BOOK REVIEW
By
Randeep
Wadehra
Society, representation & textuality Edited by Sukalpa Bhattacharjee
& C. Joshua Thomas
Sage. Pages: xliv+274. Price: Rs. 795/-
As a society evolves, it
constantly discards and adopts new ideas, traditions and worldviews. Its
cultural mores influence other societies, which, in turn, influence them; textual
output, in the form of literature, cinema and other performing arts, plays a
vital role in sustaining this process. It not only represents, or reflects what
occurs at a particular point in time but also interprets and reinterprets
various events, incidents and ideas with the passage of time. Therefore, text
is representative and interpretative functionally, and by its very nature.
There is a consensus that all
literature gives us some sort of historic sense – complete, incomplete, skewed
or otherwise. This symbiosis between literature and historicity has been of
great interest to scholars of various hues. For example, in the 19th
century Germany, Gustav Schmoller had formulated economic theory based on
economic history, for which he was severely criticized. Friedrich Nietzsche
regarded historicism as an antiquated, uncritical approach to history whereas Ernst
Troeltsch described it as the “tendency to regard all knowledge as subject to
historical change.”
For Troeltsch, the
19th century historicism stood for a Weltanschauung or worldview,
which was fundamentally different from a naturalistic or positivistic
understanding of reality based on the idea of an unchanging, universal natural
law. In the 1930s England, historicism was looked upon differently. FA Hayek and Karl Popper did not agree with
the 19th century doctrine that scientific predictions about the
future could be based on certain laws of development. In the 1980s, the French
philosopher Michel Foucault spearheaded ‘new historicism’ wherein historically
based criticism attempts to eradicate any distinction between literature and
history. Today, historicism has re-emerged as a thesis on the limits of enquiry
based on an understanding of scientific concepts as relative.
In this collection of excellent essays,
different aspects of interface between society, representation and textuality
are examined. This interface, according to the editors, is, “genetic in the
sense of being an originary cultural and historical source of creative
subjectivity… (and) epiphanic in the sense of unveiling the originary experience
of the ‘social’ in the realm of representables in the language of text.” Ghose
avers that great literature and great music are indestructible because they are
revelatory of a ‘background web of murmurings’ of which human beings and
society are products or parts. Maroof Shah points out that the problem of evil
is arguably the most difficult problem for all theistic worldviews. He goes on
to argue that the “changed perception (of evil) differentiates modern humanist
secularist worldviews from the traditional religious worldviews.”
Textuality, in the historicity
sense, has been able to deconstruct, although not shatter altogether, the
communal fault-lines. Rahman traces the impact of “Turkic invasions” in Bengal
upon the Brahaminical worldview of caste equations, which ushered in the
“radical shift in the field of literature on the soil of Bengal”. He also
quotes from various literary works to highlight the process of “fusion of
religions” during the last years of Muslim rule there. The 1947 Partition and
its attendant trauma too have been assiduously studied in this volume.
Raghavendra compares it with the Holocaust in terms of the depth, spread and
durability of its impact upon the subcontinent’s people and the resulting
literature. He shows how different cinematic works like Tamas, Anmol
Ghadi, and Lahore interpret that trauma. He also contrasts the
Indian and Pakistani interpretations of the Partition. The other essays look
upon such issues as tribal worldview, stereotyping, folk traditions, identity
and politics, et cetera.
Published in The Financial World dated 27
July 2013
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