LABELS AND BANDWAGONS
Dr. V.B. Rama Rao
Labels, more labels and still more labels seem to be the fashion of the day in discourses, spoken and written. This has spread to regional literatures too with fame-thirsty madcap writers coming forward masquerading their wares with labels like those blaring advertisements for self-promotion.
I must recount a recent experience of mine. Under the banner Literary Forum, Sahitya Akademi organised a lecture of a visiting academic on lecture tour here. The topic was Critical Realism (in relation to Modernism and Post Modernism). I (very foolishly) thought it’s be related to literature. The speaker went on explaining his own postulates (blanket generalisations) in Modernism and Post Modernism and tried to link them up with his Critical Realism in politico-socio-philosophical thought. There was no mention of literature in the talk. Literature may subsume everything written including, of curse, philosophy. And nowadays it is all inter disciplinary not always with any discipline, which is altogether a different matter.
So much to that lecture, which at least for me is a total disappointment. A couple of Jnanapiths were there along with several brilliant contemporary literateures and top administrators of the rank of vice-chancellors etc. among the audience. I saw atleast one (a vice-chancellor) with a smile of amusement on his knowing face.
Novel labels are a mania, now almost an intoxication (here there is no need to mince words) – which has crept into regional literatures too. The term post-modern has sent serious writers into a tizzy. The fact of the matter is that some writers wrote extensively about “post-Modernism” based on discourses on the term and the concept written in foreign languages. But is difficult to swallow if it is claimed that anything written in Telugu during the recent years in an exemplification of the purely western concept of Post-Modernism. There is no need, warrant or enough justification to say that such and such a piece is post-modernist without applying a reasonable explanation therefore, especially when the target reader is non-specialist. It is not to be automatically inferred that the ‘specialist’ is aware of it either.
And then there are fashionable, topical bandwagons too. Thee, some taken to be turnarounds and shortcuts for quick passports to fame, limelight or both. In certain cases the bandwagons are very short-lived too. Among labels, there are generic and brand labels too. There are several brands of the generic labels like those in Feminism with writers in the South standing for different brands of the generic faith in promoting the image of Woman as distinct from the western.
C.S Lewis in the preface to the third edition of his “Pilgrim’s Regress” rued his use of the term Romanticism, in the preface to the first edition of this book. He went on to elucidate how he did not intend any of the seven meanings he carefully listed and explained at the end of the list what he himself meant by that term. But before going to that he categorically stated “I would not, indeed, use it (the term Romanticism) to describe anything, for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banished from our vocabulary.”
Post-modernism and Critical Realism are terms like Romanticism, which without a precise explanation by the writer in a discourse tend to make it appear tat he/she is clamouring for undue attention or demanding respect or awe. There are many strands in these two and without proper explanation they contribute only to either obscurity or pretentiousness. In politico-economic thought things are made clear by using more precisely meaningful terms like Marxian, Keyenisian, Hegelian etc.
Words like Modernism mean different things to different people in different contexts. In the context of the writing in Indian languages, as a consideration to readers. Writers when resorting to the use of terms like post-modernism would do well to be explicit and precise.