Displaced Peripheries, Geopolitical Allegories: Roberto Schwarz, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and Colonial Legacies in India

G.S. Sahota

[Chapter in Thomas Waller (ed.), Roberto Schwarz and World Literature:  Critical Essays]

Abstract

By extending Schwarz’s signature approaches to reading literary and social forms together, this chapter breaks from the hegemonic protocols and processes that have defined world literature and critical theory in the North Atlantic zone. Instead, it offers ways of connecting former colonial worlds—those of India and Brazil in particular—by gleaning from their divergent historical trajectories indices for a critical theory that responds adequately to the social predicaments and concomitant cultural forms stemming from modern imperial rule. The author reconstructs Schwarz’s deft integration of the critical insights of Antonio Candido and Theodor Adorno for his notions of “generality” and “objective form” which together serve as a model for reading peripheral aesthetics against the grain of metropolitan impositions. To demonstrate the rich versatility and translatability of Schwarz’s critical paradigms beyond his Brazilian milieu, the author turns to the internally complex and multivalent short story “Garhan” (“Eclipse,” 1942) by the Urdu writer Rajinder Singh Bedi. This story interweaves historical and mythological details in an allegorical fashion that entrap the main character Holi, the haplessly pregnant and oppressed wife of a traditional Hindu family, in ways that encode the social binds produced by British colonial reification of Punjabi customary norms as well as the effective foreclosure of liberal freedom.