In
memoriam
Today when Indian literature
in English translation and Indian-English literature are part of English Literature
syllabi in Indian universities and the discourse on this literature is rich,
varied and entrenched in academia globally, the passing away of Prof Meenakshi
Mukherjee, teacher, scholar and dynamic organizer who pioneered this shift,
requires a looking back. A Bengali student in Patna
and the US, and teaching at
various colleges and universities across India, Prof Meenakshi Mukherjee was
enabled by her multilingualism (besides English she read Bengali, Hindi and
Marathi) to perceive very early, the difference in sensibility of Indians
writing in English and Indians writing in the regional languages. Along with
her husband and intellectual collaborator Prof Sujit Mukherjee she brought to
the field of translation, academic attention and critical insights on the one
hand, while building and consolidating on the other hand a discourse on Indian
English Literature.
In 1979 at the new University of Hyderabad when Prof Meenakshi Mukherjee found
an opportunity to frame a course for the MA English students, she decided to
include Indian language novels in English translation. The opposition to the
idea of using ‘translated (Indian) texts in an English MA programme’ she had already
encountered at traditional universities where the objection never seemed to
apply to English translations of Homer, Sophocles and Brecht. Teaching Indian
texts in translation in the English class Mukherjee found that student
responses to texts were more confident when they had a first hand exposure to
the culture. She critiqued the way English literature was being traditionally
taught in India
__ totally ignoring the context in which the text had been created
and canonized, and the context in which it was being received.
Deriving partly from the
interdisciplinary expansion of literature into Cultural Studies then beginning
in some American and British universities, Mukherjee saw in this direction a
way of bringing to English Literature studies in India the highly charged,
interrogative and transforming discourse of colonialism. These are experiences
she shared in her paper, ‘Mapping a Territory: Notes on Framing a Course’ in
1988. English literary studies in India were at that point set for a
change as young teachers returned from the West to teach in Indian
universities. Mukherjee’s paper was in fact part of a seminar, ‘The Study of
English Literature in India: History , Ideology and Practice’ organized by the
English Department of Miranda House, University of Delhi and subsequently
published in The Lie of the Land: English
Literary Studies in India, edited by another great scholar Rajeshwari
Sunder Rajan.
Mukherjee who travelled
constantly between Indian states, universities, languages and texts and between
India and the rest of the world was able to bring together the research and
writing taking place in different parts of the country not only in English but
in the regional languages as well. Her book, The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in
English (1971) is one of the earliest attempts to come to terms with Indian
English fiction as a literary phenomenon and the first comprehensive work by a
single scholar. There had been a collection of essays before this, born out of
the first national seminar on Indian Writing in English held at the University of Mysore in 1968. Mukherjee ruthlessly
tore through ill informed and prejudiced criticism of Indian English (then
called Indo-Anglian) literature. She hailed K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s survey Indian Writing in English (1962) as
pioneering work and welcomed William Walsh’s ‘rigorous and uncondescending
evaluation of R K Narayan’ in The
Human Idiom (1964). The bibliography to Twice
Born Fiction is a revelation of the extensive Indian scholarship already in
progress but which had until then never been brought together like this. Twice Born Fiction actually started the
process of canon formation and discourse building in the new genre.
Meanwhile British
English texts were also receiving her rigorous critical attention. The 1991
study Jane Austen, reprinted in 1995
as Re-reading Jane Austen, while
focusing critically on the feminist elements in Austen has an entire chapter
devoted to how the colonies figured in the fiction of Jane Austen and her
compatriots. Titled ‘To hear my uncle talk of the West Indies’, this chapter,
uses the quote from Mansfield Park to
explore the presentation of colonies, slavery and ‘other’ lands in Austen.
It alerts Indian students of Austen not to seek universal truths in British
literature. This perspective continued to inform her criticism of British
English texts. Her 2004 essay for a critical anthology on Frankenstein is thus aptly titled ‘The Revenge of Prakriti?’, and places Mary Shelley’s text
alongside Tagore’s Gora and U R
Anantha Murthy’s Samskara tracing the
fine threads of the nineteenth century idea of ‘nature’.
Given her movement
towards Indian bhasha literatures from a location within English studies,
Mukherjee is in many ways a ‘comparativist’ energised by the discourse of
post-colonialism. Early Novels in India (2002) are seminar papers edited by
her, under the aegis of the Centre for Comparative Literature, Kerala University
and sponsored by the Sahitya Akademi. In the Introduction to this volume
Mukherjee shows how the essays contest the ‘clichéd premise’ that ‘the novel in
India
was a borrowed genre __ a direct outcome of British education’, and
foregrounds the ‘complex question of plural heritage’, and ‘the multiplicity of
other determinants’.
Long before this, in her
1985 book Realism and Reality: the Novel
and Society in India Mukherjee had in fact set in motion
explorations in this direction. In fact Mukherjee’s scholarship is postcolonial
in essence as it shows the veins in Indian literature that have assimilated and
transformed western influence rather than simply derive from it. The lengthy appendix
in Realism and Reality, of major
novels in the Indian languages published between 1801 and 1900 ranging across
several Indian languages from Assamese to Urdu, and her acknowledgement of
scholars located in Patna, Delhi, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Austin and Naihati
(West Bengal) reveal the phenomenal
span of her intellectual and personal universe.
Towards the end of The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian
Writing in English (2000) Mukherjee discusses the eclectic selection of
Indian texts in English departments in the USA,
Canada, Australia and Europe
and the absence of Indian language texts in translation. The ‘best novels from India do not
find a ready readership abroad’ because being ‘stubbornly local’ they ‘resist
reductive readings’. She argues that, though the ‘fates of the
Indian novel in English, and the Indian novel in English translation might continue
to be dissimilar in the global market . . . there is a potentially large
domestic market to justify the present surge of translations into English’.
Mukherjee’s
collaborations, publications and contribution to the Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) are indicative of a creative
symbiosis with emerging discourses in literature studies worldwide. The 2007
volume Nation in Imagination: Essays on
Nationalism, Sub-Nationalisms and Narration which she co-edited along with
C Vijayasree, Harish Trivedi and T Vijay Kumar is one of many joint
enterprises. Here is what Anjana Sharma, editor of Frankenstein: Interrogating Gender, Culture
and Identity (2004) says of Meenakshi Mukherjee, “It was her readiness then
to aid a young researcher find publishing space . . . it taught me that to be a
true scholar one must always encourage, guide, nudge others who are also
seeking to find a voice of their own . . . you showed through your own example
that ideas are only exciting if they are shared”.
Mukherjee leaves behind
a rich legacy for academics and students of literature. Her students, readers
and collaborators are assurance that this legacy is set to grow.
-- by Sanjukta Das
Published December, 2009
References
The Lie of
the Land: English Literary Studies in India, Rajeshwari Sundar
Rajan, ed. New Delhi: Oxford
India
Paperbacks,1993.230-31
The Twice
Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English, Meenakshi
Mukherjee, New Delhi: Arnold
Heinemann (India),
1974. 10-13
Re-reading
Jane Austen, Meenakshi Mukherjee, New
Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd, 1995.49-69.
‘The Revenge of Prakriti?’, Meenakshi Mukherjee in Frankenstein: Interrogating Gender, Culture and Identity, Anjana
Sharma, ed. New Delhi:
Macmillan India Ltd, 2004. 169-76.
Early Novels
in India, Meenakshi
Mukherjee, ed. New Delhi:
Sahitya Akademi, 2002.viii.
Realism and
Reality: the Novel and Society in India, Meenakshi
Mukherjee, New Delhi: Oxford
India
Paperbacks, 1999.
The
Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English, Meenakshi
Mukherjee New Delhi: Oxford
India
Paperbacks, 2002. 199
Ibid,202
Nation in
Imagination: Essays on Nationalism, Sub-Nationalisms and Narration, C Vijayasree et al, Eds. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007. Other books
in this series edited by the same authors are Nation Across the World: Postcolonial Representations (2007) and Focus India: Postcolonial Narratives of the
Nation(2007)
Anjana
Sharma, Frankenstein: Interrogating
Gender, Culture and Identity, op cit. 4. viii.
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