The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India.

• Author: Lutgendorf, Philip

The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India. By LEELA PRASAD. Ithaca: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. ix + 206. $19.95.

Indian storytellers, both oral and literary, have never lacked "audacity" in narrating tales. In the Rdmayana tradition, with which I am most familiar, there is a long and well-known history of retellings by authors who depart, sometimes radically, from the story's supposed literary archetype, often in response to powerful ideologies rooted in caste or sectarian identity. But under the cultural assault, systemic racism, and economic exploitation of some two centuries of British rule, stories often became political acts, as in the many recastings of Mahabharata episodes in the early twentieth century that evaded press censorship while offering allegories of heroic resistance to tyranny. And for every famous and influential teller or author there were innumerable others--like the four featured in Leela Prasad's The Audacious Raconteur--who despite remarkable talents and achievements did not gain wide renown, but whose everyday acts of audacity expressed in their own way the unbridled richness of the Indian imagination, modeling, in Prasad's words, "the unsubjugable person--whose sovereignty over the territory of self, culture, and art is unassailable" (p. 8).

If, to recall the subtitle of Ashish Nandy's groundbreaking 1983 study The Intimate Enemy, many South Asians experienced and engaged in "loss and recovery of self through the colonial encounter, Prasad's emphasis is decidedly on the "recovery" side, showing how her four subjects, all active between 1857 and 1931, created often pioneering work in a range of languages and a variety of genres--folktale, biography, history, ethnography--while subtly negotiating their own relationship to colonial authority and its hegemonic tongue. Although "recovery" may suggest an abject subject--whereas Prasad sees self-possession and "rambunctious creativity" in hers (p. 9)--it also exemplifies the book's methodology, which regularly focuses on the process by which Prasad herself discovered and, to the extent possible, "recovered" the four raconteurs, tracing their lives and writings through archives, locales, realia, and (in three of the four cases) interactions with their descendants, facilitated by newspaper inquiries, internet searches, and social media postings. Thus the book, even as it digresses to consider such topics as the panoptic gaze of colonial anthropology, its fictive "science" of folktale analysis, and its subordination and exploitation of the "native scholar," also...