Prof Gauri Viswanathan

Professor Gauri Viswanathan is the Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities and Director of the South Asia Institute at Columbia University. Her book, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) explores how English studies in India, introduced by the British colonizers, was a form of political control and exploitation. Her second book, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998) won several prestigious academic prizes including the Harry Levin Prize for Comparative Literature. She is co-editor of the prize-winning book series South Asia Across the Disciplines and, in 2017-2018, she was honoured with the Mark van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia University.

Anvita Budhraja: What was the move like, back in the day, from an English education in India to studying (and teaching) Literature in the US?

Gauri Viswanathan: It feels like a long time ago now and my recollections of the move are blurry. I came specifically to the US to explore the history of Indian literary education, and the programme of studies I developed for myself kept me in touch with the formation of my own education. Indeed, the continuing hold of colonial cultural ideologies on Indian education, favoring English over vernacular languages, prompted me to want to study that history in much greater depth.

AB: You have had the chance to study/research/teach/talk in other English-speaking countries? What are some approaches to the study of English or of Literature that you perhaps found there?

GV: The US is the only other English-speaking country in which I have spent considerable time. Curricular freedom is the one major difference that I can identify as marking the teaching of literature in the US, whereas in India the syllabus was much more rigidly defined, and pedagogy rarely veered from what was on the syllabus. In other words, there was very little encouragement of reading outside the syllabus, which in my time at least was quite antiquated and followed a strict adherence to study of English (i.e., British) literature. Even American literature found little place in the syllabus. Of course, the situation has changed enormously in recent years, and the Indian syllabus has liberalized itself to the extent that “English Literature” encompasses the study of Indian languages and literatures. When I taught a workshop in Kerala last year, my university students told me that they hardly read the literature of England in their courses anymore, and instead read a lot more Indian literature than was certainly true in my time. This is a welcome change!

AB: What do the terms “Indian Writing in English” and “World/Global Literature” immediately bring to mind?

GV: They are not synonymous in my view, though curricula framing in US universities would like us to believe they are interchangeable terms. I see Indian Writing in English as evolving out of a multitude of vernacular literary traditions—what Raja Rao described as the challenge of conveying in a language not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. World/Global Literature immediately suggests literature outside the Anglo-American world, but it doesn’t necessary convey the unique characteristics of individual literatures from different regions of the world or the multiple literary strands both oral and written that comprise their writing. Global Literature is a convenient term to signal literatures written in languages other than English.

AB: What sparked your interest in charting the uneven course of English studies in India during the British times? (I would love to know a little about how Masks of Conquest developed!)

GV: I have already spoken above about what motivated me to study the history of English education, specifically in relation to my own education at an Indian university. When I began researching the topic, I expected that I would be undertaking a straightforward study of the implementation of colonial educational policies in India. But as I went deeper into the history, comparing it with educational history in England, I discovered something that I did not expect to find: that English studies had an earlier provenance in India than in England, where classical studies still predominated at a time that the study of English literature was being instituted in Indian schools and universities.

AB: You argue that the study of English was introduced in the Indian colony in a way that “humanistic functions traditionally associated with the study of literature - for example, the shaping of character or the development of the esthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking - are also essential to the process of sociopolitical control.” How has this affected the kind of writing produced in India (in English) during and directly after the British rule?

GV: I am not sure if a particular kind of writing was shaped by this idea of humanism so much as a set of attitudes that discriminated between literature written in English and literature written in the vernacular languages. “Sociopolitical control” translated into admiration and exaltation of the English language—as a manifestation of the highest qualities of sensibility and character—and condescension towards indigenous literatures as lacking in those qualities. Who can forget Salman Rushdie’s unforgivable remark a decade ago that the body of work created by Indian writers writing in English is far stronger and more important than the literature in vernacular languages?

AB: What do you see as the relationship between India as a postcolonial nation and the state of Indian writing in English in the last ~70 years?

GV: This question is too broad for me to answer in a compact way. Suffice it to say that reflections on India’s colonial history continue to preoccupy Indian writers, often expressed through experimentations with language, style, idiom, and structure.

AB: Is the bildungsroman the quintessential genre for the postcolonial state coming of age in the late 20th century? (Either for its coming-of-age narrative or for “inserting the mature individual into the accepted social spaces of the modern nation-state”)

What do you see as the appeal (or not) of this particular genre for Indian writing?

GV: The genre may have appeal to a writer like Vikram Seth, who writes the quintessential bildungsroman in A Suitable Boy, or to Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children. But I would caution against generalizing about the dominance of the genre, as Indian writing is much too eclectic and varied to be reduced to a single form. Contemporary Indian novels are much more responsive to changing social norms and transformations in urban life.

AB: You teach/have taught a class on Indian Writing in English and I noticed that you taught mainly prose writing. Is that representative of the state of Indian writing (in the past and today)? What about Indian poetry in English or even drama? Further, you (and others) have observed the hegemonic role of the novel in developing the Western canon. Do you see that being repeated in India, in the Indian canon as it were?

GV: India has rich poetic traditions. My poet friends often say that while poetry is devalued in the US, in India poets are energized by the love that people have for poetry, which is far from devalued in the Indian context. Yes, it is true that my course predominantly consists of novels and prose writings. But I have taught poetry collections, and in fact a volume of feminist Urdu poetry I taught several years, We Sinful Women, has been recently choreographed by a former student in my class, who is herself an accomplished Kathak dancer. Her dance troupe performed the work two years ago, and I was so impressed and moved by the performance that I have organized another performance of We Sinful Women at Barnard College and the South Asia Institute next April. Inter genre movements are much more common now, and it is possible to see novels being adapted as plays, poetry adapted as dance-dramas, memoirs doubling as novels and vice versa. So no, I do not see the novel as a hegemonic genre in the Indian canon.

AB: How do you think, through your scholarship, has Indian writing adapted the novel in its own postcolonial way? What kind of a response does Indian writing pose to the western novel/canon?

GV: It depends on the context. Indian novels based on the British canon (such as Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young, which is a novelistic adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear) may not necessarily have much impact in enlarging the scope of canonical readings, unless such works are incorporated into the curriculum and made into a teaching point. But for Indian readers such adaptations serve to breathe new life into their received literary education and enlarge the possibilities of reading British literature in the context of contemporary concerns, such as (in the case of Taneja’s novel) the ongoing presence of misogyny and patriarchal dispossession of women.

AB: What place do you see for Indian writing in English in the current “global” market?

GV: It is hard to generalize. Rushdie opened up interest in Indian writing that peaked in the 1990s, with writers like Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, receiving considerable attention. Exuberant reviews such as that by Anthony Burgess of Ghosh’s work, which lamented the decline of the English language in Western fiction, played no small role in the expansion of the global literary field. But it is a crowded market now, and it’s highly likely that literature has niche audiences in the way that other genres like films do. As far as translation goes, novels like Perumal Murugan’s novels (translated from Tamil) are not readily available in the West.

AB: What effect does English as the de facto language of globalization have on translated works and/or on literature in other languages in India?

GV: Again, this question is too broad for a compact answer, and I am going to give a very short answer out of sheer exhaustion! I must also get back to my student papers. All I can say here is that English has been adapted by Indian writers as a language internal to India rather than strictly a foreign one. Indian literatures in other languages often have to compete with English-language writing, but the field is robust enough to allow for varied forms of creativity, matching a diverse readership.

AB: My thanks, Professor. It was a pleasure talking to you.

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