Oceanic Crossroads:  The Mediterranean Seminar, Fall 2025

New York University Abu Dhabi, December 8-9, 2025

Roundtable Abstract 

Inter-Oceanic Studies as Cosmopolitan Horizon:  A Critique of Dalrymple’s The Golden Road

G.S. Sahota, Associate Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz)

William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road:  How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024) is likely to provoke much debate among scholars of Mediterranean Studies, the Indian Ocean World, and beyond, not least for its dismissal of the idea of the Silk Road, a “seductively Sinocentric concept,” which is now replaced by the monsoon-driven sea routes which intersect in India, making the latter the “cultural and intellectual centre of Asia, influencing and changing the course of religious, artistic and cultural life in all the regions around it, not least in China itself.”  Dalrymple contests the antiquity of the notion of the Silk Road, noting that die Seidenstraßen, coined as late as 1877 by a Prussian geographer in conjunction with the political designs of the Second Reich, reflect modern imperial imaginaries much more than they do economic exchange networks that consistently linked the Mediterranean with the South China Sea.  Today the mythology of the old Silk Road serves to secure Chinese hegemony across Pakistan and beyond, and to justify China’s Belt and Road Initiative, often referred to as the “New Silk Road.”  This fact alone demonstrates the notion’s salience in contemporary geopolitics, rife with civilizational competition and potential clash.  This paper will critically examine the civilization paradigm employed by Dalrymple as well as the limits it places on his understanding of cosmopolitan self-fashioning.  I conclude with some reflections on how the oceanic is being swallowed today by national-civilizational paradigms, necessitating wider inter-oceanic dialogues to help usher in decentered and open cosmopolitan horizons.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Two Abstracts on Iqbal and German Thought

1.

University of Minnesota (Twin Cities)

Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change

October 22, 2025

Self, Selflessness, and the Contradictions of Identity:  Goethe, Nietzsche, and Iqbal

The vast structural transformation of colonial society on the basis of the commodity-form culminated in enduring impasses regarding the conceptualization of identity and the organization of community at various scales of collective experience.  This presentation on the writings of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) concentrates on what has been dubbed the “Nietzschean Moment” of Indian intellectual history.  It surveys the complications wrought by Iqbal’s extensive engagement with German thought, especially with regard to notions of selfhood and ideals of community in two lengthy, exhortative poems composed in Persian, The Secrets of the Self (Asrar-e Khudi, 1915) and The Mysteries of Selflessness(Rumuz-e Bekhudi, 1918).  What ideas regarding the self, community, and society did Iqbal derive from German thinkers such as Goethe and Nietzsche, and what impact did they have on the evolution of his poetic themes and forms?  How did notions of the will, power, and world-affirmation get thrust into the fray of political contestations regarding the making of new subjects and the founding of new social orders?  These are just two of the key questions addressed in this investigation into the contradictions of identity in the work of Muhammad Iqbal.

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Annual Meeting

“Asian Comparative Literature and Film (Session 5):  Asian-German Textual Transnationality”

Las Vegas, Nevada, October 10, 2024

Semiotics of Translational Flow:  Goethe and Iqbal on the Nature Image of Islam

G.S. Sahota, Associate Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz)

When Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) translated Goethe’s poem “Mahomets Gesang” (Song of Mohammad, 1772-1773) into Persian for his collection Payam-e Mashriq (Message of the East, 1923), he was extending even further the already rich metaphors of flow and movement of the original.  Translational complexities did not abate when the Orientalist Annemarie Schimmel translated Iqbal’s rendition of Goethe’s poem back into German in 1963.  This presentation will engage with the semiotics of translational flow by examining these works and the questions they raise regarding Indo-German cultural exchange.  With respect to Goethe’s poem, this presentation will seek to delineate the intellectual developments that helped fashion a German image of Islam and the forms of nature which accorded with it.  It will work from the results of David Wellbery’s detailed reading of “Mahomets Gesang” to layout the challenges the poem presents for translation into Persian, on the one hand, and, on the other, the manner in which Iqbal faced such challenges in his open and experimental translation.  What shifts can be detected in the German notion of Islam through Goethe’s poem, and how does Iqbal’s version also entail changing ideas regarding Mohammad and the nature of Islam?  Through close formal readings of both German and Persian texts, this paper aims to reveal broader dynamics regarding Indo-German cultural exchange in the modern era.  By examining this cycle of translation, the presentation queries to what extent these processes encode in miniature the larger history of entanglements between India and Germany.  What do these processes suggest for models of world literary study?

College Art Association Annual Conference February 18-21, 2026 (Chicago)

Panel:  The Arts of Primitive Accumulation

Abstract:  The Return of the Mask in Sembène’s Black Girl

G.S. Sahota

Ousmane Sembène’s adaptation of his short story “La Noire de . . .” into his 1966 film Black Girl made possible the thematization of the African mask as symbol of primitive accumulation and social alienation (as well as their negation). In taking what is merely referenced in passing in the story and transforming it into a powerful visual motif in the film, Sembène’s masterpiece may be read as a commentary not merely on the sundering of Africa’s social and cultural integrity under late colonial hegemony, but also as an allegory of the negation of imperialist accumulation.  This inter-semiotic reading of the short story and cinematic work will explore the interrelation of the maidservant Djouna’s fate in the psychic grip of her French bourgeois captors and the movement of the mask from the periphery to the metropolitan sphere and back.  The guiding questions will be:  How do the intertwined trajectories of maidservant and mask reveal processes of ongoing primitive accumulation, and through what narrative moves and visual symbolizations does the film articulate a critique of these processes?  Furthermore, how does the appropriation of the mask for display on the whitest of French walls parallel the loss of self-possession and disempowerment of Djouna?  The reappearance of the mask as ghostly revenant in its site of origin in the film’s closing sequence seems to make exigent the expropriation of Africa’s expropriators and opens other possible horizons of valuation beyond that of imperial accumulation and its reification of African primitivity.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Persian Entanglements

UC Faculty Workshop

UC Merced, September 19, 2025

Opening Comments

G.S. Sahota

The moniker “Persian Entanglements” is quite fitting for me, as I make no claim to being a “Persianist” – indeed my reading skills in this language never reached beyond intermediate level – but I do find myself entangled in Persian now and then, often reaching for my Steingass, my Lambton, or an Urdu commentary, or even on occasion a Bona fide Persianist, to extricate myself from some interpretive muddle or other.

If circumstances had been slightly more fortuitous, I would have been able to pursue my studies of the language in Iran while a graduate student or early in my career.  Alas, the geopolitical situation has only worsened since then, and the opportunities have diminished.  The gutting of languages in institutions of higher learning has also not helped.  Persian was put on the chopping block recently at UCSC, alongside German, and now no longer taught.    Persian really remains an option only at the upper end of higher education in the US, inaccessible to most people, and thus easily misconstrued by the masses.  The lacuna of knowledge that widens is easily filled in by the xenophobia of our now official cultures of hate.

My own points of intersection with Persian are threefold:

1) Muhammad Iqbal and Late Indo-Persian, the Ghazal Form, and Translation

Persian emerged from early modernity as the language of world-literary significance and was valorized by the likes of Muhammad Iqbal as the most appropriate medium for fashioning a cosmopolitan voice.  Just as Urdu could be considered a transregional subcontinental language, connecting urban centers north, south, east, and west, Persian had become an international idiom for much of Asia.  Across the cultural planes that formed across this vast space, courtly genres such as the ghazal traveled unimpeded, giving rise to local contributions and acquiring the touch and flavor of distinct regions. Across these realms, Hafez arose to undisputed, indeed towering heights.  His canonical status meant the evolution of many fine translations and the development of a rich field for interpretive innovation.  This field has formed a part of my pedagogic repertoire, lending itself to some investigations into how literary forms interact, and how translation occasions literary innovation and cultural change.  This has also formed a part of my research, as will become clear in my presentation.

2) Persian and the History of Sikhism

Another regular point of entanglement with Persian for me is the history of Sikhism from its earliest moments in the 16^thcentury until the era of British conquest in the mid-19^th century.  The interactions between the Mughal Empire and the formation of a distinctive Sikh panth over these centuries is not only complex and rich, but reveals mutual mediation, inflection, and entanglement that had lasting and profound impacts.  There are Mughal sources on Sikhism in Persian just as there are Sikh sources on Mughals in this same language.  The looking glass of this language reflects the one and the other simultaneously.  Several questions come up across this longue durée that are yet to be fully explored in contemporary scholarship.  For instance, it is worth exploring how much Persianate notions of kingship informed the making of a Sikh raja and rajya, or how much a Persianate aesthetic evolved within and beyond the courtly sphere, including the very architecture that housed it.  To explore these crucial dimensions of the Sikh and Mughal past, Persian is critical.  Assuring the inclusion of Persian within Sikh studies and Sikhism within Mughal studies is no easy task, as both fields seem to create artificial boundaries meant to distance the other, to their own and mutual detriment.  The partitioning of the mind that followed in the wake of Partition has led to the making of national and communal identities through a process of elimination, including tragically, the elimination of elements of their own mutually constituted pasts.  (See, for a brilliant theorization of this process, see “Brazilian Culture:  Nationalism by Elimination” [“Nacional por subtração”] by the critical theorist Roberto Schwarz.)

3)  Recent Iranian Film Culture

I cannot comment on this at much length, but the third point at which I become caught up – if not mesmerized – by things Persian is contemporary Iranian film.  The works of Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi and several others constitute an artistic accomplishment on a global scale.  This is a field that I need to explore more intensively and systematically.  But it may be noted in passing that this is a film making of censorial escape that may serve as a model for other filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals more broadly living under repressive regimes or amidst censorious cultures.  In other words, one may consider this collective achievement as the filmic counterpart to Leo Strauss’s writings on Spinoza, Maimonides, and others in Persecution and the Art of Writing in that it maintains an esoteric dimension that apparently requires a special interpretive code to decipher.

Persianate culture was of great cosmopolitan scope, establishing the grounds far and wide for a genuine secular tradition, especially in India from as early as the Delhi Sultanate.  It was by no means perfect according to contemporary standards, but much depends on preserving this legacy.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Trajectories of Capitalist Time:  Marx, Postone, and a Critique of Colonial Temporality

G.S. Sahota

Drawing from my book, Late Colonial Sublime, this paper will lay out the theories of time underlying this project and the complications posed by extending Marx, Postone, and other theorists of capitalist temporality to the peripheries of the colonial world. With questions of temporality running through it as a leitmotif, this book characterizes the late colonial period as one in which capitalist forms of time began to saturate distant life-worlds, forcing them to come inevitably into conflict with non-capitalist modes of temporality. What results is a particularly acute contradictory zone in which emergent capitalist and residual pre-capitalist forms of time confront each other implicitly or explicitly, making for a politics of time that continues to have ramifications to this day.

This paper will reach back into canonical works (Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination) and grapple with more recent scholarship (Bhattacharya’s The Great Agrarian Conquest) to examine the complications attending a social history of time in late colonial India. That is, it will seek to summarize the temporal shifts immanent to the universalizing logic of the commodity-form, on the one hand, and grapple with specific historical moments and sites in India in which these shifts inform colonial policies and inflect everyday life-worlds, on the other. The aim is to grasp the macro and micro structurations of capitalist time in a colonial context and what they demand for a critical historical methodology.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Marxist Critical Theory Across Asian Borders:  India and the Concept of Pan-Asia

Roundtable at he Annual Conference on South Asia, UW Madison 2025

Abstract

Low-key yet noticeable developments have taken hold in recent years in South Asia-related contexts across a variety of disciplines, from social theory (Sartori, 2008); film studies (Ganguly, 2010), intellectual history (Kaiwar, 2014), and literary studies (Sahota, 2018):  new engagements with Marxist thought beyond postmodernism, and geographies wider than those of the nation-state.  The paradigms ventured by these works and others like them intersect in ways that are salient for both South Asian studies and the epistemologies that undergird it.  This roundtable seeks to discuss two interrelated phenomena:  1) how India and other Asian regions have interacted and combined under various auspices, including Pan-Asianism, Maoism, and as members of transregional political blocs, e.g. BRICS; and 2) how a return to Marxist critical theory has challenged pervasive paradigms such as those stemming from (post-)colonialism.  The present conjuncture with its rapidly shifting realities has outstripped the theoretical interventions modeled on a metaphorics of textuality and made exigent a reexamination of our historical periodizations, temporal presuppositions, geographical models, and operative scales of agency.  By putting India into a conceptual contact zone with transnational imaginaries of Asia (including Pan-Asianism and Maoism), this roundtable aims to focus on different articulations between the local and the transregional, questioning the quasi-ineffable binds that putatively connected Asian cultures together in the early twentieth century, and asking whether pervasive predicaments vis-à-vis global capital in recent decades bring these regions into dialogue on distinct epistemological grounds.  This roundtable also intends to assess what the new critical paradigms mean for rethinking relations between South Asian studies, empirical research, and the formulation of new models of critical theory.  It asks whether this field might not also be the grounds for not merely empirical data gathering for already existing theoretical models e.g. poststructuralism, but rather for a genuine critical theory for the contemporary moment.

Keywords:  India, Pan-Asianism, Marxism, Critical Theory, transnationalism

Speaker List

Speaker 1 (GS Sahota) researches South Asian literary and cultural history with a focus on modern northern India; his work has engaged critically with the Frankfurt School’s conceptual frameworks for grasping cultural developments that have traversed Asian geographies such as Romanticism, the topic of his remarks for this roundtable.

Speaker 2 (Viren Murthy) is a specialist in transnational Asian intellectual history and will make some preliminary remarks about how Marxists in Tamil Nadu have combined identity politics, a politics of tradition and Marx’s idea of Asiatic mode of production.

Speaker 3 (Nandini Chandra) specializes in the field of global comics studies, South Asian literary modernism, and critical theory. Her contribution to the roundtable will include an attempt to marry value-theory Marxism with the Mauss-inspired school of reading world histories through the lens of the gift exchange, in South Asian literary practices, specifically.

Speaker 4 (Yue Qiu) focuses on the Sino-East Pakistani Maoist ties in the 1960s and 1970s. She also has a keen interest in broader studies of the Third World and the Belt Road Initiatives. In this roundtable, she wants to explore how translation became the site of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles across China and East Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 5 (Aditya Bahl) studies Third World print cultures, Cold War political economy, and subaltern religion. In this roundtable, he will explore how the political defeat of Maoism in Punjab sparked an unexpected turn towards French structuralism in the early 1970s. These new attempts to rejuvenate Marxism produced novel engagements with both French thinkers (Greimas, Barthes, and Hjemslev), as well as Sikh and Sufi writings.

Speaker 6 (Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan), our chair, is a distinguished professor of literary and cultural studies with numerous publications on topics ranging across critical theory, diaspora, and (trans)nationalism.  With his subtle sense of the relevance of location in and beyond different theoretical paradigms, he is especially well-poised to serve as the main interlocutor for this roundtable.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Simmel, Nietzsche, and Mediations of Value-Form:  Four Fragments on Cultures of Capital

G.S. Sahota

Aurora Workshop 2025:  Analytics of Value:  Form and Critique in Contemporary Theory

April 5^th, 2025

UC Santa Cruz

1.

“Value,” as a category within classical bourgeois economy, is thought to lie primarily within the sphere of the market.  The delimitation of value as the result of pressures of supply and demand itself dissembles the wider determinants of this phenomenon.  Far from being a category relevant only to the sphere of the market, value in Marx extends outward to the non-material zones of everyday life and pulls those into the machinations of commodity production, just as much as it radiates the instrumental-rational structure underlying the commodity-form into ever more ethereal realms, conditioning them to accord with the logics of accumulation.  The value-form is already at play before the worker even arrives at the workplace, or the commodity on the store shelf.  The temporal frame of capital penetrates beyond these domains.  The sociality of value as generally necessary labor-time makes it difficult to determine where the market dimension of value comes to its limit and where it is exceeded.   This ambiguity resulted in Critical Theory’s distillation of instrumental rationality, replotting what was an emanation of the workings of the capitalist marketplace into a separate phenomenon undergirding the tragic course of Western Civilization in Dialectic of Enlightenment.  The reasons for this move in Adorno and Horkheimer are complex and revolve around some deliberate attempts to obscure their theories’ connection with the critique of capital.  By placing it back into the more specifically historical context in which the capitalist mode of production is dominant, one can wrestle with the ways in which it conditions our everyday world without imagining it as an inexorable constant for all history.  It is not clear what will help put in check the colonization of our life-worlds by the force of the market today; in the recent past, the category of the aesthetic assumed the role of resistance, as when the work of art was thought with its sheer uniqueness and potential break with conventional forms to counter the Enlightenment norms of identity-thinking.  Utterly out of step with immediate utility, the work of art was thought to put to a halt the force of reification.  Now we are in less certain times regarding the cultural realm as a whole.

What happens once the realm of culture becomes indistinguishable from the logic of accumulation, when it is coterminous with capital?  It seems that a self-devouring process ensues.  Over the course of this process one loses any sense of a rational end, and reason itself erodes.  Postone was alert to this deformation of social logic.  “Production for the sake of production signifies that production is no longer a means to a substantive end but a means to an end that is itself a means, a moment in a never-ending chain of expansion.  Production in capitalism becomes a means to a means.”  The occlusion of the fact of an underlying irrationality that undergirds the system goes hand in hand with the understanding that no option is any better than any other.  Postone elaborates:  “the relativism that prevents one from judging on substantive grounds the merits of one goal of production relative to another stems from the fact that, in capital-determined society, all products embody the same underlying goal of production – value.”  The curious nature of a society that “cannot decide on value (or surplus value) as a goal, for this goal confronts them as an external necessity” even though it is nothing less than the product of this society’s own collective ideations and physical exertions is worthy of extended investigation.  Value-form is hard fiction:  iron-clad in its appearance, but underneath as malleable as mud.  Commodity-fetishism is at once illusion and utmost reality.  When the former is forgotten and the latter taken as nature, a seemingly inexorable process of social self-devouring unfolds and a state of entropy is unleashed.  “Pure market sovereignty,” as Hobsbawm noted in a central chapter of The Age of Extremes, is a danger even to itself, for “capitalism had succeeded because it was not just capitalist.”  Once all of those cultural inheritances that helped sustain it – Adam Smith’s customary “habits of labor” for instance – are undermined from within, the bottom falls out.  Once this occurs, we seem to be tending in the direction of an illiberalism that may no longer be able to sustain the structure of capital in any recognizable form.

3.

Simmel’s work on the philosophy of money, the city, and the attenuated geistiges Leben that go along with both bears some scrutiny for our times.  Though his commitment to categories of German idealism such as the absolute or the metaphysical may seem quaint to our blasé mindsets, there is no doubt that he understood the hardening of heart and mind that comes from the penetration of the money-form into all vestiges of urban life in his times.  As the site where face-to-face relations begin to vanish under the imperative of abstract exchange relations, the city becomes the zone of expressive impersonality.  Here “a relentless matter-of-factness, . . . rationally calculated economic egoism,” reigns.  The indifferent nature of value – stripped of all uniquely distinguishing qualities through the processes of exchange – breaks down any vestige of Gemeinschaft, leaving in its train the “blasé attitude” whose essence is “an indifference toward the distinctions between things.”  The elimination of the qualitative for the quantitative furnishes a gray horizon.  To the blasé person, things appear in “a homogeneous, flat and gray color with no one of them worthy of being preferred to another.”  How an oppositional poetics might take shape against these conditions is a matter worth considering on another occasion.  Yet, one need look no further than Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) to note how the tracks are already laid in his aesthetic visions of the city that will lead him straight into the Third Reich and association with Leni Riefenstahl.  Left to its own proclivities, this classic film of Weimar cinema demonstrates how the aestheticization of the machine goes hand in hand with the de-individuation of the human.  Classes and hierarchies are naturalized, the human realm is mechanized.  Nature as a zone of spontaneity and potential resistance is eclipsed; even animals are ranked in ways that match the various strata of capitalist society, but without antagonism.  Simmel’s insights provoke some thinking about how one might challenge this ordering of the city according to the dictates of the value-form, how one might fashion a post-capitalist urbanism, a Paris Commune writ large for our moment.

4.

Nietzsche, the hard man of European philosophy who had rendered empathy verboten when it came to humans but not horses, would have no answers for the question of the monied city, or at least not intentionally.  Yet his desires for an Umwertung aller Werte – a transvaluation of all values – furnishes some insights that oddly coalesce with those of Marx from a diametrically opposed position.  These provocative insights on the question of equality and the value-form produce for us a political quandary that has never been fully resolved in Critical Theory.  Simply put, the question is:  what role does, or should, the notion of equality play in our politics?  It is clear that capital cut a contradictory course on this question.  The diffuse power of market exchange and a bourgeoning commercial public sphere made intelligible the claims of universal equality even while the core dynamism of the commodity-form structurally reproduced inequality.  That is to say, the locus of modern equality is not given in the species homo.  Rather it lies in the sociality underlying capitalist commodity-exchange, even though this very sociality is characterized by the ever-increasing material divide between capital and labor, enrichment and immiseration.  Marx himself was always skeptical about the notion of equality, seeing it as an ideological ploy within the liberal ordering of people and things.  This comes out most forcefully in The Critique of the Gotha Program where generalized equality is impugned.  And it is on this very point that Marx finds himself in accord with Nietzsche, the fiercest critic of equality if there ever was one.  Both are mistrustful of the liberal notion of equality, even if for differing reasons.  For Nietzsche, as Malcolm Bull has noted in Anti-Nietzsche, “social inequality is the source of our value concepts, and the necessary condition of value itself.”  Without quite realizing it, Nietzsche has discovered the key to the value-form in capital, against one side of which (exchange value) he rails, and in accordance with the other side of which (use value) he remains committed.  The question of liberal equality and a communism that shuns such a fiction is one that brings together Nietzsche and Marx in the most unusual of ways.  Like Aristotle perplexed by the nascent value-form in antiquity, it is perhaps not within the horizon of our historical experience to be able to answer for this.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Dystopic Monochrome and the Colors of Political Possibility: Questioning the Phenomenology of Afro-Pessimism through Photography

G.S. Sahota

Abstract

This presentation, composed of five fragments focused on questions of race and photography, constellates an immanent critique of contemporary Afro-pessimism’s questionable ontologies premised on “identity-thinking” (Adorno). Afro-pessimism, wittingly or unwittingly, betrays the possibilities of social transformation arising from within, yet at odds with the racial identities mediated by American white racism. The presentation looks to key moments in African-American history and Afro-Asian musical connections to rescue critical alternatives to the conceits of Afro-Pessimism. By examining key moments revolving around the photographic medium in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Frederick Douglass, the experiments with Indian sonic colors in the late compositions of John and Alice Coltrane, and the synesthetic visions of the photographer Khalik Allah, these fragments aim to dissolve the artificial contrasts of racist language and imagery into the hues of an absolute continuum symbolized by the rainbow (borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s early writings and small essay on photography). This absolute continuum admits of no sharp racial distinction. What these operations entail is a critique of the phenomenology of dystopian monochromes of racial rhetoric shared by both afro-pessimism and the white Alt-Right, a critique afforded by the immanent powers of the photographic medium. In capturing radical contingency and sheer individuality, the camera can summon the latent potency of natural processes to explode the quasi-natural codes of racial reification, especially their monochromatics, and in doing so, recapture the irreducible ideality of color beyond the visual, sonic, or any other medium.

Keywords:  race and photography; color and media (music and image); critique of afro-pessimism; dialectical criticism; Marxism

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Reframing the Question of Realism in Contemporary India

Varieties of Realism:  Hearing, Seeing, Connecting

Aurora Lecture Winter 2025 by Prof. Francesca Orsini, FBA

January 24^th, 2025

Discussant Comments

G.S. Sahota

The “varieties of realism” presented in this paper provoke the question as to whether there is an adequate diversity of theoretical takes on the question of realism writ so large.  The fact that Professor Orsini has developed the cultural logic and concept of realism from the rich terrain of a long century of experiments within the modern Hindi novel and short story means that we have an internally derived criterion for exploring the reach of these experiments and do not have to resort to models and standards of another distant cultural zone such as the modern West.  We can thus avoid imposing external criteria for assessing the validity of Hindi articulations of realism, even if, say, Victorian literatures played a role as catalysts for fashioning these experiments.  A whole variety of questions arise of their own accord in relation to Orsini’s exploration of the senses, forms, modalities, and affects that forge a realism that has purchase and even transformative effects on everyday experience and open horizons of futurity.  I take some of these on in the reflections that follow.

In retracing Meenaskshi Mukherjee’s seminal and still very relevant work on Realism and Reality:  The Novel and Society in India (1985), it is worth noting how a general historical movement is reflected in shifts of genre and expansion of secular horizons of possibility.  This is noticeable in the cultural evolution from the tale to the everyday.  That is, the tale, the fantastic scion of myth and legend and the traditional abode of the supernatural, gives way eventually to the everyday realm pregnant with new representational possibilities.  Whereas the tale was the effective negation of quotidian existence, too mundane to have any literary value, the new short story and novel resuscitated all that which was denied representation.  The turn to the everyday as a zone of experience integrated with history, with the here and now, necessitates in turn the dissolution of the traditional narrative conventions that prevented the grasp of the mundane in earlier times.  Mukherjee’s appendices illustrate the shift and its potential. Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa, for instance, writes in his preface to Zat-i Sharif (c. 1903):  “I aim simply at the faithful portrayal of actual happenings and am not concerned with recording the conclusions to be drawn from them . . .” (Mukherjee, 188, my italics)  This move marks a concerted departure from the fable with its “moral of the story” in the direction of the grey zone of ethical ambiguity and perhaps epistemic uncertainty, hallmarks of modern realism the world over.  We see as well, in Ruswa’s comments in Umrao Jan Ada (1899), an orientation toward the immediacy of the everyday world:  “We should not give ourselves unnecessary trouble by trying to base our novels upon the lives of persons about whom we cannot know anything in detail.  In our own circle of friends and relations there are bound to be many whose experiences are truly strange and fascinating.”  (Ibid.) The point here is clear:  the real may be stranger than fiction, have more dimensions than legend, and raise more quandaries than the moral tale could ever possibly afford.

Like Orsini today, Mukherjee in her time noted that the entire question of realism had political repercussions far and wide.  Realism produced new subjects in opposition to old ways.  In her chapter on “Women in a New Genre,” Mukherjee captures a fundamental antagonism unfolding in literature and society all at once:  “Creating real people in a recognizable historical setting – people who are not mere archetypes or representatives of a caste or a class or a social role (priest, landlord, mother-in-law, etc.) – necessitates an acceptance of subjective individualism and a specific awareness of history.  The latter had never been a component of traditional narrative in India, and the former was not easy in a tradition-bound society, even though writers themselves had begun to be restive.”  (69)  This signifies that realism in the Indian context – and surely elsewhere as well – was the medium for the assertion of social presences – such as the Dalits whose predicaments are illuminated in Orsini’s comments – whose recognition has been deferred for too long, or effectively denied.  The psychological reality of “the everyday violence of caste and neurosis of passing” (Orsini) that is internalized finds its outward expression in the mode of a claim to reality for such subjects.  The claim to reality in this instance results in the production of a pervasive affect, which Fredric Jameson in The Antinomies of Realism (2013) considers to be one of the major impulses underlying this mode (the other, following Lukács, being the drive to narrate).  The aesthetic force of the marginalized mode of existence attains an intensity that demands that others feel what she feels, not as an emotion already named, but as an affect that that hits reality like a hammer, giving it a more livable shape.  Orsini captures in a profound way this role of affect in her invocation of synesthesia.  Realism here is not about the transparency of the medium vis-à-vis reality, but rather its solidity as an expedient means for reconfiguring it.  Whatever can perform that task has some purchase on the real and thus a claim to realism. By working in tandem with different historical moments, this notion of realism as telos does not bear any necessarily consistent form, but rather, as Brecht ventured against Lukács, should remain protean.

I have several queries to put forth for our conversation.  For instance, with respect to the looming figure of Premchand and the role of his oeuvre in shaping an ongoing engagement with historical reality, should we not think about the imperatives of his moment – to produce a language that is consistent and cohesive with a range wide enough to encompass nationalist aspirations – and not judge him as producing artificially monoglossic works unwittingly?  Did his single-register way with language not produce the challenge for later writers like Krishna Sobti, who worked against it to produce a heteroglossia that captures the granular details and striated social distinctions of tone, accent, dialect, and language in a multilingual roz marra ki zindagi?  One generation may thus have produced the conditions of possibility for realism for the next.   And when we look at Premchand’s entire oeuvre and not merely one short story or novel, do we not see diglossia at play, given that he is a writer of both Hindi and Urdu?

But a more compelling question must be posed in closing.  This has to do with medium and realism.  We see that the slow proliferation of the varieties of realism means that the question regarding its ultimate shape and form has not come to an end in contemporary India, and tremendous social stakes are involved in its evolution (or devolution).  If Mukherjee saw in realism the struggle of new subjectivities in tension with the given realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we may ask what is at stake today?  Other media such as film with their capacities for representing the polyglot worlds of India may outstrip the potentiality of the written word.  Or perhaps I am being too rash in this assessment, for I recall M. Madhav Prasad doubting whether the typical Bollywood film today, bound by so many political constraints, can ever really depict reality in any recognizable way.  In that case, the short story and the novel may still have potentialities, such as those of heteroglossia, which are only now being tapped.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.