The Modernist Nonmodern: Provincialism and the Intimacy of Space

This chapter considers the relevance of literary modernism’s attachments to the nonmodern provincial for our present political climate. In his intimate engagement with South Asian writers Amrita Pritam and Mahasweta Devi alongside a range of modernists as well as his own novels and scholarship, Majumdar charts a restlessness with the cosmopolitan worldview shaping modern literature, and traces how literary modernism’s celebration of the provincial as a form of nonmodern spatial intimacy remains overshadowed by the movement’s identification with cosmopolitanism. The chapter argues that exploring the nonmodern spirit of literary aesthetics is an urgent project today in light of the global erosion of liberal modernity and its sociopolitical ambitions. At a time when many of modernity’s premises ‘seem to be failing miserably before the rise of authoritarian governments backed by jingoistic populism’, Majumdar writes, ‘the invocation of the nonmodern, as articulated in the celebration of the provincial and the irrational in works of Indian-language modernism […] is at once essential and the best possible gesture of literary activism’. In concluding this volume, Majumdar offers an arresting vista of modernism’s lasting intimacies.