Critical Discourse in Gujarati/Introduction essay: Difference between revisions

{{Heading| Critical Discourse in Gujarati: A Vikalpa Vachana. | Sitanshu Yashaschandra. }}

A study of critical discourse in Gujarati (or any other) language does not deal with a pre-defined, stabilized and given object of observation. It deals with dynamic, sometimes unstable, cultural and linguistic situations in and around us. These situations or texts have their own and many ways of generating meaning. These texts interact internally among themselves and with their external contexts. Hence the task of its historiographer is to construct carefully a mobile post of observation, matching the mobility of those situations and historical processes.

The present anthology is an effort towards meeting such a task: to understand the dynamics of critical discursive situations in Gujarati literature and to carefully construct a mobile post of observation that matches those dynamics.  To avoid any fixed point of view, immobile either at our present moment or at any single moment of the past, and yet to see clearly the doubly moving picture, is not an easy task.  That is the objective and the task before us in this anthology and of historiography that underpins it: Historiography of Gujarati literature and of its Critical Discourse.

The phrase ‘history of literature in Gujarati language’ presents its own challenges. ‘Language’, ‘Gujarati’, ‘literature’ and ‘history’, each of these four terms has its own large semiotic orbit, sometimes irregular, that we need to trace carefully.

‘Language’ itself is a polysemic term. From ‘body language’ that business managers learn to read, to ‘the Voice of Soul’ that Gandhi’s cultivated ear was able to hear, significance of this word varies widely. The term ‘language of literature’ is even more open to interpretations, in our context:  Is Sanskrit the only language of literature in India? Have the Prakrit and Apabhramsha languages also to be included, by Indian literary culture, in the charmed circle of Pan-Indian languages of literature? What happens when ‘regional’ languages, like Gujarati and Kannada begin to intrude into that category -- and why? What do the early ‘literary’ texts of the ‘vernaculars’ show us, in this regard?  From the great Jain savant  Hemachandra (12th century), pioneering Gujarati poet Bhalan (15th)  and the iconoclast Akho (17th, ) to Narmad, Navalram (19th) and Gandhi (20th), numerous authors and critics have kept alive the dispute on the status of the ‘vernaculars’ as a vehicle of literature. No accurate anthology of Gujarati literature or its critical discourse could begin to be shaped unless and until these and allied questions of historiography have been asked properly and some answers obtained from within the history of Indian literary culture(s).

Poet Narmad (1833-1886) has famously asked both (and some more) in a  composition in verse that, to my mind, forms a part of Gujarat’s critical discourse, even if I is classified as a ‘poem’. The pice in verse is titled: “Koni koni chhe Gujarat?”, i.e. “To whom and how many, does Gujarat belong?” Narmad names Gujaratis of all faiths and ethnicities to answer his crucial question. There has always been a strong centrifugal cultural energy in Gujarati culture. People of Gujarat are a very mobile lot, with a pan-Indian and global spread. This has given rise to their eventually multiple nationalities and varied new locations. The more recent phenomena are the ‘Little Gujarat’ in Jersey City near New York or Wembley and Southall in London, and of course, in many cities and towns in Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania. Gandhi’s Phoenix Settlement (1904) near Natal and Tolstoy Farm (1910) near Johannesburg in South Africa are the two original ‘catchment areas’, sources or Gangotri of the mighty Ganga of literature and literary criticism of the ‘Gandhian Period’ (1915 -1955). The centrifugal forces of Gujarati culture have always influenced the ‘idea of Gujarat’, the way Gujarat’s regionality has been sensed by its people, their literature and their critical discourses.

The large Adivasi tribal population of the region (14.23%, 1981 census) includes Bhil, Gamit, Rathva, Varli, Paradhi and several others. The Adivasi population brings in its own political geography and cultural boundaries that straddle the boundaries of the present ‘linguistic’ States of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Critical discourses in languages and speeches of these States overlap and are interconnected.  

The last two of the four terms mentioned above, namely ‘literature’ and ‘history’, add to a critical and helpful destabilization of any facile and false structures and constructs that often mutilate histories of Gujarati Literature and its critical discourse. Literatures from the margins of Gujarati society, including the literatures of Dalits, Tribals and of Women, have emerged in recent times. These new creative expressions have produced corresponding critical discourses.  This anthology includes such critical discourses from the erstwhile margins.

This brings us to two interrelated questions. Some of them could be formulated as follows:  (1) Has the prevalent historiography of Critical Discourse in Gujarati (and other Indian literatures) been based on a restrictive colonial model of literary criticism? (2) Has such a historiography led to an erasure on the older, indigenous practices of literary criticism? (3) Has it also led to an erroneous genealogy of critical discourse in Gujarati and other India languages? (4) Are the actual practices of literary criticism in Gujarati much older than those with which most anthologies of literary criticism in Gujarat begin (c. 1850)?

These and other allied questions help us focus on the long-neglected enigma of fractured genesis of Gujarati literature and of Gujarati literary critical discourse.