The Transnational in Literary Studies

Potential and Limitations of a Concept

Kai Wiegandt, Kai Wiegandt

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110688825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational and identifies areas in which the concept can be particularly useful. The division of the volume into three parts reflects areas which seem particularly amenable to analysis through a transnational lens. The chapters in Part 1 present case studies in which the concept replaces or complements traditionally dominant concepts in literary studies. These chapters demonstrate, for example, why some dramatic texts and performances can better be described as transnational than as postcolonial, and how the transnational underlies and complements concepts such as world literature. Part 2 assesses the advantages and limitations of writing literary history with a transnational focus. These chapters illustrate how such a perspective loosens the epistemic stranglehold of national historiographies, but they also argue that the transnational and national agendas of literary historiography are frequently entangled. The chapters in Part 3 identify transnational genres such as the transnational historical novel, transnational migrant fiction and translinguistic theatre, and analyse the specific poetics and politics of these genres.

1 The Transnational amongst Related Concepts in Theory and Marketing

Mixed Attachments in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971)

Anna Margaretha Horatschek

Abstract

In India, Girish Karnad is famous as a playwright, actor, poet, director, critic, and translator; in the West, he is considered a ‘postcolonial author.’ But his most famous play Hayavadana contests this normative definition of Euro-American provenance through the choice of genre, formal traits inspired by theatrical traditions from East and West, and intertextual references to Thomas Mannʼs – originally Hindu – story “The Transposed Heads” (Die vertauschten Köpfe) and to the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer. At the same time, by adapting the conventions of classical Sanskrit as well as oral Kannada Yakshagana folk theatre, the drama resists the concept of a homogeneous ‘national theatre’ in India, suggesting a transnational perspective. The concept of a nation is further undermined by the character constellation and the structure of the drama, staging intra-national struggles about highly politicised claims to interpretative authority between a classical Sanskrit and oral Bhasha traditions of culturally and politically marginalised tribes and lower castes, and along gender lines, with the only female character on stage being consistently suppressed in all respects. However, this reading contradicts the majority of interpretations from Indian academia, thus illustrating fundamental issues of ‘transnational hermeneutics,’ which are addressed at the end of this chapter.

1 Framing the conceptual field

In India, Girish Karnad is considered “one of India’s brightest shining stars, earning international acclaim as a playwright, poet, actor, director, critic, and translator,”¹ who is praised for “moulding legendary tales for the contemporary audience in an effort to forge a modern Indian theatre idiom” and “putting Indian theatre on the international map.”² In addition to a number of awards for his films, Karnad won the Padma Shri in 1974 and the Sahitya Academy award in 1994. However, he is hardly known in German academia due to the reductive canonisation of a small body of texts as ‘Indian Literature in English’ for the Western literary market, which is focused on the novel with a predominance of diasporic novelists whose representations of India tend to affirm the expectations of Western readers.

1.1 “Like other ‘isms’”: Postcolonialism

Karnad’s dramas are grouped under the category of ‘post-colonial Indian theatre,’³ with or without “that potent hyphen.”⁴ However, there are many reasons against labelling Karnad as postcolonial author, many of them exposing problems of “the critical category of ‘postcolonial literature’ which […] maps only imperfectly the literary terrain it is intended to describe,” in contradistinction to postcolonial literatures as cultural practice, an “internally varied and excitingly heterogeneous field.”⁵ ‘Postcolonial theory’ and ‘postcolonial studies’ from the 1980s onward have been re-signified to answer multiple challenges charted in detail by Vijay Mishra,⁶ because from their inception in the 1970s as an academic discipline by South Asian intellectuals, many of them in English departments or in newly created ‘postcolonial studies’ clusters in the United States, they were characterised by the imbalance of power between historically colonising and colonised cultures. The conclusions drawn from the discussions of the past decades are widely divergent. Thus, Farrier and Tuitt characterise the postcolonial project as a search for what Agamben refers to as potentiality, the “yet-to-be-realized paradigm,”⁷ while for Dengel-Janic and Reinfandt, postcoloniality is an outdated paradigm due to “the shift from intercultural relationships, postcolonialism and multiculturalism to (trans-)cultural studies (cf. Huggan 2004) and, more generally, from hybridity into transculturality that has been debated in the last decade or so (cf. for example, Welsch 1999, Schulze-Engler 2007, Schulze-Engler/Helff 2009, as well as the last section in Stilz/Dengel-Janic 2010, 215–40, entitled ‘Transcultural Perspectives’).”⁸ Among Indian intellectuals like Ashis Nandy, Ganesh Devy, Harish Trivedi, A. K. Singh, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Prakesh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, concepts of ‘postcoloniality’ are perceived as conceptual tools for scholarly analyses derived from a globalised vocabulary of Western origin and therefore entrenched in asymmetries of political and economic power, and of social and cultural capital on a global scale. Accordingly, A. K. Singh sees postcolonialism as

one of the greatest swindles in the history of contemporary criticism, to be matched only by postmodernism. […] Like other ‘isms’, it comes to us by post or poste as part of the grand Western project that treats the rest of the world as the data or guinea pigs supplying the terms and criteria of measurement or evaluation of others. It is neither our category nor our agenda.⁹

In light of these conceptual problems, Huggan opts for “a ‘new’ postcolonialism that looks much more like the work being done in transnational cultural studies than in Commonwealth literary studies.”¹⁰ My chapter, however, proposes to discard the term ‘postcolonialism’ altogether in favour of ‘transnationalism’ with a view to Karnad’s drama Hayavadana.¹¹ Regarding “the identity and self-perception of authors,” Karnad sees himself as part of that “generation […] after India became independent of British rule [which] had to face […] tensions between the cultural past of the country and its colonial past […] and […] between the attractions of Western modes of thought and our own traditions.”¹² With Hayavadana, he has written a “trans- and multilingual work […]” that has been translated into various Indian as well as non-Indian languages and that is “circulating beyond its place of origin.”¹³ Thus for example a German version of Hayavadana was directed by Vijaya Mehta at the German National Theatre, Weimar, in 1984.

Additionally, and more importantly, however, the drama itself challenges notions of postcoloniality and nationality in terms of form as well as topic: Hayavadana contests normative definitions of ‘postcolonial literature’ of Euro-American provenance implicitly through the choice of genre, formal traits inspired by theatrical traditions from East and West, and intertextual references to Thomas Mann and the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer. At the same time, however, the concept of a unified Indian national literature is subverted on an intratextual level by formal devices of the Kannada Yakshagana, “a Dravidian theatre for the lower classes enacted by lower class people,”¹⁴ and – with a special focus on the title hero Hayavadana – by the constellation of exemplary characters, who represent specific subject positions in terms of caste, gender, and cultural authority in India. In order to illustrate these theses, my chapter will at first interpret the significance of genre and the intra- and international intertextuality of Hayavadana as a critical comment on normative definitions of ‘postcolonial’ and ‘national’ literatures. I shall then address the negotiations of an Indian nationality in specific character constellations and the storyline of the drama, and finally I shall raise a few questions concerning problems of ‘transnational readings,’ “going beyond the nation [and] adopting a broadly comparative, transnational approach.”¹⁵ However, before turning to the analysis of the drama, I shall supply some information about and a summary of the plot of Hayavadana and its formal particularities.

1.2 The drama

Girish Karnad published “his landmark play” Hayavadana (1971) in Kannada, and in 1975 translated it himself into – deliberately – Indian English,¹⁶ while retaining specific words from several Indian languages. The plotline negotiates German writer Thomas Mann’s short story “Die vertauschten Köpfe” (The Transposed Heads) (1940), a modernist philosophical and psychological treatment of a Hindu folk tale from an eleventh-century Sanskrit collection of frame stories, each story containing multiple short parables within it.

Like the pretexts, Karnad’s intertext focuses on the triangular relationship between two young men – called Devadatta and Kapila in Karnad’s drama – and a young woman called Sita. Devadatta, a learned Brahmin’s son, has his friend Kapila, son of an iron-smith, woo in his stead for Sita. Though Kapila and Sita fall in love with each other, Sita marries the high-caste Devadatta and becomes pregnant. On a joint journey, Devadatta finds the temple of the goddess Kali and fulfils his former promise to sacrifice his head if he should win Sita. On finding his friend dead, Kapila also cuts off his head. When Sita, upon seeing husband and friend in their blood is about to stab herself, Kali grants her power to revive the young men. However, Sita attaches the wrong head to the wrong body, and in the ensuing debate with her newly composed companions about who now is her rightful husband, she obtains the person with Devadatta’s learned head and with Kapila’s beautiful body. Yet when Devadatta’s new body becomes slack from lack of exercise, Sita with her son escapes to the woods to stay with Kapila, whose new body from constant exertion has come to resemble his former body. After Devadatta discovers the lovers, the men decide to kill each other in a duel, and Sita resolves to become a sati and burn on the funeral pyre of her husband.

This story is framed by the highly disruptive story of the title hero Hayavadana, a man with a horse head. He appears on stage while the character of the Bhagavata performs the traditional opening ceremonies of Indian theatre in praise of the god Ganesha, and interrupts these rituals with his noisy demeanor and uncouth language. Hayavadana tells of various attempts to get rid of the horse’s head, and counters the Bhagavata’s pious advice with derogatory comments and general resistance to the rules of an ordered theatre performance. Without this problem being resolved, the story proper starts, and after some metaleptic appearances of the Bhagav...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies
• 1 The Transnational amongst Related Concepts in Theory and Marketing
• 2 Transnational Literary Histories
• 3 Poetics and Politics of Transnational Genres
• Index