Vaishali K. Srinivas
Department of English, Bangalore University
In a multilingual society such as India, literary studies should make us aware of the very important dimension of our cultural existence, rather than shut us off from it. We cannot become oblivious of this polyphony, which is creative and enriching. Linguistic fluidities, multilingualities and an active kind of bilingualism have been the salient features of modern literary movements in the various regional languages of the Indian subcontinent. This recognition and validation of the autonomy of diverse traditions, cultures, experiential and epistemological centres are communicated most eloquently in the range and depth of literature produced in the “Bhashas” in India. The ways in which Indian local literary cultures have organically evolved by actively confronting, reconfiguring, negotiating and resisting the hegemony of Eurocentric models is an exciting saga told in a perspicacious manner by the Bhasha writers. This, in itself, reinforces the idea of decentralisation and the actual experience of being with living traditions. It is also a process of legitimising non-metropolitan literary texts as potent cultural signifiers.
Our literary histories have essentially had an undoubtedly male supremacist orientation. It is no small wonder that the marginalised voices in the pages of Bhasha literature have been those of women. Female literary creativity has always had to contend precariously with bewilderingly complex patriarchal surveillance mechanisms. Examples are plentiful in the diverse Bhasha literature of India. How have our women writers in Indian Bhashas managed to surmount structures of disenfranchisement such as the caste hierarchies overlapping with gender inequalities and social stratification? How have they contested margins and ideologies that have been hostile to women’s literary production like forms of gendered censorship?
(Presented in the 2013 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum: The Emergence and Heritage of Asian Women Intellectuals, 10-11 September 2013, Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Institute of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Indian Studies Center, Chulalongkorn University)