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- Convenors:
-
Heiko Frese
(Heidelberg University)
David Shulman (Hebrew University)
- Location:
- C401
- Start time:
- 25 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This interdisciplinary panel aims at locating historical and literary fissures, thresholds, but also continuities and syntheses in processes of South Indian literary production in the 19th century. Contributions should focus on contents and contexts of vernacular literary work(s) and discourses.
Long Abstract:
The nineteenth century saw profound innovations in all the literatures of southern India, in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. Normally, these changes are keyed to the introduction of Western genres, such as the modern novel and the short story, although antecedents to these genres exist from medieval times in all these literatures. What, then, constitutes a "modern" sensibility expressed in the nineteenth-century literary forms? Is there only one dominant modernity or, as Narayana Rao has suggested, might we speak both of an organic or indigenous modernity and a "colonial" one, the latter considerably impoverished in relation to the former? How can we begin to think about the deeper ways of reading the great nineteenth century poets such as Minaksisundaram Pillai in Tamil or Gurujada Appa Ravu in Telugu? What can we learn from a comparative perspective that takes into account each of the literatures just mentioned?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The paper revolves around forms of literature in Telugu journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Paper long abstract:
Early Telugu journals were hybrid and very heterogeneous platforms for all kinds of texts. Often published by adventurous individuals, some came up with new ideas and formats, whereas others presented orthodox views and traditional approaches. This - of course - also applies to Telugu and Telugu literature: Western genres entered the stage, the first Telugu novels were serialized, short stories were printed. But was this a 'dominant discourse', or a rather irrelevant experiment, overestimated by Western historical perspectives? How do journals represent the encounter of Western and traditional pieces of literature?
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a close reading of parts of the autobiography of Chellapilla Venkata Sastry, to explore its multiple voices and individual identities, and investigates questions of self in a person who believes in astrology.
Paper long abstract:
Writing an autobiography is usually considered a modern development in India, under the influence of English education. But there is one important exception to this generally accepted idea. Sometime around 1900 Chellapilla Venkata Sastri (1870-1950), a famous Telugu poet, not formally educated in English, wrote his autobiography in verse, entitled, jataka carya, (Acts of a Horoscope). A significant aspect of this autobiography is that it was written in the third person, as the life-story of a person born on the same day, to the minute, as the author, known intimately to the author, but at the same time other than him. This Borgesian twist gives Jataka carya, a strangely post-modern quality, a bit of a surprise to occur in Telugu poetry, earlier than the emergence of what is usually called the modern period.
Venkata Sastri, along with his friend Tirupati Sastri, invented a literary performance of skill and memory called satavadhana. The two poets took questions from a hundred scholars assembled to challenge them and answered them in verse, one line at a time. One poet spoke one line and the other poet gave the next until the verse is completed. At the end both the poets recited from memory, all hundred poems they had orally composed. With this amazing feat of memory and skill of extempore versification, the twin poets who operated as if they had one mind between them amazed their audiences and took the literary world by storm.
Paper short abstract:
Tiricirapuram Minatcicuntaram Pillai, the doyen of 19th-century Tamil poets, is usually seen as a pure traditionalist writing in the medieval genres. I will show that the forms he has chosen mask a rather ironic, modern sensibility.
Paper long abstract:
We tend to regard the Tamil literary production of the 19th century as a story of decay on the one hand-- the fading away and dessication of the medieval cirrilakkiyam genres-- and of rapid innovation, on the basis of the newly introduced European models, on the other. Thus there is the ongoing search, barren for the most part, for the "first Tamil novel" and for "short stories" in the Western mode. This narrative (similar to that told for other South Asian languages) distorts a reality of much deeper creative engagement with the new realities of the 19th century, including the work of poets of genius who transformed the medieval genres-- far from worn out in expressive terms-- into subtle statements of a modern, skeptical and ironic awareness. I will show how Tiricirapuram Minatcicuntaram Pillai, the most prominent of the 19th-century Tamil poets, used traditional forms to articulate a complex vision of the modern world.