the paradigms of logic and rational

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validity established by western Enlightenment and modernity. To question this, Senapati uses alternative epistemic agents, such as poor villagers, while García Márquez uses alternative notions of temporality, such as residual time. As Paul Sawyer astutely observes, “The most direct representation of ordinary experience may, paradoxically, be a form of ‘perspectivalism’ that withdraws privilege from the conventional hierarchies of importance, forces the reader to reorient herself among competing discourse and points of view, and in this way brings human subjects who are beneath official notice into clear focus” (4782). Engaging a perspectivalism embedded in subalterns and their points of view, both texts alter hegemonic hierarchies. Senapati’s narrator spends a great deal of time parodying and debunking sources of epistemic authority, especially those that are linked to colonial rule or mindsets.27 Complementarily, Senapati’s narrator relies on a variety of nontraditional, unofficial sources as he consults the villagers and incorporates their folk and religious beliefs. He does not discount village knowledge as rural, backward, or inferior but instead uses it as a key fount of wisdom. As such, the novel’s formal project—to decenter hegemonic expressive modes through the gossip structure of the narrative—is joined to its epistemic project: to recognize other, local sources of authority and ways of knowing. While the worldview of García Márquez’s novel allows for ghosts, prophecy, and mysterious natural occurrences to occur without question, Senapati employs folk beliefs and the mysterious realm slightly differently as a means to meditate on the social realm.28 For example, the narrator asks the elder weaver Ekadusia the history of Asura Pond, allowing an Oriya “local historian” to recount history, instead of relying on academic European historians like “Marshman and Tod” (102).29 Validating the village weaver Ekadusia as a knowledge producer allows his subaltern cultural capital to carry epistemic weight. Ekadusia recounts the tale of the demon Banasura who “ordered the pond be dug, but did not pick up shovels and baskets to dig it himself” (101). Regardless of its historical veracity, Ekadusia’s tale signals a deep awareness of the structure of inequality in modern colonial production, as those who “order” do not labor.30 In fact, it becomes clear that while they may not have the agency to change systemic relations, the peasant villagers do decipher the larger system of bribes and mortgages and perceive the unfair distribution of resources. Responding to the news that Mangaraj has been persecuted and that the courts have given his lands to a lawyer, the villagers bemoan that this legal action is irrelevant: “You do not get much to eat here; you will not get much to eat there” (206). Importantly, this searing

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

Jennifer Harford Vargas

subaltern moral judgment, which gives the closing tone to Six Acres and a Third, is spoken not by one person in particular but by “the people of the village [who] reminded one another” of their cyclical plight of poverty (205). Functioning as an epistemic collective, the village generates insight, insight mined by the narrator, who uses their knowledge to put pressure on colonialist powers. García Márquez’s novel similarly contains a plethora of unofficial knowledge producers who are allocated narrative space.31 However, I will focus on García Márquez’s representation of temporality in order to demonstrate the subaltern hermeneutic produced through his construction of time. At different points, García Márquez depicts time as linear, simultaneous, collapsed, parallel, circular, and repetitious. He represents it by embedding within a more or less linear chronological plot the coexistence and the mutual mirroring of past and present. Presenting temporality from the standpoint of those subalternized by neocolonial modernity, he thereby challenges the hegemonic characterization of modernity as teleological, progressive development leading to freedom and prosperity. The utter desolation in which Macondo is left after the banana company leaves foregrounds the historical repetition of exploration and exploitation as well as the wasted ruins of colonization and modernization. The text constructs a complex residual32 temporality of the past as present through the Spanish galleon located on the periphery of the enchanted region. Originally found by José Arcadio Buendía at the beginning of the novel, the Spanish galleon, described as seeming to “occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion,” gets reanimated symbolically as it is reencountered at different historical turning points (12). Colonel Aureliano, who comes across the galleon during the civil wars, recounts the location to Aureliano Triste, who tries to modernize the route by establishing train tracks, which, unbeknownst to him, eventually bring the banana company. Úrsula responds to the galleon’s resurfacing and Aureliano Triste’s plans with the observation “that time was going in a circle” (226). Úrsula perspicaciously recognizes the doomed repetition of time in the space of the enchanted region. In a later panoramic description from the train of the enchanted region where the banana fields are now planted and “where the carbonized skeleton of the Spanish galleon still sat,” García Márquez juxtaposes the squalor in which the banana workers live with the wealth and luxury of the U.S. banana company owners (300). His description of the empty petrified shell gestures toward the trajectory of Latin America’s exploitation of its labor force, in addition to the stagnation that occurs as a result. The galleon, then, traces

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a linkage between histories of residual Spanish colonial and emergent U.S. neocolonial imperialisms.33 The enchanted region functions as a chronotrope of continual invasion and exploitation present in its very name, la región encantada, which evokes a notion of space and spectral time. After the banana company leaves and the subsequent five years of rain cease, the site, once full of flourishing banana plantations, is now “a bog of rotting roots, on the horizon of which one could manage to see the silent foam of the sea” (336).34 The narrator’s description intricately highlights the unnatural ends of imperial legacies. The practice of extracting or harvesting natural resources for commodification that has historically sapped Latin America of its natural wealth is symbolized in the leftover decaying roots. The banana company’s abandoned furnishings—which are described as “skeletons” that are covered, eerily, with “red lilies” like the color of blood—directly parallel the skeleton of the Spanish galleon (336). The “silent foam of the sea” further intensifies the symbolism of violence as the sea is the site where the physical evidence of neocolonial oppression, the massacred workers, was dumped, as well as the very site of entry for the galleon that looms throughout the book. In short, (neo)colonial skeletons plague and haunt Macondo’s past and present. García Márquez, then, fashions a subaltern historical view of modernity that temporally disrupts and reconfigures history to trace and interrogate the regeneration of colonialism. From what scholars of South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies would call their shared “politics of location,” both Senapati and García Márquez use the form of the novel to interrogate hegemonic domination in the justice system, in the realm of cultural production, and in the European ideology of knowledge. Senapati and García Márquez embed their narratives in subaltern hermeneutics that critically interpret the modern colonial world. These hermeneutics generate, to use another term from subaltern studies, a “history from below” through testimonies from below.

Testifying against (Neo)Colonial Power Both Six Acres and a Third and One Hundred Years of Solitude testify against the violation of rights. At the heart of both novels is a crime: in Six Acres and a Third it is the swindling of property and the displacement of Bhagia and Saria; in One Hundred Years of Solitude it is the massacre and “disappearance” of the banana workers. While the crimes are markedly different in type and in magnitude, both authors

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

Jennifer Harford Vargas

are invested in exposing and deconstructing the mechanisms of the crimes’ perpetration. The alternative narratives that emerge about the crimes are central to that design. The orality of Six Acres and a Third must be placed beside the book’s other main governing device: detective inquiry. The narrator’s use of irony, signifying, and investigation align with the narrator’s desire to dig below the surface to uncover the deeper truth about the socioeconomic organization and the crimes it engenders. The text’s evidential framework consists of a series of occurrences, information, data, accounts, and hearsay that are documented and presented as possible explanatory evidence. The narrator plays the role of detective and even judge as he crafts his own “law of evidence” to tell the story of the swindling of the plot of land (36). In the process he exposes the executors of the crime, interrogating them along with the systemic causes that allow the crime to occur. The text’s analytical realism is especially clear when the narrator presents the justice system as corrupt and biased toward the rich. For instance, the narrator explains that though “English law warns, ‘Watch out  .  .  . If we obtain legally conclusive proof that you have committed a crime, you shall be punished,’” the clever rich man will simply pay off the owner; “under this system, the clever and the rich get off, even though, in truth, they are guilty of hundreds of crimes” (85). The narrator gives out this information about extortion in the justice system as he introduces the lives of the weavers Bhagia and Saria for the first time. The aside about the justice system, like all asides in the novel, is as much an aside as it is part of the interaction between the main plot network and the complex series of episodes and examples that shape the narrator’s zigzag manner of telling mini stories and lessons, which relate to the main plot if not through actual events then through their relation to the larger social field mapped by the narrator. The narrator’s skeptical attitude toward the justice system prepares the reader to encounter the police investigations and the testimonies taken down and tailored. Senapati does not, as García Márquez does, incorporate testimonies in order to directly expose the truth about the crimes; instead, he opts for a portrayal of Mangaraj’s trial that makes it clear Mangaraj gets off too easily. Yet, Senapati’s use of verbal testimonies, especially in the “Police Inquiry” chapter, is important because he uses them to level critiques of the state apparatus.35 Those who testify are asked to enter into official discourse through a series of identifications that mark them as subjects in categories readable and classifiable to the dominant system. Each “witness” is forced to give her or his name, father’s name,

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caste, age, profession, village, subdivision, and district. Such identifications, however, are not relevant to the witnesses’ senses of self. For instance, Marua’s age is listed as “unknown” (160); for his profession Sana Rana gives “worshipper of the village goddess” before “farmer” (158); and Champa claims she does not even know her father’s name and states her caste as “I belong to this house” (164). The villagers’ resistance to or perhaps even inability to identify under the official classification points to their alternative value system, a system of values that, as discussed previously, is given central importance. The testifiers are wary of the official apparatus of investigation, especially since violence often becomes the means of coercing testimony. Still, the knowledge articulated by the minor characters in the testimonies is important to the novel’s gradual deciphering of the crime and its aftermath. Justice in the end is done because Mangaraj loses his property and falls into disgrace, his house and life becoming like an “empty shell” similar to the empty shell of the Spanish galleon in One Hundred Years of Solitude (209). Nevertheless, as in García Márquez’s text, oppressive rule is simply reinstated. As the villagers deftly recognize, “No matter who becomes the next master, we will remain his slaves” (206). Tied into modern colonial methods of control, the rural landowner is not by any means defeated because landowners are replaceable. The hierarchies of power have not changed—power has simply changed hands. Similar in function to Senapati’s analytical realist novel that uses a subaltern village view to expose the manipulations involved in appropriating property, García Márquez’s marvelous realist novel utilizes a subaltern oral history to expose the political repression and discursive distortions manipulated to produce hegemonic history. García Márquez demonstrates exactly how this official version is created—through a combination of censorship and state-disseminated documents—to demystify the means by which the state erases subaltern histories. The events of the strike and massacre are modified, narrated, and concretized by state decree and the “official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the county by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families” (316). With time, the erasure is total: “Everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana company had never existed” (396). Despite the official version produced through the “magic” of coercion and the controlling technologies of print, José Arcadio Segundo manages to survive the massacre and to articulate a subalternized history of the crimes.

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

Jennifer Harford Vargas

While equally wary of the justice system, García Márquez opens a transformative space for testimony, a space that Senapati perhaps cannot allow because his characters are forced to testify within the severely restricted space of police investigation and because his plot results in the death and lunacy of the victims of the crime. In contrast, the violated character in One Hundred Years of Solitude is able to come back from the edge of insanity. Initially unable to cope with the violent magnitude of the experience that he continually relives each day, isolated from any community that believes him, José Arcadio Segundo can only scream in terror of seeing the massacred, in much the same way that Saria and Bhagia repeat the crime in their grief but cannot articulate an analytical narrative about the occurrence. José Arcadio Segundo obsessively asserts the precise number of workers killed— “‘three thousand four hundred eight’”—in an attempt to account for every person because he is the sole source of memory (342). Crucially, José Arcadio Segundo encounters a nonofficial space and a receptive audience for his memories when he befriends Aureliano Babilonia. As he teaches the child to read and write, José Arcadio Segundo’s “link of mutual affection” with the boy revives him (354). Reconnecting to a community enables him to finally move beyond merely repeating incidents toward interpreting the massacre in a concrete counternarrative. He claims, “Macondo had been a prosperous place and well on its way until it was disordered and corrupted and suppressed by the banana company” (354). Placed in oppositional relation to the “false one that historians had created and consecrated in the schoolbooks,” José Arcadio Segundo’s subalternized critical oral testimony trumps the official imperialist textual history (355). José Arcadio Segundo not only passes on the events of the strike to the child; he also places them within an alternative hermeneutic, which is crucial given that the people of Macondo believe that the massacre never happened and that the banana company’s leaving caused Macondo’s ruin. The resulting counterhistory, set within the long history of (neo)colonial modernity in the novel, is both realist and critical, but also transformative. In the end, both novels not only use testimony to critique exploitation and oppression; they also share a vision of possible change. José Arcadio Segundo spends his dying breath entreating Aureliano Babilonia, “Always remember that they were more than three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea” (359). Aureliano Babilonia does, sharing the account with his friend Gabriel. Symbolic of Gabriel García Márquez himself, the character Gabriel represents the possibility of establishing an oral chain of historical truth-telling that may one

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day change the historical record, which is realized by One Hundred Years of Solitude itself, as it resurrected the real historical 1928 United Fruit massacre in Ciénaga, Colombia.36 While Six Acres and a Third is not based on a real historical event, it also holds the kernel for imagining a coming change of relations, represented in Mangaraj’s dying nightmare: “He drifted back to sleep and saw looming on the horizon the horrifying skeleton of a human with its jaws wide open, watching him intently, waiting silently to devour him. . . . He also saw thousands of lunatics like Bhagia the weaver come rushing out of black clouds in the sky, holding swords and iron clubs” (216). It is continuous with the novel’s critical politics to read the dream as Senapati envisioning those from below, the wretched of the earth, rising to demand the return of their land and foretelling future anticolonial and egalitarian movements in India. Testimony plays a part in the sociopolitical struggle by witnessing to oppression and demanding justice, but testimony also demands a change in awareness, a change in perception on the part of the audience. Six Acres and a Third and One Hundred Years of Solitude both strive to create a critical consciousness. Senapati’s and García Márquez’s critical-realist forms are designed to enable this by using narrative tactics that transculturate oral and written genres, narrate in minoritized vernaculars, and validate subaltern perspectives. Embedded in their respective local cultures and worldviews, the realist politics of representation in these two texts from the global South contribute to developing a consciousness critical of colonial and neocolonial modernity. Both share the hope Salman Rushdie has asserted in relation to the transformative role of description in the novel: “Redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it.”37

Notes 1. García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America.” 2. Senapati, Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-century Novel about Colonial India. The novel was also reprinted in 2006 by Penguin Books India. 3. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Spanish language edition I use is García Márquez, Cien años de soledad. 4. Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz was instrumental in understanding cultural mixture and transition, not as a one-way avenue of assimilation, rejection, loss, or creation, but as all of these elements working dynamically together. He coined “transculturation” to describe this dynamic interchange. Building off Ortíz’s understanding of transculturation as dynamic cultural transformation, Mary Louise

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Jennifer Harford Vargas

Pratt conceptualizes transculturation as judicious absorption, defining it as the ways in which “subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own and what they use it for” (6). 5. Mohanty, Introduction, 23. Mohanty’s characterization of Six Acres and a Third also aptly describes One Hundred Years of Solitude. 6. Since my aim is to place two forms of critical realism in the global South in conversation, I limit my analysis to analytical and marvelous realism, but certainly more could be said about other possible forms of critical realism. 7. Mohanty draws on Georg Lukács’s distinction between realism and naturalism. Mohanty uses analytical realism in place of what Lukács terms realism, and descriptive realism in place of what Lukács calls naturalism. For a more in-depth philosophical discussion of realism as it relates to the problem of reference in Mohanty’s notion of analytical realism, see his essay “The Dynamics of Literary Reference.” 8. Sawyer, 4787. 9. See Carpentier’s “On the Marvelous Real in America” and “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” both translated in Zamora and Faris. Carpentier posits that the marvelous real in Latin America is a magnification of the reality inherent to Latin American culture, nature, history, and cosmogony. Like García Márquez, Carpentier believes it is imperative for Latin American writers to interpret this reality themselves using their own forms. 10. Synthesizing the modifications magical realism makes to realism, Zamora and Faris argue, “An essential difference, then, between realism and magical realism involves the intentionality implicit in the conventions of the two modes . . . Realism intends its version of the world as a singular version, as an objective (hence universal) representation of nature and social realities—in short, that realism functions ideologically and hegemonically. Magical realism also functions ideologically but . . . less hegemonically, for its program is not centralizing but eccentric: it creates space for interactions of diversity. In magical realist texts ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation. . . . A number of the writers . . . self-consciously recuperate non-Western cultural modes and nonliterary forms in their Western form [i.e. the novel]. . . . Magical realism may be considered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation, at the same time that it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism” (3–4, 6). The point I want to stress

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here is the modification of realist western forms through nonwestern cultural modes in order to offer a corrective perspective. 11. Fiddian, 17. Critics continue to debate the origin, form, politics, characteristics of, and even the terminology for marvelous or magical realism. Many have criticized the vagueness and variety of definitions, yet there is still no scholarly consensus on whether marvelous or magical realism is a genre, a narrative mode, a literary movement, an aesthetic practice, a stylistic, a worldview, etc. For early essays that consider how marvelous realism engages in political struggle through its literary form, see Alexis and J. M. Dash in particular; for later formal political considerations, see Chanady, Martin, and Slemon in particular. For differing discussions of marvelous realism’s origins and characteristics, see Angulo, Durix, Flores, González Echeverría, Leal, Menton, Ricci Della Grisa, and Schroeder. For a range of essays exploring marvelous realism globally, see Zamora and Faris’s anthology. 12. For in-depth analyses of the trope of marvelous wonder, see Greenblatt and Chiampi. For analyses of García Márquez’s revision of European travel narratives, see González Echeverría, Robles, Palencia-Roth, and Zavala. 13. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 231. 14. García Márquez is famous for claiming he represents reality as it is. In El olor de la guayaba he asserts, “Everyday life in Latin America has shown that reality is full of extraordinary things. . . . I know people from the village who have read One Hundred Years of Solitude with much enjoyment and much attentiveness but without a single surprise because in the end I don’t tell anything that does not appear in the lives that they live. . . . There is not a single line in my novels that is not based in reality” (36–37, translation mine). See also his “Fantasía y creación.” 15. The scene is based on the United Fruit Company massacre in Ciénaga, Colombia, in 1928. The same General Carlos Cortés Vargas named in the novel was the military leader in charge of putting down the strike. See note 35. Many literary scholars have analyzed the massacre episode; see, for example, Alvarez Gardeazábal, Angulo, BellVillada, Janes, Martin, Mena, and Saldívar. 16. The idea of alternative modernities has been articulated by a number of scholars in different disciplines using a variety of terms. Alongside Goankar’s edited collection of essays, see, for example, Latin Americans Walter Mignolo, Julio Ramos, and Beatriz Sarlo’s respective work on “subaltern modernities,” “divergent modernities,” and “peripheral modernities.” 17. Importantly, the narrator also relies on a nonconventionally realist form of storytelling. The narrator claims to abide by a Franklinian philosophy of “thrift” in recounting the story, implying that the

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

Jennifer Harford Vargas

economics of the plot will be scant, linear, and directly to the point so as to not waste paper, breath, or time (Senapati, Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel about Colonial India, 40). Playing into and then frustrating readers’ expectations of realist narrative development, the novel is full of digressions, double-layered meanings, and stories not directly related to the plot development. Thus, the organizational composition of the novel is not at all linear, let alone economic in its telling by conventional standards. Yet, the narrator does recount what is salient. He thus challenges the reader to reconsider both the modes traditionally used to communicate what is important and the manner in which value is traditionally assigned to judge the relevancy of information. See Anjaria for an analysis linking Senapati’s mocking of literary restraint and economy to colonialist political and religious reforms (4796). 18. The implied gender of the narrator is male. However, Paul L. Sawyer points out the novel’s feminization of the oral tradition, showing how the narrator aligns himself with a discourse that is gendered female (4786). See Claire Horan for a discussion of gender relations and the representations of women in the novel. 19. Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines “signifyin(g)’” as the linguistic technique of repeating, imitating, revising, parodying, and critiquing the nature of meaning and representation. When used as a rhetorical technique, signifyin(g) “is the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning” and it “presupposes an ‘encoded’ intention to say one thing but to mean quite another” (82). 20. Senapati also critiques the assimilation-oriented, English-educated babus throughout the novel, but the critiques are complemented by an alternative option to assimilation: transculturation. The novel thematically meditates on the ways in which Oriyas can creatively use British culture at the same time that it stylistically enacts that creative transculturation by merging Oriya oral and British novel forms. 21. García Márquez was a member of the grupo de Barranquilla, a group of Caribbean Colombian intellectuals and artists who sought, among other things, to change the fact that Colombian fiction was dominated by those from the interior of Colombia (especially the capital, Bogotá) and was based on costumbrista, nationalist, and terrígena elements. García Márquez’s novel is full of local sayings and slang (ranging from guineo to vaina), phenomena (such as the yellow butterflies and the arroyo flooding), and cultural traditions (such as carnaval and vallenato music) from the Caribbean coast of Colombia. In relation to language politics, Caribbean Colombian Spanish was not considered appropriate literary Spanish, and many from the capital and the interior regions looked down on it (and still do today). García

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Márquez deliberately elevates the “low” denigrated vernacular of the coast to the level of “high” literature, carving a literary space for colloquial and regional speech. See Gaganendra Nath Dash for an excellent analysis of Senapati’s important contribution to Oriya-language literature and his novel’s linguistic politics. 22. Ivan Ulchur Collazos describes it this way: “An anti-conventional word of little decency that is still not worthy of being in the Real Academia [Española] dictionary, el mamagallismo is perhaps the most appropriate term to define not only a person but also a cultural context that presupposes the ideal space of the most insolent parody, irreverence, and hyperbole” (134–35, translation mine). See his detailed analysis of the types of humor and paradox produced through the novel’s mamadera de gallo. 23. Several examples of the narrator mamando gallo are as follows: He embellishes the stereotypes of the costeño from the Caribbean coast as parrandero (the constant and consummate partier) through Aureliano Segundo and of the cachaca from the interior as cold, elitist, and serious through Fernanda del Carpio. He exaggerates fecundity through Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s seventeen illegitimate sons and Petra Cotes’s procreating animals, which are also critically symbolic of the prosperity of the banana company era. And he parodies Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s fighting thirty-two civil war campaigns and mocks the indistinguishability of the Liberals and the Conservatives, to warn against the co-opting of revolutionary activities. 24. I retain the term in Spanish here to highlight what I think is García Márquez’s conscious use of “antropófago” instead of “caníbal.” I believe that the former term makes a subtle but clear alignment between García Márquez’s marvelous realism and the Brazilian antropofagía movement, a connection that has not yet been discussed in literary scholarship. The novel can be read as an extension of the Brazilian aesthetic project of antropofagía, which was essentially intended as a critical consumption of European aesthetic modes, discourses, and worldviews. Antropofagía embraced the image of the cannibal previously used by the colonial imaginary, resignifying the cannibal as occupying a place of privilege by taking western cultural forms, devouring them, digesting them, recombining them with more indigenous modes, and expelling a transculturated product. 25. Melquiades’ scripts are written in Sanskrit, in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus, and in a Lacedemonian military code. Aureliano Babilonia also knows Latin, English, French, and Greek. 26. Rodríguez, 3. For an excellent collection of essays on subaltern studies in Latin America that also considers how it is positioned in relation to the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, see Rodríguez’s anthology.

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Critical Realisms in the Global South

Jennifer Harford Vargas

27. Senapati is, as Ulka Anjaria states, “deeply aware of the complicity of aesthetic norms with other, more obviously political forms of colonial coercion”; therefore, Anjaria argues that his use of satire is “more suited to the new mode of rule characteristic of the British colonial state, where power emanated not from individuals or types but from a more pervasive normalization of the very conventions of representation and reality” (4796). The literary device of satire (which Anjaria links to “the rich tradition of oral humor”), I would add, works in tandem with the oral device of gossip to destabilize representational conventions, doing so not in opposition to literary realism but in order to enrich it by rooting it in the local (4796). 28. While Senapati may, as García Márquez does, represent such folk beliefs nonironically, his occasionally ironic attitude toward some of the villagers’ values is more the result of his awareness that they are being exploited through their values (such as by being charged money to build temples and to worship the goddess Mangala) and less the result of an imposed modern scientific paradigm of rationality that finds such beliefs epistemically lacking. 29. John Clark Marshman and James Tod were British historians of India in the mid-nineteenth century. 30. See Mohanty, “Introduction” (19–20) and Sawyer (4784) for analyses of this scene in relation to the ways it satirizes English-educated babus by rehabilitating legend and religious mythology in order to put pressure on colonial epistemology. 31. The folk beliefs that turn out to have accurate readings include the indigenous guajira Visitación’s prediction of the insomnia plague, Úrsula’s intuitions that allow her to sense the repetitive nature of occurrences, Francisco el Hombre’s popular memory in his errant oral songs, and Pilar Ternera’s and Colonel Aureliano’s predictions of the future through their respective reliance on prophecy and superstition. 32. I take Raymond Williams’s notion of “residual” here. Williams defines “residual” as that which “has been effectively formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (122). 33. The “founding” and “exploration” that begin the novel further signal the narrative’s engagement with the different stages of colonialism. Among others such as Cueva and Ortega, Dorfman chronicles the eras of colonization and underdevelopment in the novel, concluding that the novel is “a giant metaphor in which is encoded all of the history of the American continent” (139, translation mine). Gerald Martin perceives that that novel is “a socialist  .  .  . reading of Latin American history” intended to demystify history, with the final apocalypse of Macondo and the Buendías signaling “the end of neocolonialism and its conscious or unconscious collaborators” (98, 111). Similarly, José David Saldívar reads the novel as a metaphor for dependency and alienation, while the

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banana massacre scene functions as an ideological deconstruction of advanced capitalism in Colombia. See Janes’s Revolutions in Wonderland for a narration of the novel’s series of representative histories: biblical, western science, Latin American, Colombian, and literary. Also see González Echeverría’s analysis of the foundational American myth García Márquez creates by blending archival and mythic elements as well as Vargas Llosa’s articulation of the various levels of Macondo’s history as collective and individual, legendary and historic, quotidian and mythic. 34. Toward the end of the novel, the newest version of commercial imperialism threatens as the Frenchman Gastón, likened in the text to Mr. Herbert, plans to establish an airmail service in the enchanted region. Referring to his family, which has investments in palm oil in the Belgian Congo, he concludes, “It was just as well to be a pioneer in the Caribbean as in Africa” (389). This gesture toward a global system of capitalist exploitation turns the enchanted region into a chronotropic synecdoche for colonialism. 35. See Sawyer for additional readings of this chapter (4785). 36. The “masacre de las bananeras,” as it was termed at the time, was reported by General Carlos Cortés Vargas, condemned via several newspapers and radio reports, and even brought before the National Assembly by political leaders Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and Alberto Castrillón. See Castrillón, Gaitán, and 1928: La masacre en las bananeras for a collection of Castrillón’s and Gaitán’s speeches before Congress and Cortés Vargas for his rendition of the events. Eduardo Posada-Carbó is correct in pointing out what I would characterize as the marvelous irony that García Márquez’s account has become the public history of the event in the Colombian popular and scholarly imaginary. Posada-Carbó critiques the acceptance of García Márquez’s description of the massacre as history on the part of literary critics and (some) historians, arguing that the novel should not be used as a historical source. While Posada-Carbó’s critiques and his call for a more accurate popular acknowledgment of the history are valid, it seems to me that he ignores the important point that while a very minimal documentary record and some historical references did exist on the massacre, there was no larger national historical memory of the massacre. The resurrection of local popular memory in García Márquez’s novelization of the events actually enabled more accurate historical scholarship. Because of the publication and popularity of the novel, scholars have done important recuperative work on the massacre, including gathering oral testimonies. For example, see Arango, Bucheli, Fonnegra, and Herrera Soto and Castañeda. Two other novels, La casa grande (1962) by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio and Zig Zag en las bananeras (1964) by Efrain Tovar Mozo, were published about the massacre before Cien años de soledad (1967), but neither had a transformative impact on the national historical imaginary in the way that García Márquez’s did. 37. Rushdie, 14.

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1928: La masacre en las bananeras. Bogotá: Editorial Cometa del Papel, 1997. Alexis, Jacques Stephen. “Of the Marvelous Realism of the Haitians.” Présence Africaine: Cultural Journal of the Negro World 9 (1956): 249–75. Alvarez Gardeazábal, Gustavo. La novela colombiana: Entre la verdad y la mentira. Bogotá: Plaza & Janés, 2000. Angulo, María-Elena. Magical Realism: Social Context and Discourse. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. Anjaria, Ulka. “Satire, Literary Realism, and the Indian State: Six Acres and a Third and Raag Darbari.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4795–4800. Arango, Carlos Z. Sobrevivientes de las bananeras. Bogotá: Editorial Colombia Nueva, 1981. Bell-Villada, Gene H. “Banana Strike and Military Massacre: One Hundred Years of Solitude and What Happened in 1928.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 127–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Bucheli, Marcelo. Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899–2000. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Carpentier, Alejo. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora; edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 89–108. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. ———. “On the Marvelous Real in America.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora; edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 75–88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Castrillón, R. Alberto 120 días bajo el terror militar. Bogotá: Editorial TupacAmaru, 1974. Cepeda Samudio, Alvaro. La casa grande. Bogotá: Ediciones Mito, 1962. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chanady, Amaryll. “The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora; edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 125–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Chiampi, Ildomar. Realismo maravilloso: forma e ideología en la novela hispanoamericana. Translated by Agustín Marínez and Margara Russotto. Caracas: Monte Avila, 1983. Cortés Vargas, Carlos. Los sucesos de las bananeras: Historia de los acontecimientos que se desarollaron en la zona bananera del Dpto. de Magdalena 13 de noviembre de 1928 al 15 de marzo de 1929. Bogotá: La Luz, 1929. Cueva, Agustín. “Para una interpretación sociológica de Cien años de soledad.” Revista mexicana de sociología 36, no. 1 (1974) 59–76.

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Dash, Gaganendra Nath. “Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Discovery from Below: Decolonization and the Search for Linguistic Authenticity.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4801–6. Dash, J. Michael. “Marvelous Realism: The Way out of Negritude.” Caribbean Studies 13, no. 4 (1974): 57–70. Dorfman, Ariel. Imaginación y violencia en América. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1970. Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Fiddian, Robin. Introduction. García Márquez. Edited by Robin Fiddian, 1–26. New York: Longman, 1995. Flores, Angel. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora; edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 109–17. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Fonnegra, Gabriel. Bananeras: Testimonio vivo de una epopeya. Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1980. Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer. Lagrimas y sangre o, las matanzas en las bananeras: Compilación de los debates en el congreso al rededor de la revision de los procesos militares. Cali, Colombia: Ediciones de la Tipografía Gutenberg, 1929. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma 1997. ———. “Fantasía y creación artística en América Latina y el Caribe.” Voces: Arte, literatura 1, no. 2 (March 1988). ———. El olor de la guayaba. Bogotá: Editorial Oveja Negra, 1983. ———. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. ———. “La soledad de América Latina.” Speech, Nobel Prize award ceremony. Stockholm, Sweden. December 8, 1982. http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-sp.html. ———. “The Solitude of Latin America.” Speech, Nobel Prize award ceremony. Stockholm, Sweden. December 8, 1982. http://nobelprize.org/ literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-e.html. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. González Echeverría, Roberto. “Cien años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive.” In Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom, 107–24. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989. ———. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

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Horan, Claire. “Representation of Women and Gender Relations in Six Acres and a Third.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4789–93. Herrera Soto, Roberto, and Rafael Romero Castañeda. La zona Bananera del Magdalena: Historia y léxico. Yerbabuena, Colombia: Imprenta Patriótica del Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1979. Janes, Regina. Gabriel García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981. ———. “Liberals, Conservatives, and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the Fictions of Gabriel García Márquez.” Hispanofila: Literatura, ensayos 82 (1984): 79–102. Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora; edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 119–24. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Martin, Gerald. “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism in García Márquez.” In Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, edited by Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, 95–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Mena, Lucila Inés. “La huelga de la compañia bananera como expresión de lo real maravilloso Americano en Cien años de soledad.” Bulletin Hispanique 74, no. 3–4 (1972): 379–405. Menton, Seymour. Historia verdadera del realism mágico. Districo Federal de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Mohanty, Satya P. “The Dynamics of Literary Reference: Narrative Discourse and Social Ideology in Two 19th-Century Indian Novels.” In Thematology: Literary Studies in India, edited by Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, 230–48. Kolkata: Jadavpur University, 2004. ———. Introduction In Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-century Novel about Colonial India, by Fakir Mohan Senapati. Translated by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St. Pierre, 1–31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Mohanty, Satya P., and Harish Trivedi. “Introduction.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4780–1. Ortega, Julio. “Gabriel García Márquez / Cien años de soledad.” In 9 asedios a García Márquez, edited by Mario Benedetti et al, 74–88. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1969. Ortíz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Palencia-Roth, Michael. “Prisms of Consciousness: The ‘New Worlds’ of Columbus and García Márquez.” In Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom, 243–56. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.

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Posada-Carbó, Eduardo. “Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 2 (1998): 395–414. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rama, Angel. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Andariego, 2007. Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Translated by John D. Blanco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Ricci Della Grisa, Graciela N. Realismo mágico y conciencia mítica en América Latina: Textos y contextos. Buenos Aires: F. García Cambeiro, 1985. Robles, Humberto E. “The First Voyage around the World: From Pigafetta to García Márquez.” In Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989. 183–201. Rodríguez, Ileana, ed. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. New York: Granta Books, 1991. Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Sarlo, Beatriz. Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920–1930. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1988. Sawyer, Paul L. “An Oriya Village and the Battle of Plassey: Senapati’s Allegory of the Raj.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4782–8. Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas. London: Praeger, 2004. Senapati, Fakir Mohan. Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-century Novel about Colonial India. Translated by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St. Pierre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.” Canadian Literature 116 (Spring 1988): 9–24. Tovar Mozo, Efraín. Zig zag en las bananeras. Bogotá: Offset de Colombia, 1964. Ulchur Collazos, Ivan. Garcia Marquez: Del humor y otros dominios. Quito: Eskeletra Editorial, 1997. Vargas Llosa, Mario. “García Márquez: De Aracataca a Macondo.” In 9 asedios a García Márquez, edited by Mario Benedetti et al, 126–46. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1969. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris. “Introduction: Daiquiri Blends and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 1–11. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

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Zavala, Iris M. “One Hundred Years of Solitude as Chronicle of the Indies.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 109–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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Views from Above and Below: George Eliot and Fakir Mohan Senapati Paul L. Sawyer

I. Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to ‘find their feet’ among them, while their elders go about their business . . . That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.1

I

begin with one of the most famous passages in English fiction in order to define from the start what generations of readers have taken as George Eliot’s moral vision in Middlemarch—a vision exemplified not just in eloquent authorial asides like this one, but in the novel’s design, subject, and expanded point of view. The sentences contain several hallmarks of European literary realism: a bold reversal of the classical hierarchy of genres in order to favor the ordinary and humble; an intellectually serious focus on everyday life; an ironic conjunction of romantic expectation and mundane disappointment. The famous figure of the squirrel’s heartbeat similarly refigures the traditional object of sublime response, not as a spectacle vast, grand, and rare, but as “all ordinary human life.” No novelist could embrace such a totality, no

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person could endure such awareness; but by providing an image for what lies beyond the reach of human vision and feeling, the narrator hints at our highest duty as ethical beings—and suggests for literature, if not an attainable goal, something like an ultimate horizon. As every reader of Middlemarch knows, the novel elaborates a number of metaphors describing that horizon, which are primarily figures of relationship (webs, networks, tissues, the social fabric itself) and which align the work of the novelist with, among others, the work of historians and biologists. The linkage is caught in the opening sentence of the novel’s Prelude, which calls human history a “mysterious mixture” conditioned by “the varying experiments of Time” (3); by the last sentence of the novel, hundreds of pages later, we have learned that the processes of history lie in the unhistorical, and that the moral progress of the race will occur by minute accretion: “But the effect of [Dorothea’s] being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (515). All forms of life, the novel tells us, are connected, the humble with the mighty, the past with the present and future. To experience the microcosm of ordinary life in the provincial town of Middlemarch within the macrocosm of an immense novel, we might conclude, is to catch an echo of the vast roar of history through the synecdoche of a single volume.2 A fictional project that not only articulates but also concretely demonstrates such an inclusive vision of human connectedness belongs to a special moment in the history of literature, as Eliot’s novels do. Nineteenth-century realism, the literary tradition to which they belong, has been studied across European literatures as a specifically western tradition, and for good reasons. Our notion of intertextuality, after all, presupposes some historical continuity that makes difference meaningful within a common cultural context. There seems less reason to compare texts from wholly separate traditions, especially since, according to one reigning orthodoxy, western and nonwestern traditions are so incommensurably different as to be mutually illegible. But such a view can never challenge the assumption that the features of western tradition are uniquely western, like historicism or modernity or ideas of human dignity. This chapter attempts to breach the practice of European comparatism by putting Eliot’s fiction into dialogue with a novel written twenty years after her death, on the opposite side of the world, in a language she never heard of. Fakir Mohan Senapati was a writer

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and activist from the state of Orissa in what was then British India; his first novel, Six Acres and a Third (Chha Mana Atha Guntha), was published serially in his native Oriya in 1897–99. Like Eliot’s novels, Six Acres and a Third is a celebrated example of fictional realism in its native country; it centers on characters in a single village understood to be representative of a larger social order; and it illuminates profound connections between rich and poor, between local and cosmopolitan. Yet the differences between the two texts are vast. Eliot’s novels were written from the heart of the British empire, for an educated and socially sophisticated audience, in a language that was fast spreading around the globe; Senapati’s novel was written from an obscure province of the same empire, in a popular idiom of a regional language that was in danger of extinction before the joint encroachment of English and Bengali. In reading Senapati together with Eliot, I do not intend to assign them comparative rank as novelists, but rather to illuminate the issue in literary representation that, in my view, emerges most interestingly from such a juxtaposition: the problem of presenting a view “from below.” Although Eliot’s famous figure of the squirrel’s heartbeat occurs at the end of a passage about the mental anguish of a young woman of wealth and privilege, Eliot’s moral vision could hardly move us if for her the “roar on the other side of silence” did not also include the lives of the impoverished, the marginalized, the oppressed—those who have traditionally dwelt on the other side of representation, the official histories, the decorated walls, the canon of great works. What would it mean for Eliot, or for any novelist, to make us hear their heartbeats? To a degree rare in British fiction, Eliot brought the lives of the humble and neglected into the bright light of representation. Yet a comparison with Senapati underscores the ways the narrative conventions Eliot inherited, while allowing her to expand enormously the social scope of British fiction, nevertheless limited her power to imagine life from below. Six Acres and a Third appeared at the very moment when European realism, by fashioning what Erich Auerbach called the mixture of styles, began to find adequate means for representing characters low on the social scale.3 I will argue that Senapati’s techniques anticipate this change by opening up possibilities for representing the lives of the impoverished and oppressed that western fiction was not to notice (or find worthwhile) until after Eliot’s lifetime. I begin with a word about my own cultural position. I am an American critic, a specialist in Victorian literature who has read and taught Eliot’s novels for years. But I do not read Oriya or any other native

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

Indian language, which means that although I have the good fortune to learn from experts in South Asian literature, I know Senapati’s text only in translation. But my limitations will, I hope, contribute to part of my purpose, which is to attempt an experiment in intuitive cross-cultural reading. Precisely because I know a different literary tradition, Senapati’s novel felt both familiar and surprising: familiar because the representational problems he faced were also familiar; surprising because his solutions of those problems showed a distinct swerve from European practice. At the same time, some features may have stood out more strongly for me than if I’d been a specialist in Indian literatures. Just as surprising was the light Senapati cast on the Victorian novel, which I thought I knew well. I offer these readings, finally, in order to test the possibilities of a new moment in literary study. Because of more and better translations, wide migration of scholars, and the shrinkage of the planet and its cultures into a globalized information economy, we not only can but will have to learn how to read literature cross-culturally, whether as specialists or as amateurs. Our historical moment differs dramatically from the ideological and political conditions of the late colonial era, the collapse of which gives West and East new opportunities for understanding. My reading of both Eliot and Senapati will be inflected, I hope, by a postcolonial sense of history, one which, loosened from the ideological blinders Edward Said called “orientalism,” can allow westerners to recognize historical patterns across cultures without collapsing distinctions, and to imagine the possibility of truly reading the works of another culture without pretending to omniscience. To take part in that conversation—one wider than has been available to critics of any previous age—we need not be afraid of our limitations so long as we know how to recognize them.4

II. Language, the agent that mediates reality in fictional representation, is always multiple—a congeries of discourses, styles, modes of transmission, and inherited affinities that bear the marks of the structures of power from which they emerge and that produce meaning in explicit or implicit relationship to other discourses and styles. This linguistic variety reflects a hierarchy of values, drawn from the histories of the powerful and internalized as common sense, which elevates some human events while marginalizing or ignoring others as beneath notice. In classical aesthetics, this matching of style to subject is known as decorum. For a writer on the left, these inscribed

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hierarchies of value present obvious challenges. How, for example, does such a writer use language, inherently class marked, in ways that break through hierarchies of power, knowledge, and class privilege? How does one record colloquial speech without abandoning a language capable of intellectual complexity, irony, and range of reference? How does one mediate between the abstract audience of the print marketplace and the modes and subjects of oral tradition? How does one represent the fullness and richness of experience from “below” without ignoring the antiprogressive elements that powerlessness can produce—the forms of oppression, brutality, and inherited ignorance that occur locally as well as in the capitals and the courts? Understanding Senapati’s solutions to these questions means beginning with his ironic narrator. In The Dialogic Imagination Mikhail Bakhtin claimed for the novel the unique capacity to incorporate a variety of discourses within a single narrative, as opposed to the univocal, elevated style of epic. Within this heteroglossia, or discursive variety, no single voice, not even the authorial voice, can entirely fix the meanings of the statements or legislate their value. Not all novels, obviously, are equally heteroglossic. Bakhtin calls monoglossic those novels whose narrator articulates the author’s position actively and explicitly, as distinguished from heteroglossic novels, whose narrator lacks a command over the represented voices of characters.5 Eliot’s approach—creating a narrator with exceptional cogency and cultural authority—tends to the monoglossic, while Senapati’s tends to the other. Through an ironic and unreliable narrator, he is able to abandon altogether a stable perspective, along with the authoritative forms of language that such a perspective needs to secure its own authority. And as Satya Mohanty argues, this move produces a new kind of active reader.6 The novel’s plot follows the rise and fall of Ramachandra Mangaraj, a corrupt landholder (zamindar), and Champa, his brutal, mendacious mistress. With her husband’s help, Champa schemes to wrest the most fertile plot of land in the village from a childless couple because she covets their cow. Ultimately, Mangaraj is exposed and imprisoned by the British, and Champa is brutally murdered by an accomplice while fleeing arrest—but not before they have brought down the helpless and innocent as well. Among their victims are the impoverished couple who own the cow, and the Saantani, the zamindar’s saintly wife, for whose death he is found guilty in a British court. As the book opens, the narrator pretends to pay tribute to Mangaraj by deploying the learned discourses of the English-educated Indian intelligentsia—Sanskrit scripture, classical poetry, English science and law, and formal arguments derived from the Nyaya school of logic.

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

Thus, on the first page, he hints that in the evening before a fast, Mangaraj secretly enjoys a meal of milk, bananas, khai, and nabata; but he immediately withdraws the hint by asserting (scientifically) that liquids evaporate and (legally) that no conclusion is justified without incontrovertible proof; in short, he deploys learned discourses in order to contain the truth rather than reveal it. In the narrator’s hands, learned language clearly functions as an ideological system that, by extension from the local example, ultimately enables and rationalizes the British policy of ruling through corrupt local elites and a coopted class of minor officials—the babus. In the first reported dialogue of the novel, a villager observes, “Not even the father of Lord Mahadeva can catch a clever fellow stealing a drink under the water” (35–36). The narrator pretends not to understand this remark, even though he has studied science, classical literature, and the law; nevertheless, when the landlord’s milk disappears overnight, one should not need a weatherman to tell which way the wind will blow. Nor should one need help reading allegorically the narrator’s reminder that the moles, rats, flies, and mosquitoes in the zamindar’s bedroom could easily have eaten the food: “Like all base creatures of appetite, these are always on the lookout for food; such creatures are not spiritually-minded like Mangaraj, who had the benefit of listening to the holy scriptures” (36). The active reader produced by this savagely playful irony (which pervades much of the text) is not a postmodern observer, skeptical of all truth claims, but rather a shrewd decoder, adept at reading between the lines in order to grasp the way power is wielded in Gobindapur— to understand who screws whom and how they do it. That ability, of course, positions us down “below,” among the villagers. In a world governed by official and unofficial duplicity, those who are below survive, not by subtle disputation, but by reading the signs, penetrating cant, and forming quick conclusions based on long experience—the special skills of “peasant” wit. But by intermixing learned discourses parodically, the narrator also overturns the established discursive hierarchies. The resulting confusion of registers produces not a single, authoritative point of view but a perspectivalism, so that meanings emerge ironically out of the implied gaps among discourses. This absence of moral and epistemic authority forces the reader to reorient herself among competing discourses and points of view in a way that brings human subjects who are beneath official notice suddenly into focus.7 As my summary should suggest, the plot of Six Acres and a Third resembles a folk narrative that depicts structures of power through traditional character types—the corrupt landowner, the evil concubine, the saintly wife, and so forth. But the local satire achieves a

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subtler dimension when the narrator attempts to explain away the whole functioning of the system of which Mangaraj is a small part. From the point of view of peasant and babu alike, the relationships of power are hidden, their sources distant, their manifestations magical. For Oriyas, the language of the ruling class and the petty bureaucracy was once Persian, now it is English; once the Khandayat clan governed a whole district of Orissa, now they are powerless; once Mangaraj was a sharecropper who received only two acres of land from the village headman, now he owns 572 acres, according to the latest accounts. The only certain rule is that the villagers will always be oppressed—and that certainty is both the achievement and the limitation of folk wisdom. But what explains the shifts and the continuity underlying the shifts? The narrator initially casts Mangaraj as a “pious man,” a “teacher,” a “great soul” like Lord Krishna, whose life is full of “strange and wondrous happenings” (“Indeed, the life of a truly great man is never without miracles” [40]). His career is the “miracle” of the “self-made man,” the English phrase that weighs ironically throughout the chapter with this title. But what accounts for this form of success in systemic terms? Before the novel opens, an illiterate minor police official named Ali Mian acquired a zamindari (a landed estate) by bidding at an auction in Calcutta. How could he afford it? The narrator attempts an answer by first putting a complaint into the mouths of his fictionalized readers—babus, as he teasingly calls them, “with B.A. and M.A. degrees”: “Alas, Ali Mian, who could not even hold a pen properly, became a zamindar just by writing his name. Even though we can write long essays and hold a pen correctly, we starve.” The narrator replies, “Dear babus, don’t you know that it is one’s fate which ultimately prevails, not one’s wisdom or character” (69). Ali Mian’s son inherits the sinecure but falls deeply into debt; enter the young Mangaraj, the sharecropper turned moneylender, who appears at the zamindar’s home bearing gifts, which he spreads out in the fashion of a genie from an Arabian night’s tale. Just as magically, the moneylender ends up owning everything in sight. Senapati concludes the episode: “Historians say it took Clive less time to get the Bengal Subedari from the emperor of Delhi than it takes to buy and sell a donkey. How long do you think it will take Mangaraj to get the zamindari of Fatepur Sarsandha from Mian?” (76). Marx, of course, called this miracle, or fate, the magic of capital; Senapati represents capital through the figure of a rural moneylender, whose magic is interest. The peasant-witted reader who has figured out on the first page that Mangaraj secretly indulges before a fast day can by

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

now figure out how Mangaraj will swindle Ali Mian and how the local swindle is like the birth of British control over India. Six Acres and a Third, in short, is a thinly disguised allegory of the British raj, of which the vehicle is the rise, daily machinations, and ultimate catastrophic fall of a native swindler. More complexly, it combines folk narrative with a Marxian grasp of mystified power relations under capitalism. But this viewpoint, which would be literally unspeakable within the official discourses, is only one aspect of Senapati’s perspectivalism. Having brought down the mighty to the level of common chicanery, it remains to present life at the bottom with an interest at least equal to that of the mighty. As he continues the biography of a “great man” exposed as a corrupt moneylender, the fictionalized narrator brings us gradually into the village life of Gobindapur, a world excluded both from non-Oriya print economy and from the knowledge of the British-educated intelligentsia. At this stage, the narrator alternates between calling his readers babus and not-babus and so plays maliciously with the educated Oriyan’s own ignorance of his neighbors from “below.” Playing folk anthropologist to the educated babu, he continues to use elaborate parodies of traditional logic to explain why, for example, cow dung does not clutter the streets of the weavers’ section (the weavers do not raise cattle because they weave all day long), or why the childless Saria is not completely happy, or why, finally, the weavers contribute their precious earnings to a shrine. His (fictionalized) readers who are babus will believe that the village weavers built the shrine to a local god because of the saying, “as stupid as a weaver”: “If you are a civilized babu . . . you are probably wondering why the community’s cash contributions were misused in such a manner” (85). On the other hand, “Do you know how cash contributions are raised? Although you may need no explanation, the new babus do, for they are educated: they have studied and have mastered profundities. . . . To be considered a scholar, it is necessary to have read about the English or the French; there is no point in learning about oneself or one’s neighbor” (84). But why in fact did the weavers misuse their cash earnings in such a way? “Every day the conch is blown in the morning and in the evening, and the bell is rung in the temple. This announces to everyone—from children to old men—that a divine presence is leading the universe” (86). This divine presence also seems unfamiliar to the babu. As readers, we are now situated between two epistemological fields—the world of the babu (western-educated reader), who can follow references to British history and law, to Sanskrit poetry, to

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traditional logic; and the world of Gobindapur—a preliterate world, bound up in gossip, legends, and popular religious belief. In this case the narrator produces an active reader by feigned skepticism about village superstitions rather than feigned credulity of the deeds of the great. A large pond lies at the edge of town, used by the people for washing clothes, bathing, and meeting to talk. Who built the pond? The narrator dutifully repeats the account given by a ninety-five-yearold weaver, who says the pond was built in a single night by demons. When they were discovered in their unfinished job at the break of dawn, the demons escaped from the eyes of the villagers by building a tunnel to the Ganga: “During the Baruni Festival on the Ganga, the holy waters of the river used to gush through the tunnel into the pond. But, as the villagers became sinful, the river no longer did this. English-educated babus, do not be too critical of our local historian, Ekadusia Chandra. If you are, half of what Marshman and Tod have written will not survive the light of scrutiny” (102). The last two sentences clearly target early British orientalists alongside the intellectual sycophants who learn about their own country through privileged amateurs among the conquering race. But the satirical thrust should not obscure the anecdote’s deeper implications. Having learned to read between the lines of Mangaraj’s story, the reader of Gobindapur begins making inferences about the villagers’ lives as well as the zamindar’s, taking the perspective “from below” in order to judge of matters that were not supposed to interest him. The ironic nudge at babus, who are forced to view British anthropology in the same light as a peasant superstition, also leaves the reader free to consider Ekadusia’s account in a light other than that of literal fact. It does not need to be stressed that his myth is based on certain beliefs—that good and evil are real and have consequences, that the world is ruled by a divine force, that a provincial pond is indeed connected to the world’s sacred spaces since “water is life”—that are also held by Senapati’s implied narrator. By this time, the village has slowly succeeded Mangaraj and Champa as the main character (“we,” “our,” the narrator now says), and we inhabit it not just as spectators but as sharers of the villagers’ understanding of the world, of their myths and their religion. It is not an idealized place: the women quarrel, curse, and foul the water, the Brahmins chatter about fees, the thieves are in cahoots with the constable. But it is also a place where people pray for children and are devastated by a good person’s death, where they thrive, suffer, labor, and die. And we see it up close, in vivid flashes: “After a quick dip in the pond, the women ran off in their wet clothes; the clothes dripped and flopped around them as they hurried

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

home. Their panic was such that they could not even fill their pitchers to the brim; the half-filled pitchers made loud slapping noises, like the tongues of native patriots haranguing a gathering. Clutching his cane, the village schoolmaster disappeared. Children scattered on the path. Like a policeman dragging an accused murderer, the headboy marched a small boy to the school. Now this same boy was running away faster than everyone else” (152–53). Though we don’t know it yet, a daroga (police officer) from the district capital has just arrived to arrest Mangaraj for murder, and the villagers are terrified by the rumor that any and all of them are about to be arrested. As with most of Senapati’s descriptions, this one has traces of allegory and satire—we see a miniature version of the official pecking order (village is to administrative hierarchy as boy is to schoolmaster and headboy) and notice the complete helplessness of the villagers in a way linked to the novel’s prevalent imagery of prey animals and predators. But the details, finally, matter in and of themselves; they bring us in so close that we can hear sounds and distinguish between individuals even in the general chaos. Senapati’s narrator has shifted from intrusive irony—a voice digressively and verbosely fearful of digression and verbosity—into near transparency, using a style rapid, succinct, and unself-conscious. As I have shown, when he acts as ironic celebrant of the local elite, the narrator parodically adopts the discourses of law, science, logic, and scriptural aphorism and so fictionalizes his readers as babus. But when he narrates from below, he modulates into discourses and positions counter to these. As an eavesdropper and reporter—one who can overhear certain conversations and not others but can verify hunches by a look at accounts—he matches what Mohanty usefully identifies as a tout, a familiar village figure in Orissa; but this also means his words are a form of gossip. In the chapters set in Asura pond, the narrator’s relationship to gossip comes clear. He gives extensive summaries of the women’s talk, as they gather at the weavers’ ghat to bathe, and of the men’s talk, as they gather at the Saanta ghat after a day’s labor in the fields. Had there been a newspaper editor in Gobindapur, we learn, he would have gathered all the village news simply by listening in at the weavers’ ghat: “He would have found out, for instance, what had been cooked the previous night, at whose house, and what was going to be cooked there today; who went to sleep at what time; how many mosquitoes bit whom; who had run out of salt; who had borrowed oil from whom,” and so forth (105). In satirizing the triviality of the women’s topics, the narrator by implication satirizes his own topics, since he is the one who spreads the village “news” in print—imitating the style and mode of oral transmission rather

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than the print mode of an editor’s story. The relationship grows more complicated as Senapati invokes the gendered stereotypes of gossip—a pejorative term in itself, implying malice, falsehood, and uncontrollable spread, the kind of “loud noise” women produce in the marketplace (105), the servants’ quarters, and the pond. Oral tradition, then, is feminized, and the narrator, though implicitly male, finds it hard not to link himself with this gendered source. “Like village women chattering while pounding rice, we have dragged dignified persons like you into our silly stories,” he tells his babu readers. In other similes he is like a boatman who gets diverted by a current but manages to hold steady (112) and an “expert weaver” who can “disentangle a skein once he gets hold of a main thread” (111). Narration, in other words, crosses over continually from a main direction or thread into mixture, digression, and entanglement. If the structure of the main plot is unidirectional, the “story” of the village, has a structure like gossip: it ramifies, proliferates, meanders, since like a skein it takes up the whole collective life and folklore of the villagers. Crucially, their folklore and speech are revealed as a legitimate form of knowing and surviving.

III. Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the little girl walking forth one morning hand-inhand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? (Middlemarch, 3)

The narrator of Six Acres and a Third, by parodying the authoritative discourses of religion, law, and philosophy, exposes the ideological character of official modes of explanation—a strategy that reflects historically the fragmentation of brahminical authority under the force of British rule. Halfway around the world, the narrator of Eliot’s novels addresses her society’s educated audience in a similarly authoritative idiom, not as parody but as means to a moral education. Thus, the first sentence of Middlemarch, cited above, defines the novel’s subject (the “mysterious mixture” of history), constructs her reader through a rhetorical question, and states the underlying assumption of her fictional project: that heroism rests in the humble, the extraordinary in the ordinary. To enact that reversal of significance, she fashions a style capable at once of analyzing the minute

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

and of producing a grand work. The view of existence that can comprehend history as a series of experiments performed by Time can only be expressed in a discourse arduous and complex enough to stand beside the style Milton fashioned for his national epos—fit, it may be, for a “happy few.” One need not take literally the implication that readers of Middlemarch would already know and have long pondered the girlhood of Theresa of Avila, the fifteenth-century Spanish saint. The purpose of the sentence, rather, is to define the range of authorial consciousness in terms of a universalizing overview (as in, for example, the opening trumpet of Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes”: “Let Observation with extensive view / Survey mankind from China to Peru”), while at the same time it interpellates her readers into an educated circle. The readers so defined and, as it were, summoned in that first sentence must be able to grasp the significance of the allusion with only a few words’ help and similarly to follow the narrator’s syntax, metaphors, and extended analyses—an implied equality of understanding reinforced throughout the novel in Eliot’s highly personal use of “we” and in the kinds of experience she attributes to “us.” Writing from the heart of the British empire as Senapati writes from the periphery, Eliot’s narrator adumbrates a humane, flexible version of European intellectual tradition, not simply to assume it as a badge of authority (her occasional caricature of the “men of maxims” is similar to Senapati’s caricature of the babus’ learning), but to dramatize through her narrative style the powerful combination of a humanistic education and close scrutiny based on the methodology of science, particularly biology. In no novel is this aim more clearly demonstrated than in The Mill on the Floss (1860), the book I have chosen to read here because of its resemblances to Senapati’s subject. In a well-known passage, the narrator of The Mill on the Floss contrasts her drab provincial subject with a tourist’s view of the Rhone, with its ruined castles and hints of romance. Then, like Senapati satirizing the learning of babus, she ventriloquizes the response of her middle-class reader, whom she imagines becoming impatient at her subject (the small struggles of farmers and tradespeople in the village of St. Ogg’s) by rehearsing the aesthetic and moral commonplaces the same reader might use to compare the romantic and the real: the “poetry [of] peasant life,” “sublime principles,” “romantic visions,” “the level of the tragic-comic,” on the one hand; “without polish,” “respectability in a gig of unfashionable build,” “worldliness without side-dishes,” on the other. But instead of mocking these categories of judgment, she acknowledges

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I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie—how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them. . . . Does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.8

In the dimensional imagery of this passage, the “large vision” of the scientist (and novelist) reinforces the hierarchical figure of “mental levels,” which the narrator surveys from above. In this way, she raises her readers to a consciousness more spacious than their own inherited class prejudices, but also more advanced than the worldview of her provincial subjects, here typologized as Dodsons and Tullivers. Thus, the expansion of vision and feeling Eliot demands of her “babu” readers entails imagining her characters’ world from above, not from their own vantage point. But not above all her characters. The passage I have been citing is in fact atypical, appearing after about two hundred pages of a narrative that has been focalized through Maggie, the daughter of the village miller. The novel actually opens as a conflation of the narrator’s memory with Maggie’s musing on the bridge overlooking the mill, then moves into the miller’s parlor, where Mr. Tulliver initiates the plot by speaking to his wife about sending his son Tom away to school. Like Senapati’s narrator, then, Eliot keeps us close to the lives of the people while occasionally drawing us outward into the world of an educated person’s knowledge. The difference is that Maggie’s consciousness is exceptional among the villagers and so commensurate with that of her readers. Roughly speaking, we share the viewpoint of characters who speak standard English as opposed to regional dialect, and who have inner lives capable of being narrated. These formal indicators—standardized speech and the representation of interiority—are common in Victorian fiction but not in Senapati. The convention of dialect marking in particular is so crucial to this distinction that it is worth pausing briefly to consider its prevalence and function in the novelistic tradition that Eliot both inherited and expanded. In order to indicate the linguistic variety of represented

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them in order to transcend them. “It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons,” she tells her readers.

Paul L. Sawyer

speech, works of fiction narrated in the standard form of a language often represent linguistic variety by orthographic markers that divide standard speech from spoken dialect. In such novels, standard speech, including the speech of the narrator, is unmarked and therefore naturalized; since we as readers hear unmarked narration in our own accent, we imaginatively share the speech of the narrator and the characters whose speech is unmarked, while hearing the marked speakers as nonstandard. In turn, orthographic variants (including apostrophes to indicate omitted sounds and variant spellings to indicate nonstandard pronunciation) make nonstandard speech appear “other” to an assumed norm. This binary of marked and unmarked reflects the strictly insoluble problem of representing a wide social range, since the alternative would be to flatten linguistic variety by eliminating differences among characters’ speech. For most texts, the strict distinction tends to be muted and overlaid by the variety of spoken differences not indicated orthographically, such as nonstandard but unmarked syntax, personal idiolects, various formal registers, contrasts of verbal exuberance and reticence, and so forth. Underlying this variety, nevertheless, is a binary system that, in relation to the reader, divides characters into “us” and “them.” Although some markings may be based on observed speech differences, the function of this system of differences is diacritical rather than mimetic; that is, we hear marked speech as a difference from standard pronunciation, whereas unmarked speech indicates not sound but correct rules: spelling as given by dictionaries. (Thus, in a British novel, the spoken word “father” is never written “fathuh,” as it might be if spoken by a British character in an American novel.) Unmarked speech, in other words, simply indicates that a character’s pronunciation is to be taken as normative, a category that exists nowhere in actual speech communities except on a printed page; it also functions rhetorically in relation to the reader, indicating the characters who speak like us and whose thoughts sound like our own thoughts in our inner ear. These are the characters who exist, so to speak, at our level and form the possibilities of readerly identification. Who tends to speak unmarked English in Victorian fiction? The answer is complicated, but a knowledge of canonical novels suggests a few clear rules. Most obviously, the marked-unmarked binary tends to circumscribe middle-class identity, understood as a mutually reinforcing blend of income, status, manners, and education, with the line falling sometimes above and sometimes below the ambiguous category of the lower middle class (clerks, yeoman farmers) and sometimes excluding ignorant aristocrats. This rough distinction produces

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a wavering line of gentility that gains clarity and emphasis when genteel characters collide with stock types from those other classes, such as the swell or the dissolute young rake. Another rule is that heroes and heroines always speak unmarked dialogue, even if they are not genteel by the usual measures; as a result, their genteel speech and manners may appear magical, as in the notorious case of Oliver Twist. Class status and protagonist status are not the same thing, in other words, but the use of unmarked speech to indicate normative linguistic competence blurs the distinction. Heroes and heroines also speak in standard syntax, never in colloquial phrases or idiolects, a point that suggests a further distinction: the characteristic appearance in Victorian dialogue of formalized rhetoric, in cases when a hero or heroine rises to an exalted occasion. This stylized speech has a close analogue in accompanying illustrations, where the genteel heroes and heroines have idealized, cookie-cutter features as standardized as their flights of speech. Any account of heteroglossia in Victorian fiction, therefore, has to recognize the interplay between the King’s English and oral variants that are heard in various ways in relation to that standard—as colorful, as quaint, as vital, as deficient, and so forth. The conventions for marking dialogue have obvious consequences for the representation of interiority. Free indirect discourse, the chief technique for reproducing a character’s inner life, developed at the turn of the nineteenth century as a compromise between the transcription of an experience in a character’s own words (as in a letter, a soliloquy, or some imitation of the flow of thoughts through the brain) and the author’s own commentary on that experience—a compromise that strategically blends the narrator’s and the character’s own modes of speech.9 In the case of fiction with very broad social representation, free indirect discourse gives with one hand but retracts with the other. While granting the novelist the hypothetical power of omniscience, the technique tends to restrict plausible verbal collaboration to the minds of those characters who speak and think in ways recognizably similar to the narrator’s. Very generally, then, the dialect distinction in Victorian fiction reinforces the psychic distinction: the binary separation of “their” dialect from “our” (and the narrator’s) King’s English tends to parallel the more flexible separation between characters with or without a defined inner life. Gentility (in the sense I have been using the word, as a blurring of middle-class status and protagonist status) and interiority therefore define the points of identification for a reader of these novels, in triangulation with a narrator who shares their language and interior space—and ours. To classify a work of fiction as a bourgeois novel, therefore, is to indicate something about

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

its scheme of values, its plot, and its protagonists, but also the formal conventions that underwrite them all.10 If we view the invention of the Eliot narrator (a center of consciousness and language capable of at least theoretically universal sympathy) and the subject of The Mill on the Floss (the struggles of provincial life) in light of the conventions Eliot inherited from the early Victorian novel, the chief challenge would be to adapt her universalizing sympathy to what I have called the wavering linguistic line of gentility, which divides characters according to an idealized standard of middle-class speech, manners, and education. The complexity lies in the relationship of this standard to a different but related one, a standard of virtue. As we would expect, the speech of what the narrator (with some irony) calls “these emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers” is orthographically marked, while the speech of the genteel characters (Stephen Guest, Philip Wakem, Lucy, Lawyer Wakem, the adult Maggie) is not; unmarked speech therefore locates the reader at the level of the genteel characters, as I have suggested in the case for Victorian fiction in general. The linguistic binary also naturalizes a binary class distinction that in turn parallels the plot of Maggie’s progress—from her subjugation as a precocious child to the meanness and want of the Dodson world, to her apparent release as a young woman from the Dodson world into the elegant and witty (and erotic) circle of the children of the local elite. This discursive structure is the reverse of what we found in Six Acres and a Third: while Senapati’s base language is a demotic Oriya disrupted by Sanskritized passages that the reader hears as awkward and pedantic, Eliot’s base language is a learned elaboration of standard English supplemented by a nonstandard vernacular that the reader hears as regional and semiliterate. But the sociolinguistic system of The Mill on the Floss contains telling exceptions, as a look at two key characters makes clear: the peddler Bob Jakin, and Maggie’s ambitious brother Tom. Near the novel’s end, Maggie suffers the disgrace of a perceived sexual indiscretion and is civilly but unyieldingly ostracized by the town of St. Ogg’s. At the low point of her fortunes, she is visited by the peddler, her childhood friend. Bob Jakin is part trickster, part vagabond, part lovelorn swain, lacking both social standing and the moralistic judgments that come with social standing, and he has come to Maggie with help in his heart: he means to set up a meeting between Maggie and the kindly town clergyman, newly widowed, about possible lodgings. Here is a sample of his speech: “But I told him [the widowed clergyman] I was upo’ the travel three parts o’ the Sundays—an’ then I’m so used to bein’ on

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my legs, I can’t sit so long on end—‘an’ lors, sir,’ says I, ‘a pack man can do wi’ a small ‘lowance o’ church: it tastes strong,’ says I; ‘there’s no call to lay it on thick.’ Eh, Miss how good the little un [Bob’s infant son] is wi’ you! It’s like as if it knowed you: it partly does, I’ll be bound—like the birds know the morning.” The narrator comments, “Bob’s tongue was now evidently loosed from its unwonted bondage, and might even be in danger of doing more work than was required of it. But the subjects on which he longed to be informed were so steep and difficult of approach, that his tongue was likely to run on along the level rather than to carry him on that unbeaten road. He felt this, and was silent again for a little while” (195–96). As the commentary makes clear, Bob has a mental life that could be described (motives, contradictory impulses, affections), but not in the narrator’s idiom, except awkwardly; instead, the narrator stays outside his consciousness and effectually puts him on exhibit for our appraisal. In her rendering of his speech, she grants him facility with metaphor, a quick-witted alertness, and paternal affection. But he also tends to lose control of his speech (as in this case, when he comes too close to his unconfessed adoration of Maggie), a point the narrator makes in a style that emphasizes Bob’s class status by her discreet indirection, vocabulary, and playful irony. In a novel so concerned with the possibility of inherent moral goodness, the comic diminishment of Bob is an anomaly that I sense in the nervous overemphasis of these very strictures: Bob may “stray” into indiscretion, but it is his very gift of persuasion that guarantees his economic livelihood as a peddler. One senses that the very possibility of folk eloquence is a disturbing factor for the novel’s tight linkage, through Maggie above all but also through Philip Wakem, of moral enlightenment with articulate speech. This moral distinction finds its corollary in the class relationship that Bob expresses through his erotic idealization of Maggie: he remains childlike, devoted to Maggie as to a fairy-tale princess. Maggie’s gentle reprimand of his roguishness underscores this difference. Thus, when he offers to give a good “leathering” to the person who has wronged her, she replies, “O, Bob, you’re a very good friend to me. But I shouldn’t like to punish anyone, even if they’d done me wrong. I’ve done wrong myself too often.”11 Unlike Bob’s, Maggie’s speech is never in danger of breaking syntax or doing more work than is required of it. (An example is this desperate plea to her lover Stephen Guest, some pages earlier: “No—not with my whole heart and soul, Stephen. I have never consented to it with my whole mind. There are memories, and affections, and longings after perfect goodness, that have such a strong hold on me; they would

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

never quiet me for long, they would come back and be pain to me— repentance” (166).12 A scene like this puts the novel’s marked-unmarked binary in particularly sharp relief; but the sociolinguistic distinction breaks down in the second case I want to consider, Tom Tulliver, the miller’s son. Immediately after Mr. Tulliver’s bankruptcy pushes his family into helplessness and poverty, the narrator enters the mind of Tom: [Tom] felt the humiliation as well as the prospective hardships of his lot with all the keenness of a proud nature; and with all his resolute dutifulness towards his father there mingled an irrepressible indignation against him which gave misfortune the less endurable aspect of a wrong . . . There were no impulses in Tom that led him to expect what did not present itself to him as a right to be demanded. . . . Tom saw some injustice in severity; and all the more, because he had confidence in himself that he should never deserve that just severity . . . He would ask no one to help him, more than to give him work and pay him for it. Poor Tom was not without his hopes to take refuge in under the chill damp imprisonment of the December fog which seemed only like a part of his home troubles. At sixteen, the mind that has the strongest affinity for fact cannot escape illusion and self-flattery; and Tom, in sketching his future, had no other guide in arranging his facts than the suggestions of his own brave self-reliance (185).

This passage typifies free indirect discourse as Eliot develops it, combining narration, paraphrase of a character’s thoughts, psychological analysis, and sympathetic yet judicious evaluation. It follows Tom as he sets off on a gloomy morning on a mission to apply for a job as clerk to his affluent uncle, then works his way up to a naively optimistic expectation of success; we see both the moral strengths (unselfpitying determination, self-sacrifice, loyalty to his father’s honor) and the weaknesses (harshness of judgment, emotional stuntedness, isolation, rigidity) of the Protestant ethic, of which Tom is a representative but not a bland stereotype. A miller’s son struggling to save pennies in order to buy back the property his father has lost in a reckless lawsuit: from the point of view of the British babulike middle-class reader, his story is trivial. Yet the narrator makes these same readers take him as seriously as she does, because she can discern both his moral strength and his psychological complexity (“keenness of a proud nature,” “brave self-reliance”). If he fails, his story will be the stuff of tragedy—like that of his father, the bankrupt miller. Rarely if ever before had an English novelist bestowed such analytical attention

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and such spacious interiority on a character who is so limited in terms of both class standing and moral sensibility. But unlike Bob Jakin, Tom does not speak in dialect. Tom is neither precocious nor refined, though he has the makings of a successful merchant if he perseveres; yet Eliot leaves both his and Maggie’s speech unmarked even in childhood, while their parents speak in dialect. The fact that Tom was sent away to school as a boy does not seem an adequate explanation, since part of the point of that episode is to show he was a poor scholar (unlike the precocious Maggie, whose standard speech appears as the plausible result of her natural love of learning). The real reason for Tom’s unmarked speech is suggested in a passage I cited earlier, in which Eliot sets the siblings off from the “oppressive narrowness” of their environment; her aim, we recall, is to show how that narrowness “has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them.” Tom’s unmarked speech would therefore seem to indicate protagonist status rather than class status, allowing him to represent generational ascent through economic self-discipline, as Maggie represents generational ascent through moral enlightenment and genteel manners. (The contradiction between economic self-discipline and the moral enlightenment of sympathy is then worked out through the plot of sibling conflict.) Eliot’s relationship to the novel she inherited is thus complex. On the one hand, in her fictional world, innate gifts of mind and virtue run far down the social spectrum, and the scope of narrative concern embraces, at least potentially, the meanest human object. Thus, in her greatest need, Maggie is visited by an illiterate peddler with a pregnant wife back home and a favorite dog. The peddler is not simply an example of instinctive virtue among the economically marginalized; he is actually related typologically to the town’s patron saint, St. Ogg, who in ages past also helped a young virgin in distress. In the same way, Maggie Tulliver, the miller’s daughter—an unruly scamp when she was a child growing up in Dorlcote Mill—blooms by the time of adolescence into a creature of passion and intellect, whose capacity for moral enlightenment makes her a potential actor (like Dorothea Brooke) in the “onward progress of human things.” Most importantly, because we are party to her inner life from childhood, her development is fully plausible. In her failure, she will join other mute, inglorious Miltons in a country graveyard like that of Gray’s “Elegy”—to name the poem whose radical egalitarianism prefigures

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

Eliot’s novel. Yet Eliot presents that vision not from below but from above, through the lens of gentility. Years ago, Raymond Williams remarked that Eliot’s rural characters exist primarily as a “chorus” or as part of the “landscape” rather than as “active bearers of personal experience.” The difference between these characters and Eliot’s mode of narration (“the technical strategy of unified narrative and analytic tones”) therefore produces for Williams a disconnection: “a new kind of break in the texture of the novel, an evident failure of continuity between the necessary language of the novelist and the recorded language of many of the characters.” Williams makes clear that this break results from the novel form as Eliot inherited it and as she expanded it. In the much more restricted social world of a novelist like Jane Austen, he argues, “Speech and narrative and analysis  .  .  . are connected by a literary convention,” whereas Eliot’s exploration of conflicting social relationships “makes a unity of idiom impossible.”13 I have offered a specific formal description of the lost “unity of idiom” in terms of the linguistic markers that divide dialogue hierarchically between learned and demotic, print and oral, the standardized language of the educated minority and the class-marked dialect of the uneducated majority. My account does not, however, read the “landscape” characters as Williams does. Despite the passage that calls the Dodsons and Tullivers “emmet-like,” Maggie’s family often breaks forth from the choral background; Mr. Tulliver by virtue of his defiant energy, the Dodson uncles by virtue of their different economic positions, and Aunt Glegg by virtue of her surprising compassion (she, too, is one who reaches out to Maggie in her greatest need) are all capable of surprising us in plausible ways. (Bob Jakin is an exception Williams would probably accept, since Bob really belongs to a nonrealist literary tradition and so has a somewhat magical existence in relation to the socioeconomic order depicted in the novel.) To summarize: in The Mill on the Floss, the dialect speakers tend to occupy the place of the choral background, a fact that their dialect reciprocally emphasizes, but not entirely; their real difference from the characters who speak and think in the narrator’s idiom is that the unmarked speakers are active bearers of their own experience, in Williams’s terse but suggestive phrase, by virtue of either genteel status or their capacity “to rise above the mental level of the generation before them.” To an extraordinary degree, Eliot associates this capacity with education. The “choral” or background characters draw upon rumor, prejudice, custom, and misinformation to make sense of their world (Mr. Tulliver mistakes the nature of law and the usefulness of a

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public-school education; Mrs. Tulliver confuses the literal and metaphorical). Virtue for Eliot is by no means the natural accompaniment of middle-class status; but the kind of education available to young people of means and natural ability produces the possibility of an enlightened class who are the harbingers of a slowly evolving future more intelligently humane than the past. Maggie’s access to social status (and beauty), which marks her as a heroine, appears to be the natural result of her expanded moral intelligence. She ends up a suitable marriage partner for Philip Wakem, the bookish son of a lawyer, and Stephen Guest, the dashing son of the leading manufacturer, but not the love-smitten peddler Bob Jakin, who worships Maggie both for her virtue and for her ineffable status as a lady. (Tom, the one character with the capacity to bear his own experience who does not attain gentility fails in part because of his problems with learning.) Gentility—in the sense of refined behavior, if not in the sense of income—appears to be a necessary, if insufficient condition for expanded moral consciousness. This also means that in the rhetoric of the novel, Tom and Maggie are one of us. In addressing her readers from a position above her characters, the Eliot narrator invites us not just to observe Tom’s and Maggie’s struggles but to participate vicariously in them, particularly in the story of Maggie’s moral development. Eliot’s attitude toward rural wisdom, on the contrary, is similar to that of Senapati’s babus: it is a set of superstitions and unquestioned practices useful for limited purposes, rather than (as for Senapati) a form of knowing valid in itself and allied to an innate religious sense. The stress on education as moral enlightenment brings us back to Eliot’s creation of a narrative voice that is both enlightened and learned. In experiencing Maggie’s mind as rich, spacious, and complex through the narrator’s commentary, we are also aware that the narrator’s linguistic command and intellectual subtlety are congruent with hers. This is not to say that we read the narrator in specific class terms, but it is to say something about the narrator’s relationship to represented social class. On the one hand, the gap between “ordinary” speech and the narrator’s transcendent rhetoric increases and in some cases naturalizes class difference; on the other, the narrator’s “large vision” enables her to enter the minds of characters lower on the social scale than Austen, for example, ever attempted. Either way, the implied political conclusion is the same: the slow, upward course of human progress will come from above—from the class of the enlightened, or from the rare, extraordinary individuals who have emerged into that class from below. The reader is, of course,

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

interpellated into that group, summoned to experience through the moral pedagogy of reading what Matthew Arnold called the goal of culture: the attainment of a (classless) best self. Eliot’s realism thus naturalizes the position from which both visionary compassion and historical change can emanate, a position defined in part through the sociolinguistic construction of gentility. Gentility is, of course, a social identity completely absent from Senapati’s world. The elevated position or angle of Eliot’s world, therefore, makes unimaginable (and in a certain sense pointless) a view from below like Senapati’s—one that does not simply bestow compassionate understanding on the poor but that reconceives the moral and political world from their perspective.

IV. Because he refuses an authoritative discourse, Senapati’s ironic narrator is able to release his characters from the hierarchy where a view from above would insert them; it also releases his readers to position themselves among the characters in a shared view from below. Like Eliot’s narrator, he shifts viewpoints often, drifting in and out of the innermost thoughts of his characters in a playfully selective exercise of omniscience; but as a villager among villagers, without access to the moral authority and learned eloquence assumed by a narrator like Eliot’s, he does not use free indirect discourse to generate psychological interiority. What he does achieve occurs so matter of factly we hardly notice it. Here is the way he begins an account of an impoverished shopkeeper’s life: “Gopi had grown old and was no longer able to work in the fields; he had grown weaker after his wife died. His sons had not asked him to do any work, but Gopi was not a man to sit idle, doing something was better than doing nothing. Last year, he had found a way to keep himself busy. Every morning after eating a handful of rice, he would come to his shop, stay there until evening, then lock his doors with a pipelock and return to his house, one mile away” (183–84). This, and more, about a character of no importance to the plot, if we take plot in the narrow sense of the life story of Senapati’s “hero and heroine.” (Gopi Sahu merely owns the riverside shop where Champa, fleeing Gobindapur in disgrace, is then murdered by an accomplice.) As we have seen, in the view from below, narrative turns into an endless fabric; because everything matters, there are no digressions and no minor characters. In the present passage, we learn the layout and dimensions of Gopi’s shop, the food that is for sale, his developing opium habit, his daily expenses, and more; we see the

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scene from his point of view, catch his thoughts (“Gopi looked at his shop and remarked, ‘I have not been able to sell even a paisa’s worth of tobacco today’”), and overhear him singing a hymn (“Like a river / Years of life flow into the ocean. / Drunk with worldly desires / Man forgets his real home in heaven”). The hymn comments on the singer’s age and poverty, flows naturally from the long, listless day of waiting, ironically presages Champa’s appearance (she will soon stumble in wearing expensive silk and a peacock-shaped nose jewel), and links the swollen river before Gopi to the river of life that is also the river of death and obliteration (“Previously, the village of Gopalpur had stood on this spot, but it washed away in a flood on the eighth day of Bhodua in the eighth year of the reign of the kings of Puri. Although the village as such no longer existed, its name still survived” [183]). Gopi is both a figure in a petty-bourgeois system of exchange and a mortal being resting on the brink of the immortal—and so he is not a digression. The novel contains several of these quiet accountings of characters’ lives, mini biographies that drape around the pompous tale of Mangaraj and Champa and link at the edges with the names of characters who do not even appear in the story.14 I hear passages like this one as coming from the voice of an implied narrator rather than the garrulous and ironic figure who narrates most of the book. Having evacuated eloquence as completely as he has evacuated traditional authority, making both seem fatuous and self-absorbed, Senapati is able to produce intense emotional effects through a plain style, so purely denotative and bare as to appear transparent. The transparency here, I would argue, is also dialogical, since we hear the plain style not by itself but against the class-bound discourses that have fallen quiet. This style achieves its crowning effect in the chapter on Mangaraj’s trial before the British authorities. Throughout the novel, the narrator, role playing a defense lawyer, scientific expert, and keeper of accounts, has encouraged his reader to reason by strict inferences and so to question any testimony, including the narrator’s own; the whole novel has, in this sense, been an accumulation of legal evidence for presentation to its readers as a jury. His active reader is now prepared to infer the truth of Mangaraj’s case by reading with and against the testimony, which is delivered by villagers and inserted into the text: “I am told I was seven when I was married to a man who, at the time, was sixty-four. My husband sold his land and gave one hundred and sixty rupees to my father for the bride-price. At the time of the wedding, my husband suffered from asthma. This disease killed him. There was no one left in my husband’s family. My father came, sold off all my husband’s property, and brought me home. There I stayed for

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Witness no.: 3 Name: Marua Father’s name: Lakshman Tihadi Caste: Brahmin Age: Unknown Village: Gobindapur District: Cuttack

At the head of all the depositions, the government is designated “The Mighty Government of the [British East India] Company.” The narrator makes no direct comment on Marua’s testimony, though he elsewhere offers an ironic judgment on the official hierarchies of human importance. Saantani’s dearest friend, he tells us, was the only person in the village who did not cry after her death: “Struck dumb, unable to open his toothless mouth, his long bony legs outstretched, Mukunda, an old farmhand, sat against a hedge and stared blankly into space. It was he who did not cry. Are you interested in knowing his age, caste, lineage, and birthplace? Probably not, for who cares about a poor farmhand, who was also an orphan?” (146). The farmhand’s caste, lineage, and birthplace—the information that would insert him into the imperial archive as a subject of the raj—are irrelevant to our understanding him as a person. The narrator makes the polemical point in this case, but Marua’s testimony produces greater pathos because it stands alone, framed not by authorial sarcasm but by a profounder irony: the impersonal heading of the official record. The linguistic situation here is not a collision of discursive registers (as in much of the novel) but a set of statements—the narration, Marua’s deposition, the facts in the heading—that are all transparently denotative. Today we would recognize this as a documentary style. What differs and produces ironic meaning is not a difference in style but a difference in context, which comes clear if we ask whether Marua’s deposition represents a view of village life from above or below. The answer is, from below, since she tells her story in her own words, but also from above, since her story belongs now to an official dossier filed before the British judge in Cuttack, where it takes the form—by virtue of its framing but not

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five to seven years” (162). These sentences begin the servant Marua’s deposition in the case, which, as it turns out, is legally superfluous (her account of her life has no bearing on the disposition of the case). Senapati emphasizes the impersonal context of her testimony, its place in an official archive, by reproducing its grid-like headings:

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its language—as a legal document and a case history. Since we have already gotten to know the villagers as people rather than as official subjects, the pathos arises from our seeing the fragmented record of a testimony of lived experience caught within the impersonal legal archive that in one sense is the linguistic embodiment of the raj. We read the document, the trace of her words, not as the colonial administrator would (who is blind to all but the facts in the case) but as someone noticing a buried clue. The subaltern speaks eloquently from within the imprisonment of her legal subjection because she is in this sense a witness not in the Mangaraj’s case but a witness to her own life, and indeed, to the far greater “case” of which she, like all the villagers, is witness: the open secret of injustice. The fact of injustice is fundamental to Senapati’s vision at every point in the novel. Within and through a portrayal of human beings that is unsentimental, earthy, ironic, even harsh, Six Acres and a Third presents us with a view from below that constitutes, if not a specific political program, one of the necessary preconditions of any progressive politics: an uncompromising insistence on oppression as a character of all human societies. The six and a third acres of Senapati’s title, made fertile and therefore enviable because it receives the drainage of the village, brings ruin on both those who inherit it and those who expropriate it. At a more abstract level, capital and power also circulate mysteriously, by laws of patronage and interest and deceit, until relationships are transformed and upended, fortunes are made or lost, lives are raised up or destroyed. For Senapati this illicit movement brings down inevitable retribution, which he names the law of karma. This law governs in small things as well as large, as the narrator notes in comparing the fate of a little plot of land to the lives destroyed by the Koh-i-noor diamond in its fateful movement from family to family: “And yet, ever since this jewel has adorned the crown of our highly revered, greatly honored empress of India, who dwells in the White Island and who is manifest like our goddess Kamala, the fame and power of England have spread all over the globe . . . The point of this is that nothing in its rightful place is ever a source of trouble” (203). Because of its placement this passage subtly but cruelly links the queen’s diamond with the fate of Champa, the vicious and greedy woman, brutally stabbed on a shop floor in the middle of the night. If we read it ironically, the bejeweled woman becomes the emblem of the guilt of riches or, if we read it straight, of redemption from guilt. Nevertheless, in a world governed by the cataclysmic flow of capital and the sway of empire, the unjust are often spared and their victims suffer randomly. In every

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Paul L. Sawyer

instance, possession of riches is also dominance over others, a point emphasized by the character of the Saantani, the saintly opposite of the wicked concubine, who most completely embodies the novel’s positive values. As we learn from the narrator’s eulogy of her, she took the side of the weakest in any argument; she did not know money was “such a precious thing”; she wept “at the suffering of people, no matter whether they were guilty or not,” and “she treated everyone equally . . . perhaps [because] she had no desire to dominate” (144). The same statements could apply to Maggie Tulliver. Neither character ultimately becomes the bearer of her own destiny, a fact that points to one other necessary precondition for progressive politics: belief in the ability of people to create their collective history.

V. For Raymond Williams, Eliot’s later fiction follows the development of British fiction in general, in the sense that the “knowable community . . . comes to be known as a problem of ambivalent relationship: of how the separated individual, with a divided consciousness of belonging and not belonging, makes his own moral history” (Williams, 174). Maggie’s excruciating final days are a clear example of divided consciousness; had she survived the end of The Mill on the Floss, many readers have sensed, she could have made her moral history in London, as Marianne Evans did. But this outcome would have blunted the novel’s clearest political thrust, which (like Senapati’s novel) exposes the sexual oppression pervasive in traditional rural societies—a form of politics Williams does not stress in his account. Although a concept of oppression is not fundamental to Eliot’s politics, as it is for Senapati, Maggie too is a victim, borne down by communal ostracism and then by a flood that rescues and annihilates her with a single stroke. But Maggie’s divided consciousness raises a larger issue in Eliot’s fiction: the relationship between historical process and the representation of individual consciousness. Earlier, I argued that free indirect discourse tends to reify class distinctions by restricting interiority to characters who plausibly think in the standard syntax of the narrative voice. Some critics on the left have also argued that the technique is suspect because it draws attention away from the history of what Williams calls knowable communities and from the larger dynamics of power, in order to focus on the fortunes of individual characters. Are deep understandings of collective history and of individual psychology necessarily incompatible in realist

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fiction? A look back at the passage from Middlemarch with which I began suggests a partial answer for the case of Eliot. As every reader of the novel knows, the image of the squirrel’s heartbeat concludes an extended passage of free indirect discourse that evokes and analyzes Dorothea Brooke’s mental distress during the first weeks of her honeymoon in Rome. “Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself,” the passage begins; “and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty.” But soon the narrator juxtaposes Rome, the “city of visible history”—a history vast, crowded, lurid, shattered, and uncognizable—to the scene of Dorothea’s invisible history, as though in direct mutual commentary, a linkage of great and small that lends tremendous force to the final clause of the passage: “and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence.” The roar refers to the mental scenes we have just encountered—to the unfathomable vastness of human need and to Dorothea’s silent distress, mediated by the ruins of imperial Rome—but also to the narrator’s own magical ability to inhabit the consciousness of another person—a privilege strikingly lacking in the male characters who are at that moment observing and attempting to understand Dorothea. But the roar on the other side of silence is also the ruins of time as she has encountered them mutely, in museums, in the ancient fora, on sculptured walls. The passage is a figure, in other words, of the permeability of the personal and the collective—the way consciousness is everywhere traversed and marked by history, even in moments of most intense isolation.15 But the same passage can also be read differently, to suggest on the contrary that despite the immense ambition of Eliot’s project, something stands outside its scope, which is history as a site of conflictual violence. Although Dorothea’s consciousness is traversed by history at every point, she experiences the violence of Roman history as overwhelmingly alien and other. The narrator sums up her disorientation by a stunning image: the red drapery covering the Vatican for a celebration, which spreads like “a disease of the retina.” Of all the characters in the novel, Dorothea’s blindness should most resonate for the reader against her normal hyperawareness to the minds of others, but also against phrases like the one that opens the novel (“Who that cares much to know the history of man”)—in a word, against the narrator’s own epistemological struggle to make sense of history and of other minds. “The weight of unintelligible Rome” would then also stand for the “other” of representation—what the narrator cannot

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Paul L. Sawyer

absorb into her chronicle of the quotidian, with its infinitely extensible network of relationships. The other of Eliot’s historicist realism, in other words, is the violence and conflict that marks the history of “imperial Rome”—to say nothing of imperial Britain, which as we will see stands firmly implicated in the historical vision of Senapati. As it turns out, Dorothea’s power of vision and feeling will enable her to become an active bearer of her personal experience and therefore of historical process. She lives a life of social usefulness that never registers in the chronicles of time; nevertheless, “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs” (515). In Eliot’s novels, the processes of change are metonymic, that is, incremental—one person affecting another affecting another. As I pointed out in the beginning, this form of action is so thoroughly exemplified in Middlemarch’s vastness of narrative detail as to suggest that to grasp human history as a whole, one would imagine an indefinite extension of the novel’s network of metonymic relationships stretching over time and space. Moral progress is therefore evolutionary—gradual and ineluctable, as evolutionary change is for Darwin, but without a systemic dynamic of struggle and domination, the concept so central to Senapati’s view of history. For Eliot, to imagine human relationships as an infinite metonymy would also be to see our whole duty to our fellow beings. According to the final sentence of Middlemarch, the influence of deeds like Dorothea’s (a woman of wealth and privilege, in this case) is incalculably diffusive, an effect that, we assume, will proceed with many reverses but without systemic conflict. Her good characters live faithful lives but do not create history through collective action. The notion, for example, that the working classes would have a history in the sense documented by E. P. Thompson is as foreign to Eliot’s thinking as to that of the other great Victorian novelists. In the single instance of self-motivated group action in Middlemarch, some farmers attempt to block the building of a railway (they are scolded into confusion by Caleb Garth, the yeoman farmer who acts as spokesman for the traditional values of rectitude and integrity). In her political essays, Eliot warned against ill-advised attempts on the part of working-class organizations to take history into their own hands. This conclusion should surprise us only if we sense a gap between the restraint of Eliot’s political expectations and her sublime rhetoric, which works most characteristically to produce an exultant sense of omniscient sympathy: “Does not science tell us that its highest striving

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is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest?” The underlying figure in passages like this— social life as an organic totality—derives from conservative political thought; but since sympathy follows knowledge, the rhetorical question implies not only an epistemological possibility but an insistence on the unconditional quality of moral concern—an implication that puts Eliot in line with some quite radical political claims. The tension between those claims and Eliot’s political caution, so to call it, derives in part from her inherited notion of sympathy, which she pushed as far as this primarily affective conception could go.16 One does not need Senapati to discern Eliot’s political opinions. But without knowing Senapati, it would have been harder for me, given the immense scope and moral cogency of Eliot’s fiction, to imagine what a powerfully realized fictional view from below might have looked like in Eliot’s century—one that could give us something other than grim naturalism or a fantasy of uplift, and that could surprise us with wit, deepen our understanding of history, and, finally, move us. I have argued that Senapati’s novel, written half a world away from Eliot’s London, achieves such a view. For that reason, reading the novels together—in the spirit of an Arnoldian comparison, it may be—clarifies the nature and limitations of both their achievements, which are in both cases feats of moral, historical, and literary imagination. The comparison has suggested, first of all, the ways Eliot’s view from above reproduces the structural tendency of the Victorian novel to represent social life through the lens of an idealized gentility. That lens naturalizes class distinctions even as it renders them more flexible by using formal methods (standardized English dialogue and the evocation of psychic interiority) to link the acquirements of privilege (status, income, education) with the novel’s virtuous protagonists— characters whose moral imagination makes them bearers of their own history and therefore (as members of a potential elite) bearers of melioristic historical change. By contrast, Six Acres and a Third evacuates the possibility of any such elite of either privilege or ethical insight, relying instead on an ironic narrator, a documentary presentation of character, a relish for folk culture (earthiness, gossip, local legends), and sarcastic allegories of power to produce a view of human experience from below. These differences depend in part on a different relationship to the “strong culture” of Britain, filtered and idealized in the one case by a supremely informed narrator, and ironized and subverted in the other by a wily village tout. By accomplishing all this, Six Acres and a Third prefigures the dramatic developments in European modernist fiction that would achieve in different ways some

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

of the effects I have described—a fact that makes Senapati’s novel an exemplar, one might argue, of non-European modernism.17 In many ways, Senapati presents us with a picture of history more pessimistic than Eliot’s—and in places, hopeless. His good characters are so passive and disempowered that we have little way of imagining, within the parameters of the novel, where the sources of political resistance might lie; the Saantani, who eschews domination, suffers in silence and eventually wastes away to death. Whatever glimpses of hope and human connection Senapati does give us, however, belong to a political perspective taken from below, which treats seriously (as Eliot does not) the epistemological insights available to the oppressed as a group. In this regard, Senapati’s understanding of human connection is closer to Dickens’s than to Eliot’s. Instead of chains of contiguous effects, he adumbrates circulating systems of wealth and power whose buried links must be discovered and laid bare. Human complicity extends invisibly across vast distances, connecting high and low, imperial rulers and imperial subjects, Gobindapur at one end of the system and London and St. Ogg’s at the other. These connections potentially form the basis of revolutionary change from below; as he tells his genteel readers, “The word weaver denotes a stupid person, but not every stupid person is a weaver. Think of the Manchester weavers, who made the British Parliament tremble. It is thanks to them that you can present yourself as a babu.”

Notes 1. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Norton, 2000), 124. Further references to this edition will appear in the text. 2. In the most powerful recent discussion of historicist realism, Harry E. Shaw defends the realist tradition against the common complaint that it purports to represent reality as a “simple” reflection and that it therefore naturalizes a “totalizing” view of experience. Shaw argues instead that novelists like Eliot involve their readers in practices that would enable them to grasp what the processes of history would look like. For Shaw, the field of historicist realism is the quotidian, and the mechanism of representation is what he calls historicist metonymy— the network of relationships, some of them causal and some of them contiguous, that in their farthest, indefinite extent would constitute something like the movement of history. Shaw’s argument informs my own at many points. 3. In Auerbach’s survey, the first fully engaged depiction of the lower orders in European fiction occurs in Zola; his example is Germinal,

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published in 1888 (for linguistic reasons, Auerbach does not treat Russian authors). 4. My earlier essay on Six Acres and a Third appeared in Economic and Political Weekly; an expanded version, comparing Senapati with Eliot, appeared in Diacritics. The present chapter is adapted from this version. No one, least of all a literary critic, works alone. I have benefited from invaluable comments and suggestions from my colleague Satya P. Mohanty of Cornell University, who first introduced me to Senapati. 5. Throughout this chapter I have assumed Bakhtin’s conception of language as inherently social, bearing within it the traces of social contradiction and an infinite set of social exchanges. “Heteroglossia” is the English neologism for raznorechiye, literally “vari-speech” or “polydiscourse.” Bakhtin would argue that even a voice as authoritative as Eliot’s narrator fails to assert complete dominance over the voices of her characters, as I also argue below. 6. Mohanty, Introduction to Six Acres and a Third. The 2005 University of California Press edition is the first readily available English translation of Senapati’s novel; all further references appear in the text. 7. As Mohanty points out, Senapati’s prose is the Oriya of the ordinary people, the “language of the paddy fields and the village markets,” though it also incorporates a Sanskritized Oriya that suggests “an artificial elevation of tone and sentiment.” In his memoir, Senapati recalls the language of a local schoolteacher, whose methods consisted of translating ordinary Oriya sentences into learned style. For example: “One day a crow sat on the branch of a tree holding a piece of meat in the beak” becomes (in the Latinate translation by John Boulton), “One day, or in the course of one diurnal time-span, a crow, or a corvine avis, sat or became sedent, on a branch or a ramus, of a tree or arbor, holding or supporting, a piece of meat or a segment of animal matter or orifice” (Mohanty, Introduction, 16–17). For a revealing account of Senapati’s linguistic researches in their political context, see Gaganendra Nath Dash, “Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Discovery from Below: Decolonisation and the Search for Linguistic Authority.” An important figure for Senapati’s work was the British philologist John Beames, who at that time was collector of Balasore. According to Dash, colonial administrators like Beames were “not only his benefactors, but also played important roles in retaining Oriya as the medium of instruction in Orissan schools and thereby also in the construction of modern Oriyan identity” (4804). 8. All references to The Mill on the Floss, which hereafter appear in the text, are to the Norton Critical Edition edited by Carol T. Christ. 9. The recent literature on free indirect discourse is large and growing. For a standard account, see Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.

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Views from Above and Below

Paul L. Sawyer

10. The distinction between genteel characters who speak properly and formally and all others, whose speech is either marked as dialect or presented colloquially, closely parallels the distinction on the Shakespearean stage between noble characters, who speak blank verse, and the artisans, henchmen, drunken lawyers, clowns, and the like, who speak prose. In his theory of modes, or “radicals of presentation,” Northrop Frye calls the second the high-mimetic mode and the first the low-mimetic mode. For Frye, modes chart the historical succession of literary works according to the dominant social class in a particular time; thus, in the Britain of Dickens, cultural and social dominance has shifted from the aristocracy to the haute bourgeoisie. See Anatomy of Criticism, 35–43. My attempt to clarify a “view from above” through attention to formal features has a quite close analogue in Frye, which suggests to me that despite his notorious overschematism, his classifications still draw needed attention to the very deep way generic conventions filter, or “focalize,” representations of reality. 11. Ibid., 196. 12. Bob Jakin can also be read as an example of the instability of narratorial hegemony as Bakhtin conceives it. On the one hand, I am arguing that the scenes between Maggie and Bob reinforce the novel’s performance of classed moral authority by linking the narrator’s judgments and standard idiom with Maggie’s standard idiom, values, and attainment of genteel status and behavior. Maggie’s gentle rebukes of Bob’s ethical heterodoxy—his impulse to chivalrous revenge and (elsewhere) his creative sales methods—thus complement the narrator’s dig at Bob’s broken syntax and confused thinking. But a consideration of the novel’s heteroglossia might make us ask whether Maggie’s prim speeches really trump Bob’s verbal exuberance. As a trickster figure or vagrant who stands outside the Dodson world, Bob tweaks and outshines the Dodsons from below as the narrator fixes and appraises them from above; he is the narrator’s heterodox other in this sense, a voice that partially escapes the earnest narratorial regime and therefore my generalizations about Eliot’s monologism. By the same token, as a semimagical figure who is partially exempt from the rules that govern others in the rural economic system (one thinks of a Shakespearean fool, or the popular image of a Gypsy), Bob stands outside of history and its contradictions. But in yet another twist, he’s also the character who gives Tom Tulliver his start in business by a shrewd hunch about marketing possibilities—so in that respect, he does not stand outside of historical process. He complicates the novel’s moral positions but not the conservative political tendency of Eliot’s historicism. 13. Williams, 168–89. Frye’s account of the low mimetic mode is surprisingly close to Williams’s complaint about the treatment of character in

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relation to the social whole: “The root cause of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence the central tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the isolated mind, the story of how someone recognizably like ourselves is broken by a conflict between the inner and outer world, between imaginative reality and the sort of reality which is established by a social consensus” (Frye, 39). On this description, Senapati’s novel would clearly belong to a different mode from Eliot’s fiction, but the fifth and final mode in Fry’s scheme, which he calls irony, does not easily fit Six Acres and a Third; that is partly because Frye does not in fact develop the relationship idea central to my argument (“someone recognizably like ourselves”), and so associates the ironic mode with pessimistic genres like naturalism, in which the distance between readers and characters can be quite large. 14. For example: “The village women rushed in to see the gifts—Rebati, Sukuri, Sakri, Malia, Jenna’s mother, Bhima’s mother and aunt, Hagura’s mother, Sadari, Menki, Kanaka, Netajeji, Sabi, Kamali, Padiapa, Shyama’s daughter-in-law, Nalita, Bishakha, and Sumitra, the young daughter-in-law of the cowman’s family” (132). A portion of the long paragraph about the daroga’s arrival, which I have cited above, reads: “Meanwhile, Gopalia stopped working and rushed to tell Sama Sahu, his master. Sama Sahu told Hari Sahu, Hatia told Natia, Jemama told Shyama’s mother, and mother-in-law passed the news on to daughterin-law” (152). For a sensitive treatment of interiority and its lack in Senapati, see Anjaria (this volume). 15. Shaw makes a similar point about Dorothea in relation to a different passage from the same novel: “We see Dorothea trying to make sense of her feelings by using the external world as an expressive metaphor for them, but that world remains, for us, part of history. Without reference to her place in history, we cannot indeed grasp the precise nature of Dorothea’s psychological situation or participate in it” (231). 16. Eliot of course joins to her conception of sympathy a Christian conception of duty that extends, theoretically, to all human beings. The universalism recalls, among other thinkers, Spinoza, for whom the ultimate purpose of social life is to realize Christ’s second commandment (to love one’s neighbor as oneself). Spinoza also identifies the motive for moral behavior with the intellectual love of God, which only a few can achieve, and which I read as a resolutely unpsychological category. His skepticism about “sentimental” motives of course predates the Enlightenment development of sympathy as a category of social cohesion, a skepticism that might support my reading of the conceptual limitations of Eliot’s view from above. If for Eliot sympathy informs and quickens understanding, it also has the blindness of its insights. Eliot knew Spinoza well; as a young woman, she began

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Paul L. Sawyer

a translation of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and in 1856 she completed a translation of Ethics, which remained unpublished in her lifetime. See Ashton, 130, 153–54. 17. The issues raised by the contrast between Eliot’s transcendent narrator and Senapati’s ironic evacuation of stable narrative authority put into sharp relief the achievement of modernist fiction—specifically, twentieth-century texts that dispense with an authoritative narrative voice. Mark Twain’s premodernist experiment with nonstandard narration in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1886) erases a standardized narrative discourse that would have fixed Huck and Jim, however benevolently, from above. Joyce’s even more dramatic evacuation of the narrator in Ulysses liberates his characters into a richness of heteroglossia never attempted before in British literature, a linguistic economy in which individual consciousnesses are thoroughly marked by the social and the historical, and in which the plain-style thoughts of the bourgeois Leopold Bloom rub shoulders with the learned verbal metonymies of Stephen Dedalus—who as a younger version of Joyce should have been the narrator but winds up as one voice among others. If the evacuation of the traditional narrator is a hallmark of literary modernism, then Senapati, who never read Twain, Eliot, or Joyce, shares this hallmark of modernism, though his work on the whole resembles more closely the realist tradition.

Bibliography Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. London: Penguin Books, 1997. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Dash, Gaganendra Nath. “Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Discovery from Below: Decolonisation and the Search for Linguistic Authority.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 46 (2006): 4801–5. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Norton, 2000. ———. The Mill on the Floss: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contemporary Reactions Criticism. Edited by Carol T. Christ. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Sawyer, Paul L. “An Oriya Village and the Battle of Plassey: Senapati’s Allegory of the Raj.” Economic and Political Weekly 41.46 (2006): 4782–88. ———. “Views from Above and Below: George Eliot and Fakir Mohan Senapati.” Diacritics 37.4 (2007): 56–77.

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Senapati, Fakir Mohan. Six Acres and a Third. Translated by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St. Pierre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Shaw, Harry E. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

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Views from Above and Below

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Two Classic Tales of Village India: The Realist Epistemology of Chha Mana A tha G untha and Godaan Himansu S. Mohapatra

I

f, as the poststructuralists argue, the real cannot be accessed except through texts, then realism, in the sense of an engagement with a mind-independent world, and textuality would appear to be at odds with each other. Such an opposition would, however, be a false one, and it is bred by an outmoded positivist epistemology. The “what” of the narrative, its thematic purpose as well as its wider philosophical and social vision, cannot be narrowly tied to its verbal construction. Granted, the world comes to us in the shape of stories, but I wish to show how some stories write the world in a more realistic way than others precisely by providing a better “epistemic access”1 to it. This access is, of course, theory mediated and not innocent. The present chapter, concerned with a realist auditing of fiction, will attempt to demonstrate its thesis by reading Fakir Mohan Senapati and Premchand from a comparative perspective. Further, it will seek, through this comparative reading, to unravel the differentiation within the tradition of Indian literary realism to which both the authors owe their allegiance.2 The texts of choice for this enterprise are bound to be Senapati’s Chha Mana Atha Guntha3 (1897–99) and Premchand’s Godaan4 (1936), these being not only the representative novels of the

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Economic and Political Weekly in 2008.

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two writers but also the best known exemplars of social realism in the Indian context.5

Though widely regarded as watersheds in the development of novelistic realism in their respective languages, Oriya and Hindi, Chha Mana and Godaan employ different realistic methods with which to portray a primarily rural India. A proper comparative analysis of these two novels should then attempt to arrive at a finely calibrated view of their techniques of realist representation. The Lukácsian opposition between naturalism and realism comes to mind here. Proposing as it does a distinction between a realism that is primarily one of descriptive accuracy and a realism that is more analytical, it is a helpful starting point for analysis. But such a critical procedure can have a much wider resonance by drawing on the kind of philosophical realism developed by philosophers like Quine, Putnam, and Boyd, and as applied to literary analysis by Satya P. Mohanty.6 The question this critical procedure asks of novels is not whether they are just good and recognizable pictures of the world, but also whether they are good causal explanations of the same. This chapter, therefore, proposes to evaluate Chha Mana and Godaan in terms of the degrees and modes of “epistemic access” they provide to their referents by enabling an understanding of the microstructures of the social world they depict. This is a new way of doing comparative literary analysis based on the idea of what Mohanty has called in a recent essay “the dynamics of literary reference.”7 An exploration into realist epistemology in the Indian literary context is best undertaken by recalling a distinction that Amiya Dev has made between the discourse-driven early Indian novel and its mimesisdominated later avatar.8 Dev is of the opinion that the development of the Indian novel can be understood in terms of the gradual disappearance of “discourse” in favor of what he calls a “composite mimesis” (185). This may well be the trajectory of the Indian novel from Chha Mana to Godaan, but I would like to argue that the gain in mimesis in Godaan goes along with a certain loss of analytical depth. The real achievement of Chha Mana can be appreciated, I believe, if we see its self-conscious narrative discourse as the main force behind its attempt to reorient the reader by clarifying connections among social phenomena that ignorance or ideological mystification has obscured. This epistemological work characteristically takes the form of (literary) postmodernist frame breaks without that accompanying (theoretical) postmodernist skepticism about truth claims. Dev himself amplifies

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the relationship between fictional self-consciousness and realism when he sets out to show how they are complementary to one another in the early Indian novel. As he says, “The novel is fiction only by definition, but its main purpose is truth. And that purpose will be defeated if the reader does not recognize its contents. Thus the mimesis needs breaks which are filled up by discourse. The early Indian novel is in particular need of these breaks and thus of this discourse, for it is a new genre and is as such quite self-conscious” (185). But then Dev does not seem to draw out the revolutionary implications of his illuminating comment. If he is right about the analytical, truth-telling function of discourse in the early Indian novel, he is surely not on firm ground in suggesting a seamless evolutionary logic whereby discourse is sublimated into mimesis. Besides, his definition of realism—which he equates with mimesis—as an objectified process of representation is partial and inadequate. Realism, to quote him, is “an unsentimental depiction of life’s crassness, an un-ameliorated presentation of experience, an objective and adjectiveless description of life processes” (185). This positivist emphasis on “adjectiveless description” and its conflation with “objectivity” seems more like an account of naturalism than of Luckácsian realism. The account is certainly not true of the realism of Chha Mana where the empirical datum, the so-called unproblematic referent, is brought into play by an active epistemological reorientation of the reader to the underlying socioeconomic currents and processes, to what the scientific realists describe as the “causal joints” of the world. Chha Mana’s realism depends less on adjectiveless description than on an engaged attitude, an attitude that deliberately draws attention to all our habitual “adjectives” so that they—together with their social origins—can be analyzed critically. For instance, the referent of a certain significant narrative section in Chha Mana, which is the source of its most eloquent anticolonial social commentary (Chapter 12, titled “The Asura Pond”), is colonial relations. Its counterpart in an earlier and much discussed work of social realism, namely Rev. Lal Behari Day’s Bengal Peasant Life (1874), which served in some ways as a model for Senapati’s novel, is the timeless, orientalized Indian village. Insofar as it is derived from an ideological act of suppressing colonial relations, it is far from being an innocent referent itself. Thus, as Mohanty has rightly observed in his introduction to Six Acres and a Third, the writing of Chha Mana is a rewriting where a central norm of realist writing—plain and unvarnished presentation of social and economic reality—is being audaciously revised to get at the core of that reality. In other words,

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Two Classic Tales of Village India

Himansu S. Mohapatra

referencing can be both simple and complex and can work as much to mystify and obscure as to clarify. That passage from obscurity to clarity suggests, as Boyd says, a “process of referential refinement,”9 which has nothing to do with the linguistic transparency that critics like Raymond Williams have tended to see as the strength of the nineteenth-century British realist novel.10 Thus an advance in the referential function of literary discourse of Chha Mana is not irreconcilable with the quality of self-reflexivity that a number of recent commentators on the novel have noted.11 This is not to say that Godaan subscribes to this positivist fantasy of pure description any more than Chha Mana does. But it can be said that the distinction between a mimetic realism and an analytical realism that two classic tales of village India help to mobilize has a lot to account for whether or not we have a genuine analysis and critique of social relations. Though overtly concerned with the margins of society, Premchand’s straightforward narration precludes awareness of the subtle inscriptions of the excluded in the dominant discourse. Senapati’s zigzagging narrative discourse articulates a rich critique of social power even as it provides a richly metaphorical articulation of what lies at the bottom of the social pyramid. What follows is a reasonably detailed and fairly substantial analysis of the two orientations of realist epistemology, top down and bottom up, as manifested in these two novels.

Godaan: About Below Godaan is a compelling story of village India. It has always been read as a memorable record of rural life in India, caught between tradition and modernity, between bondage and freedom. For Premchand’s critics this novel marks a break from what they call “idealistic realism” (adarshatmak yatharthavad) to “realistic realism”12 (yatharthavadi yatharthavad). The latter term is an acknowledgment of the fact that in this novel Premchand has finally moved toward an allegorization of proletarian India. While there is no doubt about the author’s propoor and progressive sympathies, it is also crucial for us to recognize this as an ideologically dictated position. There are other elements in the author’s ideological universe that point to its unsettled and ambivalent nature. For instance, the novel gives evidence of Indian society’s cheerful habituation to colonial modernity in the early decades of the twentieth century. Colonial presence is very much taken for granted by the novel. The assimilative politics that is at work in it strips the colonial presence of its alien character.13 This causes the society pictured in Godaan to split less and less along cultural or civilizational

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lines. Maybe this also explains why reference in Godaan works to eschew analysis, except of the individual psychologizing kind, in favor of description and portraiture. The novel contains the most powerful evocation of social reality imaginable. But without the ironic analysis and anatomizing of it, this inhospitable social reality seems to be perceived by the characters in the novel as a kind of fait accompli. In other words, social analysis seems to have taken a back seat in the novel to individual character analysis. Irony in Godaan, as in Premchand’s other major works, seems to have a reduced scope, being restricted to the limited interpersonal space between characters in the novel. Though used to stunning effect by the novelist as an instrument of revelation of conduct, it does not seem to radiate from or penetrate into the center of the narrative discourse of the novel. Take the representative example of the encounter between the zamindar, Rai Sahib, and the peasant, Hori, early in the novel. The former lectures Hori about the evil of the zamindari system in particular, and about the evil of wealth in general. He tells Hori how his greedy relations profess love of him only for his wealth: “Our parasitic existence has crippled us. . . . Sometimes I think the government would do us a big favour by confiscating our lands and making us work for a living. . . . We’ve fallen prey to the system, a system that’s completely destroying us. Until we’re freed from the chains of wealth, the curse will keep hanging over our heads and we’ll never reach those heights of manhood which are life’s ultimate goal” (26). While he is lecturing away thus in an altruistic vein, a servant brings him news that “the men on forced labour have refused to work” (26) and will not continue if they are not given food. At this he leaves his philosophizing mode to return instantly to his habitual whip-cracking mode. And he snaps at the man, “‘Come with me,’ he declared, eyes bulging. I’ll put those troublemakers in their place. They have never been given food in the past. Why this new demand today? They’ll get the anna a day they always get, and they’ll damn well do the work whether they like it or not’” (27). Expectedly enough, Hori is left bewildered by this sudden outburst of anger, wondering about its contradiction with “all this talk about right and goodness” (26) that went before. This is fine irony by all accounts if by irony is meant the discrepancy between the seeming and the real. But being confined to an interpersonal space, this fails to rise to a higher level and take on the power and force of narrative irony, which implicates the reader more fully. Those links, nudges, and dodges of the narrator in Six Acres, which produce the active reader, leading her to identify

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Two Classic Tales of Village India

Himansu S. Mohapatra

connections between disparate and discrete phenomena, are missing here. Irony, as Paul L. Sawyer observed in a recent article, works in Chha Mana to bring separated “epistemological fields”—one learned, print-literate and babu, and the other folk, oral and peasant—into contact and collision. It is true, of course, that Six Acres neither personalizes the encounter between the exploiter and the exploited nor is seen as imputing agency to those from the margins who are among the exploited. In this sense Hori (or Dhaniya) is a rounded and realized character with an inner life, a function surely of the “composite mimesis” that Dev has talked about. But the characters also fail to become the vehicle of an authorial mobilization of irony with manifold ramifications. An analysis of the spatial configurations in the novel shows the same flawed way of seeing which presents a fragmentary perception of the social whole, leading to a mixing up of symptoms with their social causes. That is to say, the kaleidoscopic shifts between the cityscapes of Lucknow and the villages of Belari and Semari in Godaan are descriptive triumphs. But they do not involve an analytical comparison of the two social spaces. The locales are widely spaced out and probably would have run away in opposing directions if not held together within the covers of a book. The economic relationship of rent and revenue that clearly exists between them is suggested, not dialogized.14