The conference opened on the morning of 25 January with an
innovative non-ceremony on the lawns of the residence of the pro-Vice-Chancellor, where
the participants assembled had a cup of coffee, and informally went round hailing old
friends and making new acquaintances. In the first session, Professor Vanikar welcomed the
participants, commended the organizing efforts of Professor Devy and his team, and
emphasized the need for us in India to fashion a critical idiom of our own.
Keynote Address
As if in
direct response, the keynote address by Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah was entitled
"Towards the Rudiments of an Indian Approach to Literature". With his unique
blend of an astoundingly wide range of scholarship and a lively and original critical
approach, CDN spoke of the rasa theory in its many worldly and spiritual
dimensions, and compared the sahridaya with Helen Gardner's concept of a reader.
He distinguished between five categories of reader, from the alpabuddhi (the simpleton)
through the sadharana jana (the average man, following received opinions), the bhakta
(the enthusiast or the devotee), and the pandita (the scholarly pedant) to the acharya
(the practised and discriminating reader). He spoke of roopabahulya (saturation)
as witnessed in "the tigritude" of Blake's tiger, of the Buddha and T.S. Eliot,
of Hamlet and Satyakama, and of Prospero, Lear and the Indian value of suffering. In
conclusion, he declared, we Indians had more in common with Plato than with Aristotle.
Professor
V.Y. Kantak, presiding, said that the common reader's experience of rasa was
preferable to the intellectual response of the academic critic. As for the problem of how
to read many literatures together as "Commonwealth Literature," he said an
analogy was to be found in the political life of India as a nation. The question in both
cases was how to remain distinct while having things in common.
The next
session comprised a panel discussion on "Issues in Contemporary Indian
Literature." Gulammohammod Sheikh spoke on Gujarati literature, Meenakshi Mukherjee
on Bengali literature, Harish Trivedi on Hindi literature, E.V. Ramakrishnan on Malayalam
literature and Deepak Kannal on Marathi literature.
These five
presentations were followed by a brief but lively discussion. D. Srinivasan presided.
Themes and Authors
In the
afternoon, papers were read on a wide range of subjects in two parallel sessions. In one
of these, chaired by O.P. Joneja, V. Sam Sahayam pointed out thematic as well as close
verbal similarities between Anita Desai and D.H. Lawrence, G.J.V. Prasad offered a
manifold |
problematization of how to teach English literature, and M.F.
Salat spoke on aspects of Canadian literature. In the other session, chaired by Harish
Trivedi, S.K. Sareen gave a comprehensive account of South Asian love poetry, Sarla Palkar
compared the treatment of the self and the other in Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines
and Nuruddin Farah's Maps, Sudha Pandya charted the voyages of self-discovery
made by three expatriate writers of Asian origin now living in Canada, and Rani Dharker
analysed the interplay of the folk and the modern in two plays based on the same
folk-tale, by Grish Karnad and Chandrashekher Kambar respectively.
The first
day of the conference concluded with a dinner for the participants hosted by the Mayor of
Vadodara at the picturesque Ajawa Gardens, about twenty kms from the city. Here a musical
fountain outscored even its famed counterpart at the Vrindavana Gardens in that other
stronghold of commonwealth literature, Mysore, and log-fires burnt bright spreading a warm
glow while participants feasted under Orion which shone equally bright overhead. On the
drive back, budding as well as seasoned scholars of English, Commonwealth and Sanskrit
literatures soulfully sang Hindi and Gujarati songs in a tragic or nostalgic vein.
On the
morning of 26 January, papers were again presented in two parallel sessions, now largely
by younger scholars whose academic ability was fully as impressive as their enthusiasm. In
one session, chaired by Sudha Pandya, Rita Kothari led off with an analysis of two
contrasted representations of female sexuality in Vijay Tendulkar's Shantata and Gidhare.
Krishna Kumar spoke of immigration as renewal in the context of Canada, with particular
reference to the non-assimilationist writing of Vassanji (whom he had recently met). Neeti
Singh dissected the first volume of poems by Ranjit Hoskote so incisively as to suggest to
some listeners that her paper might be better than his poems.
In the same
session, Shubhra Pathak made a strong plea for teaching Indian literature in English
translation in undergraduate courses rather than culturally alien and bewildering
specimens of remote and remoter literature such as the Canadian.
Charu Maini
offered a close reading of Atwood's poems from a broadly humanist rather than a
reductively feminist point of view. Preeta Menon compared manifestations of the dominant
patriarchal ideology in depictions of the roles of women in Attia Hosain's Sunlight on
a Broken Column and Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence. (It is regretted
that a report of the other parallel session cannot be provided, in which A.P. Mcwan, Dilip
Rajshirke, Sujata Shuke, Nancy George, Kennedy and Seema Goyal were scheduled to read
papers.) |
