The site of literary and cultural productions in Indian languages complicates perceptions of the Euro-American model of modernity. This essay examines select literary writings in Indian languages and, in light of their differently paced and varied negotiations with everyday experiences of coloniality and modernity, urges the need for a decolonial model. It proposes transmodernity as a frame that can accommodate and account for the multiple, contested, incommensurate social worlds ensconced in literatures in Indian languages. Such a frame would allow us to valorize multivocality and entanglements through intercultural dialogues and transversal engagements.
This essay argues that Pakistani writer Intizar Husain's short story "Morenama" (A chronicle of the peacocks), written originally in Urdu in 2002, uses the framework of pilgrimage and the South Asian-Persianate qissa genre to describe transmodern ways of apprehending the narrator's traumatic displacement following the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent. The essay claims that the narrator's post-Partition visits to the tombs of spiritual saints and epic battlefields in India offer pluralistic, transmodern ways of seeing and thinking beyond the horizon of European modernity. Husain's depictions of graves and ghosts through "rememory" accommodate temporal and spatial perceptions that counter Western modernity's positivistic ways of knowing and representing reality. Although the narrator's return to familiar places fails to diminish his homesickness, the depiction of that journey as at once real and imagined-the narrative insistently blurs the distinction-decenters modernity's distorting vision and thereby revivifies marginalized places.
This article examines two novels with reference to “transmodern perspectives on literature” (Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa 2019), focusing on a common denominator in their plots: the motif of two real, historical figures conversing with each other from beyond the grave. Rabisankar Bal’s Bengali novel Dozakhnama (2010), translated into English as Dozakhnama: Conversations in Hell (2012), is premised on a posthumous dialogue between Mirza Ghalib and Saadat Hasan Manto – two prominent figures in Urdu literature. Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) pivots around a posthumous debate between two medieval Arab philosophers, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Al-Ghazali. I invoke Enrique Dussel’s concept of “trans-modern pluriversality” to account for the juxtaposition, in these novels, of postmodern narrative devices with the premodern genres of the dastan and the qissa . I use the term post-Orientalism to designate the metafictional and anticolonial uses of Orientalist tropes in these works.
Following the critical work of the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, this essay argues that decolonization implies acknowledging the existence of transmodernity and the recognition of progress outside Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic zones. In her essay “Maritime Transmodernities and The Ibis Trilogy” (2019), Anupama Mohan marshals the tenets of transmodernismo in order to signal the emergence of the genre she calls “the transmodern novel,” focusing on the Indian Ocean as an extensive space of littoral cultural negotiations of competing and intersecting global colonial versions of modernity. This essay will engage with the negotiations between transmodern novel-writing and the rewriting of stories/histories as they navigate the world, with the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean as maritime nodes of pluriversal circulation of cultural meaning. I focus on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and The Nutmeg’s Curse to argue that, as the same colonial mechanisms are replicated globally, interoceanic routes of transmodern cultural exchange generate stories/histories that counterbalance the impositions of global modernity, promoting freedom from compulsory Eurocentric models.
This paper applies Enrique Dussel’s conception of transmodernity to the complex, intermeshed histories of subjugation, suffering, and resilience that are produced within the interstices of modernity’s project, global capital’s operations, and what Aníbal Quijano describes as the coloniality of power. It asks whether we must distinguish between a social-historical condition, that of transmodernity, and an aesthetic mode, that of transmodernism, as we do between modernity and modernism, or postmodernity and postmodernism. These theoretical observations are then brought to bear on my reading of a Bengali novel, Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwābnāmā (Dream chronicle), first published in 1996. This text focuses both on the subjectivity and the subjection of the peasant in a time of upheaval, as they are called upon to negotiate pasts that survive as memory, dream or trauma, and to cope with a present of alienation and suffering. Elias deconstructs the politics of nationhood, offering in its stead an insurrectionary poetics that subjects history, time and nature to the dialectical (or, as Dussel might put it, analectical) promise of allegory.
This paper provides a succinct outline of the findings from the 2023 excavations conducted at Kuldor-tepa in Urgut, Samarkand region. The excavations, focused on the south-western suburban area of the site, have revealed a complex that is reminiscent of Sogdian variations of Zoroastrian sanctuaries found in Central Asia. The complex includes a cella with two stairs in the innermost area, connected to a larger hall with smaller side chambers. This arrangement resembles the layout of the temples of Panjikent and appears to support the hypothesis of its function as a temple. Kuldor-tepa is situated approximately 25 km south-east of Samarkand. The original name of the site remains uncertain, with arguments suggesting it may be the remnants of Boxide ((sic)(sic)T), mentioned in Chinese historical sources as the capital castle or town of Mi (f ), or Maymurgh principality, one of the major yet little-known Sogdian city-states.
Why did so many Southeast Asian kingdoms choose cremation as a royal rite? Fire rituals weren’t simply imported from India. This paper examines how the rituals were reshaped by already established local beliefs that valued cremation. Sites like Sa Huỳnh and Ban Non Wat show that fire burials were current long before Indian religions arrived in the region. Later, Hindu and Buddhist cremation rites were not blindly copied but put to use by monarchs in Funan, Champa, Srivijaya, and Majapahit to broadcast the rulers’ sacred kingship. Religious specialists like Brahmins and monks helped introduce these ideas, but local people made them their own. Meanwhile, regions like northern Vietnam kept their Confucian burial traditions. This paper argues that cremation became part of a political and spiritual language, not because of cultural domination, but because it resonated with existing ways of thinking about death, power, and ancestry.
