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After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism

G.N Devy’s After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism states that bhasha literatures in India did not pay much attention to developing their own modes of criticism, as result of the cultural amnesia brought about by colonialism. According to Devy, this millennium marked the emergence of new languages or bhashas in the Indian subcontinent in protest against the hegemony of Sanskrit in the north and the culture Sanskriti that the language nurtured. In the north the regional dialects of Sanskrit known as Apabramsha established themselves independent languages.The Middle-Indo Aryan dialect in the east got divided into Bangala and Oriya. The north-eastern dialect developed into Kashmiri, Sindhi and Panjabi. The western Apabhramsa known as Middle Indo Aryan was split into Hindi, Gujarathi and Marathi. Hindi, later on, came into contact with the Islamic languages such as Arabic, Turkish and so on and gave birth to a cantonment language called Urdu which later matured into a full-fledged literary language. In the south, a similar movement occurred in connection with Tamil which after a continuous history of thousand years bifurcated into Telugu. In course of time, Kannada, once a dialect of Tamil, became an independent language. Nine hundred years later, Tamil and Kannada jointly produced Malayalam. Under the influence of the Sanskrit criticism, spanning some sixteen centuries, many bhashas such as Marathi, Gujarathi and Tamil developed their own modes of criticism. Devy says that the emergence of the bhasha literatures coincided with, even if it not entirely caused by, a succession of Islamic rulers India. The Islamic rulers provided the bhasha literatures a kind of legitimacy throough liberal political patronage. The intimate contact with Islamic culture gave bhasha literatures new directions to explore. From the middle of the eighteen century, India witnessed British intervention. Once political domination was well established, the British rulers introduced Western education in India with a view to ‘civilizing’ the Indian citizens. But in reality, the real intention behind this act was purely pragmatic. The aim was to ‘educate’ Indians so that they could be of use to the empire to run the imperial machinery in the subcontinent. The group that supported the western education in India which came to be known as Anglicist looked down upon the oriental epistemic systems. These words by Macaulay sum up the anglicist disposition towards oriental knowledge system. . . “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (XX). Opposite to the Anglicist camp was the group called Indologist that stood for the revival of India’s glorious past by returning to the ancient Sanskrit tradition. They considered Indian heritage as “one glorious and now decadent” (XX). They saw cultural phenomena as museum pieces removed from the current of history. Through the intervention of Indology, Europe came to accept the Sanskrit tradition of India. It also played a vital role in making the Indian critics feel emotionally in tune with Sanskrit tradition of India which has no organic relation with them. Through Western education, the Indian critics also developed an affinity with Western literature which was far removed from India’s cultural milieu. These two forces which were the products of colonialism caused a cultural amnesia in the critics of bhasa literatures thereby slowly distancing them from the history of their native tongue. This cultural amnesia prevented the bhasha literatures from reviving their already existing critical practices—as in the case of Tamil, Gujrati or Marathi---or developing a new mode of criticism to study their literary works. For studying bhasha literature, these critics either borrowed the western critical tools or retuned to the ancient Sanskrit criticism revitalized by the Indologists. Devy notices that in the nineteenth century, bhasha literature did not produce any native paradigms of criticism thanks to the cultural amnesia. According to Devy, at present there are three major streams of criticism in India. The first section argues that it is possible to meet the present literary-critical needs by following exclusively either Western criticism. The second section argues for a return to Sanskrit criticism. The third one believes that it is possible to meet the needs by combining the two trends.This trend in criticism also bears testimony to the fact that bhasha critics are completely blind to the native traditions of criticism. As far as Devy is concerned it is “. . .it is unprofitable for Indian critics to relate themselves to either the Western or the Sanskrit tradition of criticism, or to any knind of combination of the two” (34). Devy opines that these wild cravings for distant traditions needs to be moderated by an awareness of bhasha traditions; critics should confine themselves to traditions closer at hand, if criticism is to break through the present crisis. Bhasha criticism today has ceased to be an intellectual discourse, and the native critics have a fetish for western and Sanskrit traditions of criticism with which these critics have no organic relation. According to Devy cultural amnesia is an inevitable consequence of colonialism. It is caused when a dominated culture is branded as inferior by a dominating culture, and when this view is accepted as such by the subject culture. As a way to win the acceptance of the dominating culture which is presented as superior to the subject culture, the subject culture slowly conforms to the views upheld by the coloniser. We have seen that, in India, Sanskrit and western critical practices are the critical practices accepted by the colonial power. The reluctance of the modern Indian critic to develop or return to the native modes of criticism, and their tendency to uphold Sanskrit and Western critical practices are very much the result of the consequence of colonialism. Devy holds that literature growing out of one type of underlying linguistic and metaphysical structure cannot be understood and studied by criticism growing out of another and alien type of underlying linguistic and metaphysical structure. In reality, the Indian critic feels a false proximity to Sanskrit and western ideas. Their relationship with these alien critical practices is only virtual, not an organic one. He points out that the modern Indian critic can utmost say that India had a glorious tradition of literary criticism a thousand years ago. But this critic cannot use this tradition as a living tradition which shares a frame of reference within his normal intellectual activity. The same is the case with western criticism. Devy asks, “How can an Indian critic brought up on the Derridian sense of difference do justice ti literature produced in a society which had never experienced the anxiety resulting from logocentricism?”(26). As a panacea for the current crisis in Indian literary criticism, Devy insists that each bhasha should develop a native mode of criticism, instead of banking upon Sanskrit and western criticism. Led by the novelist-critic Bhalachandra Nemade, nativism as a school of criticism emerged in Marathi literature during the last fifteen years. This movement exhorts to eschew both the western and Sanskrit critical practices to study bhasha literature since they are far removed from the cultural milieu of the bhasha literatures. Devy concludes that the Indian critics should give up their fetish for Sanskritization and westernization, and should pay more attention to the tradition that they have at hand, that is the tradition of criticism in bhasha literatures.