Locating Indian Modernism

The historical origins of Indian modernism in literature and the arts lie in the extraordinary transformation of society and culture that begins in the early nineteenth century, while the East India Company is still in the process of establishing its military dominance and political hegemony on the subcontinent. In the perspective of literary history, this social transformation is driven, to a significant extent, by a dialectic of discourses across cultures that has been at work since the European Renaissance. As the action of opposing forces within a society, this generalized dialectic has four simultaneous, dynamic components: 1) Europe's longstanding critique of Indian society and culture, stemming from Europe's self-definition of its autonomous modernity; 2) India's counter-critique of Europe, which starts early in the nineteenth century; 3) Europe's self-critique, in response to the encounter in the colony; and 4) Indian self-critique, developed “outside the purview of the state and the European missionaries” and based on a Kantian “public use of … reason” under a republican ideal, which accepts many points in the European critique and seeks responsively to transform Indian ways of life (P. Chatterjee, Nation 7; Kant 55; emphases in originals). Once this quadrangular dialectic is active in the colony by the 1810s, it triggers a succession of organized and concerted movements of social reform, which deeply influence political, legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, and cultural phenomena in modern India, down to the present (Dharwadker, “Historical” 238–43). The process of reform launched in the early nineteenth century constitutes a social modernism that has clearly enunciated goals: among them, to change women's life-conditions inside and outside the home; to provide for the literacy and education of girls and for the habilitation and remarriage of widows; to end child marriage, polygamy, and polyandry, purdah, the immolation of satis, “blind” superstition, ritual pollution and untouchability, and discrimination based on caste; to produce new translations and interpretations of Hindu scripture, theology, and philosophy; to reconcile differences among religions, increase their mutual understanding and respect, and defuse communal violence; to reform ancient Indian law; to comprehensively historicize the subcontinent's past; and to revitalize its crafts and arts (see Kopf, Brahmo).