I saw a Hindu Keralite woman who is pro Dalit but believes in intersectionality, all details I gathered from the comments to her post, write on FB a sentence as a post which read "Every man is a Brahmin." I do not know if the post was a barb at Brahmins or a compliment (said tongue in cheek) but from the comments it seemed like a barb, but the point here is that it made me think of discourse, text and context, subtext, and finally, my topic for today, postmodernism. So let me launch into it with full vigour and vim. The said lady was not aware whether she was inverting the tradition of awe and reverence surrounding the word Brahmin or not, but not giving a context was centering her discourse on India, Hinduism and caste, not aware that her readers may not be from India or Hindus or aware of the nuances or implications of the layers of meaning a word like Brahmin used in such a context may have. Postcolonial writing or fiction in India has such a seeming drawback by becoming too national, regional and local, unlike the writing that deals with theory, but to come to postmodernism, this reminded me of the writer I consider the first postmodernist of India, someone Salman Rushdie also considered that, namely GV Desani. I need to start with him as I am going to speak of Postmodernism in the Indian subcontinent's literature in English briefly
But first the usual definitions of postmodernism.
Brian Dunigan says: "Postmodernism is a late 20th-century movement in philosophy and literary theory that generally questions the basic assumptions of Western philosophy in the modern period (roughly, the 17th century through the 19th century)." He means the philosophers of the Enlightenment as we all know. " Postmodern philosophy is characterized by broad scepticism or relativism and a general suspicion of reason. It also broadly asserts that Western intellectual and cultural norms and values are a product of, or are in some sense influenced by, the ideology of dominant or elite (political and economic) groups and at least indirectly serve their interest." "Many postmodernists hold one or more of the following views: (1) there is no objective reality; (2) there is no scientific or historical truth (objective truth); (3) science and technology (and even reason and logic) are not vehicles of human progress but suspect instruments of established power; (4) reason and logic are not universally valid; (5) there is no such thing as human nature (human behaviour and psychology are socially determined or constructed); (6) language does not refer to a reality outside itself; (7) there is no certain knowledge; and (8) no general theory of the natural or social world can be valid or true (all are illegitimate “metanarratives”)."Although some postmodernists reject the relativist label, many postmodern doctrines constitute or imply some form of relativism. Many postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective or that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false (implying metaphysical relativism), that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (implying epistemological skepticism or relativism), and that there are objective, or absolute, moral truths or values (implying ethical subjectivism or relativism). Instead, reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by “discourses” (shared linguistic practices) and can vary with them."Some famous thinkers associated with postmodernism are Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre-Félix Guattari, Fredric Jameson, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Slavoj Žižek."
My personal footnote is that postmodernism has two streams, for explaining it simply, one being that anything that follows modernism can be called postmodern but I am more interested in this second narrower stream limited by theory and defined by what I read out in this talk though I will be shifting from one to the other at my own sweet will and pleasure.
My entry into post-modernism will not be through theory but through literature, having done my research on Samuel Beckett. That his later plays, novels, short stories, short prose pieces, short pieces of criticism, and poems are post-modernist there is no doubt. Anyone who has read Beckett on Joyce and then the third part of his trilogy Unnameable will get what I mean.
Beckett says of Joyce in his essay "Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce": Why, Mr Joyce seems to say, should there be four legs to a table, and four to a horse […]? He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he will tell you, and in the meantime must be content to know why horses have not five legs, nor three. He is conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelationship. (32)
Beckett, Samuel. “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” Disjecta Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment: Samuel Beckett, edited by Ruby Cohn. Grove Press, 1984: pp. 18-33.
This Joyce who is on the way to omniscience bothers Beckett as he later says of himself, in comparison, in contradistinction: "I am a non can-er, a non know-er." This fundamental Cartesian doubt without reaching Cartesian foundationalism which comes to be predominant in the work of Samuel Beckett is at the same time Socratic as well as deconstructive of the Enlightenment philosophers who begin with Descartes and who are postmodern to the core.
If we trace out post-modernism's major writers who follow his footsteps or go on parallel journeys at the same time but in their own ways we would have to mention Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe Grillet, B S Johnson, Sam Shepard, and several others, one of whom I will come to later.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1985 was awarded to Claude Simon "who in his novels combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition."
He says in his speech receiving the prize: "Nothing is sure, nor does it offer any other guarantees than those Flaubert, following Novalis, speaks of: a harmony, a music. Searching for it, the writer makes only laborious progress. Feeling his way forward like a blind man, he goes up culs-de-sac, gets bogged down and starts out anew. If we at all costs must find some edification in his efforts, one could say it lies in seeing that always we are advancing across sands which shift under our feet."
This strikes the note of postmodernism in creative writing so well that it needs no further explication, except to point out that by still talking of words like harmony and music and advancing it suggests that it is not a totally destructive or nihilistic enterprise.
To come to GV Desani and his All About H Hatterr, Rushdie says: " "H. Haterr is the first post-modernist Indian novel if you like. It's much more self-conscious and reflexive than Midnight's Children." The sentence is self-evident, Rushdie considers postmodernism as self-consciousness and reflexivity and of course complexity in the use of language and experimentalism/experimentation with it in the Joycean rather than the Beckettian tradition. Rushdie is echoing Linda Hutchinson here, knowingly or unknowingly in her book on Metafiction, that was once staple diet for us researchers who wanted to know about (postmodernism. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236818644_Salman_Rushdie_A_Postmodern_Reading_of_His_Major_Works_review)
But first, before coming to Rushdie, more on Desani. "Desani's penetrating insights that a) there are no small deeds, that b) thoughts are things, and that, c) sincere, energetic practice of any faith or religion can lead to personal peace — conclusions from his decades of mental culture and researching religious practices worldwide — is an underappreciated contribution to world religious dialouge." "Desani's teachings are respectfully summed up as follows: The ancient goals of Vipassana and Enlightenment are real and attainable. However, the quest is difficult. It is not for everyone. Others should simply try to live good, ethical lives."
https://www.desani.org/Home#h.p_pkQhfFXgTndW
According to me these are already there in ab ovo in his first novel and he too would agree as effect according to him could bring about cause in his study of nadi texts, and so the post modernism is not in his self consciousness or reflexivity but in the abyss opened up by his use of language which is opposed to his content which is an attempt to reconcile East and West, whether successful or not, a "positive trajectory." towards peace by one firmly entrenched in the East more than the West. What I mean by abyss here is that he did knowingly, not at all like Amos Tutuola, author of the "Palm Wine Drinkard", constructively, to language, that decolonisation that has led to its present "bastardization", but in the process making the West acknowledge that he knew what he was doing. This deconstruction of language to make it Indian English is what makes him post-modern uniquely.
While for Rushdie the definitive text of Indian postmodernism is this novel on Hatterr, for me it is Rushdie's Satanic Verses. This is because while Desani is a wider ecumenical in his outlook, like thinkers like Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Bede Griffiths, Ken Wilber to some extent, and Raimondo Panikkar, Rushdie is guardedly deconstructive of the tradition he belongs to. His novel has the points noted above which are 1. a suspicion of metanarratives, in this case his own Islamic one, and 2. a suspicion at the same time of the narrative process itself whether as practiced in the past in the writing of the Quran or in the present in its practice by himself as the controversial parts are put as magical realism or a series of magic dream vision narratives that may or may not be taken as a serious or playful subversion of the story telling's ideological notion that it has to be "truthful", which is one of the reasonable assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy. He also demystifies the idea that writing is "Sacred" in some inspired Grecian sense of coming from above and not from the unconscious.
Since this is about subcontinental literature let me now come to the one writer in Pakistan who to me merits the title of postmodern more than any other. That is Zulfikar Ghose who was a friend of BS Johnson and influenced by Beckett. His concerns and Rushdie's and Desani's have some overlap but what makes him interesting is his transition from modernism to postmodernism, that is from Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Proust and Beckett but for him form, style, aesthetics and images as well as a creative pattern and chance matters and the sentences that lead to the unfolding of what happens along with the imagination. This is very postmodern especially in his trilogy on Brazil which some call magic realism and some a travelogue but he calls a superimposition of the story of Jason and the Argonauts on South America and America, the first part coming from chance in taking it on from Bullfinch's Anthology. I refer to "New History of Torments".
In Bangladesh, post-modernism is often connected to a writer like Taslima Nasreen. While hers is postmodern in being a criticism of the majoritarian discourse in her own country from the standpoint of a suffocated minority whether it remains the same when in exile is something we cannot be sure of. Other writers we need to consider are Arvind Adiga and Arundhati Roy but I do not know if they fit the post-modern bracket as well as a Jeet Thayyil may in Necropolis which is more experimental. we can also consider a Shyam Selvadurai and Queer Theory in works like Funny Boy if we want to bring in Sri Lanka.
More interesting than these writers who seem to me to be more modern than postmodern is Jhumpa Lahiri's novel in Italian and what Homi Bhabha says of it:
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