Abstract
Sumanyu Satpathy’s Will to Argue aims to analyse the idea of controversy as a concept, and situates it in specific historical context and varied geographical locations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial India. The word controversy has always generated a significant ideological and political consternation, particularly for the elite literate intellectual class in their literary sensibilities and interests. Controversies are culture-specific, discursively oriented, identity constructs and can provide newer interpretative modes and modalities of historical texts and their uses even for the contemporary times. Whether controversies of various sorts can create a genre or a distinctive field of study is what the author intends to convey in this elegantly argued book. Navigating through a rich and diverse set of historical literary texts focusing on subjects such as khadi, sexuality, language, textual interpretations, ambivalence and uncertainty over authorship by literary stalwarts such as Sarla Das, Radhanath Ray, Fakir Mohan Senapathy of colonial Orissa (now Odisha) along with Tagore, Gandhi and Premchand, Satpathy gives us a rich and variegated mix of literary historical traditions and their humani-stic interpretations.
The Will to Argue over controversies in colonial and post-colonial India resonates so well in our own times of controversies with each passing day. It is here that the will to argue becomes a sincere will in all times since it produces newer forms of knowledge and scripts of resistance in literature, science, art and history. The book leads us to ask a pertinent question—whether the will to argue is innate or created under specific historical conditions. The author has engaged with a number of themes or subjects of inquiry that historically became controversial. In that sense, they were not controversies to begin with but produced and historically shaped as controversies indicating that there were clear intents on the part of certain actors to present them as controversies. The author consistently draws attention to this important aspect in the book.
The author seems to suggest the need for a new comparative literary history that would go beyond the binaries of geo-linguistic hierarchies which tend to produce local–regional literary histories, historical tracts and treatises which contribute to the formation of nationalism and the idea of the national as well as regional political and cultural identities of various kinds. But as the author rightly points out at the very beginning that ‘not all controversies are momentous nation-forming discourses’ (p. 2). It is in this context that some will acquire a pan-Indian character such as the Hindi–Urdu debate or the epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata which are not specific to one region or state. Hence, controversies acquire a certain degree of cultural context, produced thereon and also generate a larger discursive space.
Satpathy thinks that in order to consider controversy a genre, it could be treated as a cultural text. To substantiate this point, he gives examples of the idea of dress on the part of Gandhi and singing of national anthem. He also makes another important point in the beginning that the idea of quelling a controversy will always prolong or generate more controversies. The author, however, cautions that some controversies do contribute actively to the creation of identity and ideology, and the famous one being whether Bengal has better history than Odisha or vice versa. And of course, controversies over homo-eroticism, homosexuality, extra-marital affairs as of Gandhi and Radhakanta Ray, and their confessions have been described with lucid narratives in the book. However, the textual political controversies can, or do at times, act as master narratives of the historical era they represent. One of the master narratives—in the book, in chapter two—is about Hindi/Urdu debate. The debate on Hindi/Urdu is also extended to Odia language, but it can well be mapped onto Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi and Telugu to say the least.
The author’s idea of an inclusive literary history of India is certainly a much wanted subject of concern, particularly in times of hyper-nationalism and exclusive terrains of it. The author has painstakingly put together disparate archives from public and private collections and has thus used innovatively historical sources hitherto unused to help us to understand the valuable writings of Fakir Mohan Senapati and Munshi Premchand in chapter three of the book with newer nuances and subtlety. The theoretical framework and conceptual consensus emerging in this work provides us with larger and less exclusionary framework to analyse the multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-scriptal historical narratives and counter-narratives. What emerges then is a methodological pluralism and innovativeness whereby linguistic, caste, religious, and regional diversities and differences are seen as interlinked and not always oppositional. This can help us to locate the historical master narratives to discern the communalization of the language question expressed through literary histories written so far. It is suggestive of the fact that canonization and nationalization of both languages and literatures is a mutually reinforcing process. In this way, one can understand the role of the print capitalism and its contribution in producing the linguistic habitus which sets up a complex relationship of power and patronage between and among various languages and their users, between language communities and their identities. For example, the manner in which the trope of Hindustani was used during the nationalist struggle was to avoid the question of linguistic communalism spearheaded over Hindi and Urdu exclusivism. In this regard, the teleology of linguistic nationalism can be a more secularizing process at times than religious nationalism, and this has proved to be historically so over the last two hundred years globally.
These linguistic–cultural contestations are not just deeply historical but also inter/intra community one. Therefore, the question of authorship of a text is always a controversial one moving beyond the given geo-linguistic and historical boundaries. In fact, a counterfactual is how the fluidity of borders and boundaries during the colonial period affected the making of literary canon in ways significantly different from the time when such boundaries were more fixed and rigid. It is in this regard that bilingual, trilingual and even multilingual treatises and textbooks seemed to be the order of the day in nineteenth-century colonial India.
The Will to Argue is a delightful reading with interesting and hitherto unknown archival richness with a large number of Odia and English newspapers and periodicals used which familiarize the readers with a dense and vibrant literary public sphere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Besides, the author has provided long endnotes with rich explanation and narratives of tremendous importance and use for the future researchers and writers. However, I think some of those reflections and elaborations should have been in the main text rather than in the endnotes. Despite the new literary and historical sources that the author has skilfully woven into his narratives, making the book a delight to read, there are a few omissions and oversights that I think is worth mentioning. In several places, the author makes near conclusive statements which otherwise are deeply problematic and would require further elaboration. For example, ‘that controversies are obverse of consensus’ (p. 14) or ‘that linguistic communities were helped by British scholars’ (p. 179) are a few such sentences in the book. Despite the extensive set of points and counterpoints well-articulated and summarized by the author as part of the larger argument, the author seems to avoid taking a clear position over the theoretical construct of the concept of controversy. He is either corroborating or contradicting the available scholarly arguments or interpretations on nationalism, national/regional identity and patriarchy.
It is important to remember here that questions related to political and ideological agenda in the writing of particular literary texts need to be addressed. The idea of language here appears as both signifier and signified whereby the latter is more in terms of the representational value of the language and literary sensibilities of the community at stake. The language or literature becomes a veil of colonial conquest which establishes its everyday form of authority through the ‘language of command and command of language’ to use Barney Cohn’s famous phrase. So we need, at times, to separate language and literature for specific ideological and political purposes-writing of dictionaries or colonial officials learning particular lndian languages was a specific agenda. May be, we can consider an idea of collaborative historical context as one where seemingly different and divergent regional and cultural social accounts and imaginaries can be brought together to make sense of their past and present predicament. Often time, a statement like—Odia and Bengali languages are similar—and, therefore, Bengalis and Oriyas have much in common can be put to critical historical scrutiny to give us answers pertaining to the claims on Roshgulla or Jayadeva by both the communities. Another controversy is one on changing the name—whether to retain Oriya or Odia or Orissa or Odisha, and varied controversies that each of these terms allude to.
I would like to raise the question here as to why the term controversy, why not argument, is used as the latter would not make sense without its collaboration with counterargument, whereas controversy suggests that something is not always open to arguments or a reasoned debate and thus reduced to a mere mundane criticism or refusal. Controversies indicate the world of ambivalence, doubt, suspicion, love and hatred among competing groups and communities stoking such controversies. ‘Words are deeds’ as Gandhi said, and it is here that controversies result in extreme forms of violence such as the threat to physical attack, verbal humiliation and abusive behaviour of various forms. Therefore, it is not sufficient to merely talk about the discursive sphere but also larger social sphere that gets vitiated or affected through these controversies.
The author rightly concludes by saying that there is near ‘impossibility of drawing any definite conclusions and the seemingly disconnected controversies exist in dialogue with each other and each one of them helps us understand the others better’ (p. 179). It is also important to bear in mind that often time controversies are created with definite intention, ideological or political or both, at the national and regional levels to suppress voices of democratic dissent (cases being of Jawaharlal Nehru University [JNU] and Padmavat); or as the author has drawn attention to a public confession of Radhanath Ray printed in all major newspapers of Odisha and West Bengal and the responses elicited to this from various quarters of the society. The Will to Argue is an extremely significant work having the virtues of being concise, subtle and historically nuanced and the author has done a commendable job of presenting a rich tapestry of writings, albeit controversial, of literary giants such as Sarala Das’s Mahabharata and Radhanath Ray’s Mahayatra among others. The book forcefully argues and substantiates the fact that controversies reveal differences of perspective, discursive patterns, varied verbal and non-verbal articulations, and social–political legitimization as central to any society’s human life. And some controversies will never be resolved peacefully under the rhetoric of consensus or mutual agreement, but they can be pitched against the dominant other or an imposed consensus. One must go beyond the obvious, visible signs of controversies and recover the cultural and political subtext of ideological orientations impacting, rather violently, the everyday affairs of life in general.