The article argues that a critical encounter with pre-modern literatures from the national past is long overdue under the impact of a globalized discourse of sexuality. Its effects are already felt at the level of both pedagogy and literary reading, one reconstituting the other, in the ‘global classroom’, a self-conscious pedagogical space imagined by the new educational policy to bring about a globally accredited cultural homogeneity. The case study comes from teaching erotic poetry at an Indian university, from the joint literary complex of Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, a theme uncomfortably located in national culture not just because of its sexuality but its association with non-national linguistic elements which the article terms ‘Indo-Islamic’. The overlapping of the sexual modern with the Indo-Islamic resurfaces a tension in the nationalized body of literary writing in Hindi/Urdu, the major ‘national’ languages of South Asia. This encounter of erotic poetry in old Hindi and Urdu with globalized sexuality, the article shows, offers a chance to reflect on how literary studies are being reshaped by the assumptions of a monolingual, monocultural global sexuality in our nationalist times.
South Asian interest in Gabriel García Márquez and his works has been intense and diverse, and mapping its multiple trajectories offers a historical field of enquiry for assessing the reception of this Latin American writer in the subcontinent. This article uncovers various strands of the conceptual armature at work in the South Asian critical readings of García Márquez and magical realism. These range from approaches that privilege the “Third World” provenance of the genre; to the poststructuralist critique of such Third World nationalism; to the discomfort with an intermediating Euro-American critical apparatus, as also with decolonial readings of García Márquez’s magical realism as a transformative mode charged with a political dimension. The deployment of the “non-mimetic” realist mode in the works of diasporic South Asian writers such as Salman Rushdie or Michael Ondaatje has been noted by critics and is central to positing magical realism as the literary language of postcolonial writers. This article additionally explores the mode’s sturdiness in the works of some of their counterparts in the bhashas, that is, writers of the so-called vernacular languages of the subcontinent. It is in these languages with robust literary traditions such as Bengali, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, and Urdu that García Márquez’s works have been intercepted through translations for the vast majority of readers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, who do not read them in metropolitan languages. The article critically maps these diverse modes of accessing García Márquez in the “lettered cities” of South Asia.
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