8 November 2021
Jinan Ashraf, Dublin City University
Few studies record a quantifiable filiation between Joyce and India, and for this reason, Joyce remains a ‘spectral’ presence on the landscape of literary traditions broadly construed in English within Indian Anglophone writing.[1] While several studies have acknowledged the comparative colonial modernisms of James Joyce and Mulk Raj Anand (one of the modern pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction) the present article looks to demonstrate direct allusions to Joyce’s legacy in shaping Anand’s ideas of fiction in the early twentieth-century.[2] The article also comments on Joyce’s legacy on the forgotten and silenced makers of Indian modernisms: late colonial women writers writing from the fringes as they negotiate and push back against the gendered authorities of the modern novel. Early pioneers of the modern Indian novel in English such as Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zahir visited the West and may have been introduced to James Joyce from networks/mentors during their studies abroad;[3] Anand, for example, records his experiences and interactions with—and varying kinds of confrontations and conflicts within— the Bloomsbury group in a memoir titled Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981). Indian Muslim avant-garde women writers such as Rashid Jahan, on the other hand, would have come into second-hand contact with ideas of fiction being shaped by European modernisms through her friendship with writers who had visited Europe such as Zahir and Ahmed Ali. These writers would constitute a network of progressive Anglophone writing that would draw from the literary techniques of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in attempting to represent the individual mind and its struggle even as these writers push back against the imperialism of the British Raj and the social hierarchies and caste, class, and gender inequalities in late colonial India. Modernism in Indian literature may be said to follow in the tradition of its European counterpart, attempting to break from the tyranny of the realism and naturalism of the Renaissance era (1857), and striving to achieve an ‘innerness’ [4]in the spiritual quest for form and technique. This was accompanied by a relentless pursuit of the ‘right word’ and the right kind of ‘poetic’ language and vocabulary needed to satiate the increasing needs of expression among artists— needs that were no longer answered by the realist trend in fiction. Where the European counterpart placed attention on the metropolitan city, the emphasis in Modernist India was upon the question of ‘modernity’ in the villages. The rise of humanistic and progressive ideals ‘weaned’ writers off romanticism[5], shifting the focus instead upon figures of outcastes— prostitutes, coolies, untouchables, labourers—which became a new source of novelistic sustenance. A parallel emphasis on what Rimbaud would call ‘the inner reality’ came to be echoed in writers in the Post-Renaissance modern age in Indian literature in English. There was in the Modernist Indian writer in English the same pangs from such questions as ‘What technique or form would now suit the contemporary writer’s motives?’ There was a felt need to depart from the derivative models that Renaissance writers in India had inherited and imitated— models imported, tried and tested from the West— against the backdrop of a wave of nationalist and reform movements. Transformations on the literary scene in India were also underway with Modernist women writers such as Ismat Chugtai, Iqbalunnisa Hossain and Rashid Jahan beginning to subvert patriarchal, imperial, and caste/class based ideological blueprints of women’s subjectivity in Renaissance writing. Continue reading “Joycean Legacies in Indian Modernism” →
The Modernist Review 