Fourth Annual Kailath Colloquia, September 16-18, 1999 New Literary Histories for Nineteenth Century India: Mapping the Terrain Vasudha Dalmia, Professor of Hindi at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, in cooperation with Stuart Blackburn of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, organized a 3-day workshop from September 16-18, 1999 at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the Berkeley campus. Scholars from India, Europe and the U. S. came together to discuss, debate and analyze the beginnings of the modern literatures of the subcontinent. There was an unusual degree of internal cohesion in the papers presented and a sense of shared excitement about making fresh inroads in Indian literary historiography. The strict focus on the nineteenth century helped to create the coherence, but also the careful selection of participants. A core group had formed at the European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies meeting in Prague two years ago. That group, also organized by Dalmia and Blackburn, was now expanded to include more literary cultures and more work on publishing, printing and the formation of print languages. In charting the history of the modern literatures of India, literary scholars have now come to focus on the public literary sphere, as it emerged in the urban cultures of mid-nineteenth century India. It was in these metropolitan centers, in the complexity of the colonial context, that the modern literatures of South Asia evolved, self consciously and deliberately establishing links with traditions, both classical and recent, even while propelling themselves forward in the spirit of the new. It was through these new literatures that nationalisms were imagined, that communities were newly constituted and that, as the family itself was newly defined, the domestic was sought to be cordoned off from the public. The literary sphere, then, was a part of a larger cultural and political enterprise, and was constituted, as elsewhere, by literary journals, civic associations, educational groups, reading and debating clubs, amateur theatrical associations, and religious and reform associations with their manifold publications and activities. The organizers of the workshop were of the opinion that the time had now come to attempt a fresh analysis of the data from new perspectives. The task they set themselves was not only to recover works forgotten and faded, lost in the files of old libraries, private and public, but also to understand the cultural politics in which the new emerged. What were the breaks and continuities in patterns of patronage, of literary production and literary modes? In addition to these discursive patterns, they also looked to empirical studies of print technology, the operations of printing presses, publishing houses, and libraries. The participants started from the premise that the literary idiom from the West did not appear in a vacuum, but was acting upon rich narrative and performative traditions and sophisticated literary cultures. How did courtly poetry, the vast corpus of devotional poetry and hagiographical literature, the oral epics of remarkable magnitude and power, respond to and accommodate the new genres from the West? How did these in turn influence the selection of specific literary modes and features from the wide repertoire offered from the West? And when the new syntheses finally emerged, when the literary canons were reconstituted, what linkages did they establish with the past and what did they exclude? Fresh perspectives and newly researched material was brought together on topics as varied as the early nineteenth century Tamil Christian poems of Vedanayaka Sastri, printed oral tales in Tamil, Hindi and Urdu, the classical poem fulfilling new political functions in Gujarati and the thematics of the lower caste novel in Malayalam. There was discussion of the figure of the Babu in Bengali satirical writing and that of the shifts in the depiction of the trickster woman in popular Hindi-Urdu literature but also of the powerful role ascribed to the educated and domesticated urban woman in the didactic literature of almost all the Indian languages. The rise of the hybrid Parsi theatre, however, was to offer a new platform for female impersonation with its own forms for presenting new desires and tensions in the distribution of gender roles. This material was further enriched by studies of the new publishing and printing culture of Delhi and Lucknow, of the commercial publishing which enabled the early rise of the detective novel in Hindi, the vital role of libraries in disseminating the popular English novel, but also of the old-time Sanskrit pandit in the formation of Telugu as a print language. The participants were:
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