Development studies] is a field that postcolonial studies rarely cites. The same, in reverse, can be said of development studies vis a vis postcolonial brethren and epistemologies. Two giant islands of analysis and enterprise stake out a large part of the world and operate within it-or with respect to it-as if the other had a bad smell. 2
Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.
Two Pieces Of Bread A Day": The Absence of the Desiring BodyHindu literature and ideals, especially the model of life stages or ashramadharma, recommend renunciation of worldly pursuits in old age. According to Manu Smriti, 1 when the householder, or the mature, economically active adult male on whom all others in society depend for sustenance, "sees his skin wrinkled and his hair white and the sons of his sons", he should turn over the management of household affairs to his heir and retreat to a forest where, in order to disentangle himself from physical and emotional bonds of interdependence developed during the previous life stages, he will devote himself to contemplation, the performance of sacred rites and bodily self-mortification. If he succeeds in this, he is ready to enter the last stage, which involves the complete renunciation of the material world and its pleasures and ties. This is the manner in which ideally he should end his days, fully absorbed in the quest for spiritual perfection. 2 Although Hindus in contemporary India may not subscribe to the idealized, four-stage life cycle in literal detail, they are nonetheless guided by the belief that life is made up of distinct developmental stages, each with its own normative code of conduct. Irrespective of the degree of direct familiarity with the classical texts, the idea that it is appropriate for old people to withdraw from active economic, productive or managerial involvement with household affairs and to renounce sensual in favour of Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies
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