The Everyday as Modernity

Abstract The analysis of the salient characteristics of Indian modernity initiated in Chapter 1 is continued in Chapter 2 by scrutinizing the signals of everydayness animating Indian bhasha writing. Lefebvre, the original formulator of everydayness, considers the concept as constituting an important dimension of modernity, though there is limited scope in practical terms for its articulation in western modernity because of the latter’s continuing alliance with the hermetic aesthetic. While one may not be in a position to eliminate the icons of the everyday from one’s experience of modernity, the conventions of reading promoted by western aesthetics might persuade the reader to misread them as signals of eternity. Bhasha literature, by contrast, is uniquely placed to celebrate the everyday as a seminal principle of Indian modernity. The chapter illustrates this using the writings of the Malayalam fictionist S.K. Pottekkat. The analysis reveals the irony at work in his kind of writing, which is that even as modernity engenders the category of the everyday, it also devises ways of exorcizing it from experience. This can be explained only in terms of modernity’s dialectic, which is linked intimately to the question of the form of realism that dominated the fictional imagination for the most part of modernity.