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.
