Classics of Modern South Asian Literature.

• Author: SHAPIRO, MICHAEL C.
• Position: Review

Classics of Modern South Asian Literature. Edited by RUPERT

SNELL and I. M. P. RAESIDE. Khoj: A Series of Modern South Asian Studies, vol. 6. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 1998. Pp. viii + 257. DM 138.

In the special June 23-June 30, 1997 issue of the New Yorker, published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, Salman Rushdie mused at some length on the state of creative writing in South Asia in the post-independence period. He opined that to a considerable degree the only literature to have come out of the subcontinent in this period that is competitive on the wide stage of world literature is that written in English. It is not simply that literature composed in vernacular Indian languages has a difficult time finding a worldwide audience, Rushdie was saying (or seeming to say), but that, with few exceptions, vernacular literature is qualitatively not up to the standard of the best that is being written in English.

It is easy enough to dismiss Rushdie's manifesto as a glib and abrasive put-down of South Asian vernacular literature from someone not previously known as a student or critic of South Asian languages and literatures, with the notable exception of English. Without carrying out detailed textual and literary analysis of works of vernacular literature as originally written, it is surely premature to exclude them from the canon of worthwhile and important contemporary works. Still, however, Rushdie's philippic does serve to raise important questions. Is it possible for a work written in a vernacular Indian language, regardless of its artistry or technical proficiency, to obtain a readership among people ignorant of the particular Indian language in which the work was written? Is writing in a vernacular language, given the ready availability of a "global" language such as English, in and of itself symptomatic of an intellectual parochiality that significantly reduces the possibility that a work written in that lang uage might attain some degree of quality? Is it possible for a work of a "regional" South Asian language such as Panjabi or Malayalam to attain a kind of classic status only within a restricted cultural and geographic sphere? These are not questions that are unique to South Asian literature. There is no apparent reason why they would not also pertain to Icelandic, Yiddish, Japanese, and Portuguese, each of which has been the language of one or more Nobel Prize-winning authors.

It is foolish...