31 Balachandra Nemade and Nativism

Dr. Mrinmoy Pramanick

About the chapter:

This module talks about Indian nativism and Bhalchandra Nemade’s contribution in the discourse. This module introduce the context of the doctrine of nativism, it’s root, influence of Americanism or American nativism in Indian nativism, Bhalchandra Nemade’s major works etc. along with these, the module also talks about orientalism its relation with nativism, it talks about the limitations of the idea, and role of other marginal communities in receiving the idea of nativism. Nativism is also discussed from the point of view of anti-colonial aesthetics of the orients. This idea helps the literary practitioners to have different readings about colonial literature, marginal literature and also Indian indigenous literature or the literatures which were outside the influence of Europe.

Introduction

There is no East and no West, all is global.

-Nemade

In this era of globalization, it is very often argued that no cultural or literary elements are nativist rather they are global. Immense growth of technology and people’s access to it, no doubt offers knowledge of different cultural zones of the World. Neo-liberal economy successfully has commercialized cultural products of different regions and circulated those to the other parts of the world. But this is partial or very limited observation. It is not astonishing that all the parts of the globe is not equally represented in this era of immense technological growth. People, culture and the communities survive with their pasts, with their indigenous and traditional cultural beliefs and systems in different forms. If such practices do not happen so materially it still exists in collective memory of the community.

The point here is the concept of globalization and the concept of the nativism is not exactly opposite two ideas and one does not ensure the absence of the other. To understand nativism in culture, language or literature, we have to understand the historical development of one literature and its contemporary or current trends.

But globalization is not the only force which makes people skeptical about locating the nativity in a certain cultural system but there were whole lot of other epistemological forces what have already changed the lives, thoughts and practices of the communities. Such as Colonialism, Imperialism, modernism etc. In different periods of history, such experiences challenged the nativist practices of the communities who have come across the historical phenomena.

Birth of the Concept

The idea of nativism emerged in 1835-45, in America and it was known as Americanism. Nativism as a concept was introduced in India during 1980s. It was introduced in India through English in India. Bhalchandra Nemade pioneer theorist of Nativism or Desivad says, “The task of preparing again a viable Indian Critical Tradition may not be possible unless all the systems of literature- productive, distributive and consumptive – are originally desi or nativistic” (Preface/ Nativism).

Colonialism and colonial culture used to portray Indian culture as a “Low Value-Culture”. Nemade correctly established the point of beginning of his discussion in saying that, “It had been certainly a high-value culture till the seventeenth century which created Dara Shikoh, the Tej and Tukaram, to mention only a few”.

Bhalchandra Nemade

Bhalchandra Nemade, born in 1938 is a Marathi literary figure; his famous works are Hindu and Kosala, though he is widely known in India for his work on desivad. He is also honoured with the highest literary honour in India, Jnanpith Award 2014. Nemade was one of the pioneering figure in the post-1960s Little Magazine movement. Nemade’s contribution in the form of novel is ‘peerless’. His novel Kosala brought a new wave in Marathi novel and Marathi fiction has been influenced a lot with this work by Nemade (Nandgaonkar, Satish).

What is Nativism?

Nativism1 is an idea or practice or policy to re-conceptualise, revisit, re-discovering one’s native identity, culture, etc. It is an idea to establish against immigrants2. It is a practice to resist against the colonial, imperial forces and also against the cultural hegemony of globalization. Nativism is perceived as weapon to a dying culture or the culture which is threaten or to the culture which is hegemonised. In Indian context it is said that nativism teaches about what India needs most to serve her languages and cultures. It claims that the historically colonized and globalized Indian culture needs pity towards it. It demands for a methodology and individual’s responsibility to save a culture, orality, tradition and folklore in its own way. Nativism is search for a method which must be emerged from the culture within. It is an alternative method to write history of a community or nation and the historiogrsaphy must be constituted within the nation or community’s practice or knowledge. In Indian context nativism is to offer an alternative way of reading India’s past, culture, literature and languages. And this way must be non-colonial and non-globalised.

Concept of Nativism

Another scholar in the field of Comparative Literature, Translation and Indian Literature, Indranath Choudhury put nativism in different way. His argument is nativism is not an obsession towards one’s past but it is a method of comparative study; it is comparative tool to have better understanding about one’s own literature. According to Choudhury, “Here, it should be remembered that Nativism is not an obsession with roots. Instead, it is a concept which has come to challenge the very idea of Eurocentric modernism and internationalism – the tendency to compare every literary text / trend with some Euro-American product” (as said by Indra Nath Choudhuri in his welcome speech at a seminar on Desivad in Indian Literature organized by Sahitya Academy in collaboration with the Centre for Creative Writing and Publication, IIT, Kanpur in 1995.). (Nativism: Essays in Criticism, 2). According to him nativism is a dialectic relationship between self and other. Self is reclaiming one’s desi identity and other is different from one’s desi identity. But desivad is different than the narrow nationalism and a peaceful co-existence between desi and other is possible. There is a power relation in the context of desivad also. This power relation is not a power relation of different but the opposites. When a community tries to bring changes in other community-life this is obviously a power relation.

Makarand Paranjape, another scholar of nativism defines nativism, as a form of indigenism whose agenda can be summed up as a cry for cultural self-respect …. (Nativism: Essays in Criticism, xii). And here is the importance of nativism as an anti-colonial method of reading the literature of ex-colonies. But he also describes nativism as an aggressive and militant way to rediscover one’s nativeness. Though Paranjape also observed nativism as one’s right to live with the cultural past what one inherits.

Why Nativism

Nemade, in the beginning of his book raised few points about desivad what helps us to understand the why of nativism. He said, “Kalidasa is the Shakespeare of India, Valmiki is the Homer of the East, and ‘foreign signifiers became a primary base of our linguistic signs in literary criticism’. But who was the Tukaram of West, or what was the Ajanta or the Mahabharata of the West?” (Nemade, Bhalchandra;). According to Nemade,

• Each culture has its desi modernity, native modernity
• Being native means being attached to a particular place.
• To nativistic in order to survive.
• Native principle is fundamental to literature.
• The regional may be thought of only as subset of the nativist.

According to Makarand Paranjape, desivad or nativism is a militant or aggressive form of that passive and self-evident quality of desipana or nativeness, that is, the value of being desi or native, which value is inherent in any cultural object, belief or practice and which implies the natural state of sustaining the status quo. Nativism is thus establishing of one’s right to exist as one is (Nemade, Bhalchandra;). Here is the significance of the idea of nativism and nativism is required for a community or nation to culturally and historically survive.

Nemade’s Nativism

Nemade’s famous book Nativism or Desivad is published from Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla in 2009. The chapters of the book are as follows:

• – Preface
• – Nativism in Literary Culture
• – Modernity, Globalization and Nativism
• – Native Styles: Orality
• – Marathi Novel 1857-1975
• – The Story of Yogananda In the Kathasaritsagra
• – Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Poetry

Nemade popularized the term not only in Marathi literary sphere but also in Indian literary criticism. Especially when the English version of the book got published Indian literary criticism got a new method introduced. The Indian equivalent of the term is Desivad, which is used in Marathi and other Indian languages too. The term is directly translation of the English term ‘nativism’.

Nemade in his Nativism argues that, “every place has its own “code of the land”, … If the code is not felt in our intellectual activities our literary activities will be of no consequence”. Not understand one’s own literature or culture or history with the eyes of the others, nativism is needed. Because of the code of the land the scientific method of reading literature or understanding culture or history should be emerged from one’s own culture, heritage and knowledge.

Modernity and Globalisation is the forces which kills the nativity, therefore nativism here perceives as a force to rediscover the pre-modern, pre-globalisation culture and history. Modernity appears to him as a universal commodity and it is ‘not a culture specific phase in history’. In this context he focuses on two questions, one is “how to decolonize the native understanding of the West?” and “How to decolonize our own understanding of India?”.

According to Nemade literary theory we use in Indian context are truly western in nature, therefore Nemade finds Indian theory for reading Indian literature. Orality in Indian cultural tradition appears as source of new literary understanding. Orality appears to him as, ‘One of the major sources to reconstructing native styles’ (59). Writing was privilege to the upper class and orality is the greatest source to find the psyche of the Indian commons. He tries to understand the orality as the most common denominator of Indian literature and therefore whole history of Indianness in different Indian literature, language and culture. To find the Indianness in Indian culture he finds Bhakti movement as most common denominating factor which stands for the greatest symbol or orality.

Critique of Nativism

Critic of nativism Vilas Sarang says, while Nemade himself is criticizing Marathi criticism as very much influenced by the western literary theory and criticism, Nemade himself is borrowing the idea of nativism from the west (Sarang, Vilas;). Sarang again criticized the whole idea of nativism by saying that nativism is no more used in literary criticism but this is the idea which is much more anthropological and Nemade is blamed by him that the idea is ‘swallowed’ to the Marathi criticism. According to Sarang, the purpose for what nativism is introduced in the literary criticism may be served better with the comparative study of literary history of different languages and nation. He also points out that, if a literature goes beyond the nativism and narrow nationalism, only the literature flourished.

Sarang’s arguments are although worth mentioning but there are limitations in his arguments too. Influence by the west does not mean the loosing originality. Especially for the critical studies it does not happen so easily. Nemade has borrowed the idea of nativism from the west to revisit India’s past and to reclaiming the history of Indian literature to reconceptualise the history of literature. Throughout his study, it was his intention to theorise the literary issues with the reference of Indian literature and to present the rich literary heritage of Indian literature.

According to Chavan, desivad in Marathi also did not get much response, until unless IIAS invited Nemade for delivering lectures on desivad and they published all of those lectures into English. Meanwhile Nemade also got chances to reshape his work what was published earlier in Marathi. All the criticism against Nemade’s work may be resolved with his work published in English. Because he addressed all the objections and criticism about his Marathi work in his English book. Chavan says that, “Nemade expects us to look into our own tradition to form our own standards to judge the quality of a literary work” (Chavan, Dilip;). G N Devy and Makrand Paranjape appreciated the meit of Nemde’s work. But Nemade was highly criticized by the some of the dalit scholars who found Hindutva elements in Nemade’s work. It is often criticized as conservative, narrow, nationalist, traditional and separatist as mentioned by Chavan. But Chavan also mentions that one should judge the merits of the allegations made against the Nemade’s work. Some of the critics also claims that Nemade’s work falls between the trap of the western and the Sanskritic culture, and knowledge. It is interesting to note that very clearly Chavan has analysed the socio-historical contexts what actually made critics to understand Nemade’s text as Hindutva or Sanskritic or Brahminical. Chavan said, “…there is a strong resistance to any concept concomitant to ‘Vedic parrotry’ or the self-righteous Brahminic world-view as ‘holier than thou.’ Therefore, as a reaction to the oppressive Brahmimic dominance many scholars view Western knowledge systems as a liberating force. To them, except Buddhism, anything indigenous is synonymous with Brahminic. … Paradoxically, many nativistic forms of creations have been developed and preserved by lower sections of society” (Chavan, Dilip;). Though Nemade also pointed out that the indigenity is mostly preserved by the lower section of the society. The culture which is more marginal intended to be more original or indigenous or desi.

Conclusion

Nemade’s nativism is an important theoretical framework which is significant contribution in Indian literary and cultural theory in post-Independent India. To imagine Indian Literature and to contextualize Comparative literary studies in India nativism may be understood as necessary tool or theoretical framework. Though Nemade’s nativism is not beyond criticism. It is highly criticized by the marginal section like Dalits but it is paradoxical that the intention of such theory is to have an inclusive reading of literature and culture, especially to address the marginal culture but it appeared to the Dalits as a problematic idea. And because of this problem it is difficult to establish as unavoidable way to rediscovering India’s past or it is difficult to representing marginal India with this discursive framework. But it is doubtless that India needs such theory to reconceptualise the idea of Indian Literature and contextualize Indian Comparative literature.

In literary discipline like English such theory is important to understand the Indian literature in English or Indian writing in English translation, to understand the indigenous Indianness. Moreover, this is a cultural theory too, that help to read different indigenous cultural forms of a community or nation. From that perspective gradually evolving English discipline needs to have discussions on such theory.

Nativism, as it is about the study of indigeneity of one’s culture, tradition, heritage, literature, and history, it appears to the practitioners as a poetics of indigeneity.

Reference

• Chavan, Dilip;. “Nemade’s Nativism – Part I.” Muse India 74 (2017).<http://www.museindia.com/featurecontent.asp?issid=63&id=6043>.
• Nandgaonkar, Satish;. “Marathi novelist Bhalchandra Nemade chosen for Jnanpith award.” The HIndu 2 April 2016. Web.
• Nemade, Bhalchandra;. Nativism. Shimla: IIAS, 2009. Print.
• Sarang, Vilas;. “The Perils of Nativism.” Muse India 21 (2008). Web.<http://www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2008&issid=21&id=1209>.