Ten Theses on the Idea of Indian Literature | Preetha Mani (Rutgers University)

Lecture from Preetha Mani, Assistant Professor of South Asian Literatures, Rutgers University

Abstract

Based on my recent book, this talk compares Hindi and Tamil literature to explore the feasibility and durability of the idea of Indian literature and its capacity to collect diverse literary and linguistic strategies and aims beneath the auspices of a single rubric. Hindi and Tamil writers were active theorists who claimed the literary as the terrain on which to define and contest the postcolonial condition. Their theorizations created new forms of aesthetic affiliation between readers, writers, and texts by framing how texts should be positioned and received. The affiliations they forged were tied to the fissures of language and region yet also exceeded these fissures through the promise of readerly communion in multilingualism and translation. The unrealizability of this promise breathes life into the idea of Indian literature and its ambition to circumvent the politics of language, while linking literature to nation.