When Pratiman: Samay Samaj Sanskriti (Standards: Time Society Culture), a joint initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and Vani Prakashan, made its appearance more than six years ago, it was accorded a warm welcome by the Hindi world because it tried to make a serious effort to expand the scope of intellectual discourse in Hindi that had, for various reasons, become almost solely the language of journalism and literature. It also claimed to be the first peer-reviewed academic journal in Hindi with the declared objective of “combining original thinking in Hindi with systematic research methodology and practices”. When the third issue of the half-yearly journal appeared, this columnist on May 31, 2014 appreciated the effort for making “a conscious and much-needed attempt to introduce academic and intellectual rigour to the world of Hindi writing”.
Changing clan
The latest issue of the journal provides an occasion to revisit the intellectual project and see how far it has travelled in the past more than six years. It contains a 58-page-long, well-researched and well-argued article by its Chief Editor Abhay Dubey on the changing RSS clan. The article, which is, in fact, an extract from the author’s forthcoming book, critically examines various critiques of the Hindutva ideology and takes note of the myriad ways in which the RSS and its associates have been trying to adapt themselves to the demands of the changing times. However, since the title of the article appears on the cover of the issue, it gives a misleading impression that the entire issue is focused on the changing face of the RSS. Thankfully, this is not the case at all and the issue contains a number of very interesting articles that deal with diverse issues concerning Indian society, Hindi literature, religion and culture.
A discussion centring on the language and the process of decolonisation among 17 scholars is particularly illuminating. The discussants include Radhaballabh Tripathi, Aditya Nigam, Satish Deshpande, Abhay Kumar Dubey and Hilal Ahmed, and they reflect on the spread and hegemony of English and the way it has influenced the process of production of knowledge. Instead of going into the oft-repeated questions pertaining to the linguistic politics of the pre and post-independence India, they try to grapple with more fundamental issues so as to understand if English could spread merely because it was much more closely related to the ability to earn money than other Indian languages. Also, did the colonial rulers succeed in changing the structure of the India’s ‘self’ through the use of the English language and should we accept English as the primary language of the elite intellectual discourse as Sanskrit and Persian were in the pre-British period? And, most importantly, is autonomous production of knowledge, without the influence of English, possible in Indian languages in the present times?
Rare subject
A long interview with the recently deceased anthropologist-thinker Suresh Sharma by Udayan Vajpeyi sheds light on the pagan cultural, intellectual and artistic history.
Titled “Modernity and Pagan Civilisations”, it contextualises paganism against the backdrop of the modern Western Christian world view. Such subjects are not often discussed in the Hindi world and whether one agrees or disagrees with the views of the interviewer or the interviewee, such intellectual engagements should receive an enthusiastic response.
This issue offers its readers the transcript of a lecture delivered by Hindi critic-scholar Namwar Singh at Allahabad in 2008. Although its theme is Riti poetry and Singh, who passed away in February this year, tries to situate it in the contemporary setting, its real significance lies in the way he looks at the different manner in which the European and Indian societies evolved over centuries. Singh, who was widely read in Indian history and had a keen historical sense, also makes quite a few important points concerning the historiography of Hindi literature and the way Riti poetry had fallen victim to systematic neglect over the decades. He also makes a tongue-in-cheek comment about the way outdated intellectual trends make their entry into the world of Hindi discourse, pointing out that when post-modernism had gone out of vogue in the West by 1990, it began to be discussed in Hindi around the same time.
Shubhneet Kaushik offers a very important historical analysis in his article “Bhasha, Dharm aur Rashtra” (Language, Religion and Nation) to demonstrate how the Hindi-Urdu controversy and the fight over script was inextricably intertwined with the history of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan and the conceptualisation of a nascent nationalism. It may be recalled that the Sammelan was a hugely powerful organisation devoted to the cause of propagating and promoting Hindi written in the Nagari script.
Most relevant to the present political and literary discourse is an article by Nishikant Kolge, originally written in English, and translated into Hindi by Tushar Kant, on the lessons one can draw from the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate. It comes to the conclusion that many formulations of Ambedkar would warrant modifications while Gandhi continues to remain contemporary and relevant even now.
The writer is a senior literary critic
