Under the Bhasha Gaze

Abstract Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature is a study of literatures in India in the context of recent discussions on modernity. It is a critique of the aesthetics and politics of modernity as they are embodied in Indian bhasha writing of the past two centuries. Exploring the trajectory of modernity after Indian literature came into contact with colonialism in the early nineteenth century is the book’s primary object, though the intricate ways in which the bhasha imagination negotiated questions clustering around such concepts as the literary, the historical and the social receive focused attention in the analysis. The work can also be regarded as a critical intervention in the current debates on comparative Indian literature. Though the study acknowledges the European provenance of modernity as a historical idea, it also recognizes the concept’s inherent complexity and its equivocal connotations when used with reference to the multilingual bhasha environment in India. Theoretical issues debated in relation to modernity such as its conceptual affinities with the western enlightenment project, its ideological investment in European aesthetics, and its implication for the evolution of the hermetic aesthetic are important for the study. The work also examines the local and regional strengths of the bhasha imagination that renders inevitable a specifically Indian conception of modernity. Although the book is concerned with issues pertaining to Indian literature in general, the theoretical postulates undergirding it are illustrated with the help primarily of Malayalam literature, with supplementary inputs from literatures in other bhashas and Indian English.