Indian Literatures, from Vedas to Diasporas ; Les littératures indiennes, des Védas aux diasporas

Abstract

Indian Literatures, from Vedas to Diasporas Anne Castaing, Livres Hebdo, 14/02/2020 Firstly unimpeachable, it is in the plurality of Indian literatures, great sanskrites and heroes' stories of Hindu mythology to Nobel Rabindranath Tagore's poems and the magic realism of the very cosmopolite Salman Rushdie. The Indian subcontinent (which includes India, but also states bordering Pakistan to the west, Bangladesh to the east, Nepal and Bhutan to the north, and Sri Lanka and the Maldives to the south) is an area where literary is cohesive, protracted and even fed into history, politics and society, since its first formulations in the second millennium of JC. Although the French editorial landscape gives great weight to modernity, which is itself a foisonant and, moreover, largely diasporic, it is a reflection, whether voluntary or not, of sometimes millennial traditions, rich as well as iconoclastes. A few clarifications are therefore not unnecessary. Multilingualism European comparison is not inappropriate, although it largely minimises the contemporary Indian linguistic reality: the Indian Constitution recognises 2 national languages, 22 official languages and more than 400 minority languages, some of which (such as bhojpuri or rajasthani) have tens of millions of speakers. The former (English and Hindi) and the latter (bengali, telougou, sindhi, etc.) and the third produced fertile literature, often unfamiliar to the French reader: the English speakers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy, or their predecessors R.K. Narayan or Raja Rao, the great romancier hindi Premchand (1880-1936), gandhien and father of social realism in India, remain ignored despite his major role in the nationalist movement and in the development of the Hindi prose. Authors such as Mahasweta Devi for Bengali, Saadat Hasan Manto for Urdou, Amrita Pritam for panjabi, Girish Karnad dramaturge for kannada or KSatchidanandan poet for Malayalam have, however, marked the modern literary history of the Sous-continent, both in terms of ...