Sachin Ketkar's Blog, page 2

Accessing the World of Relatedness I

When his Aaji , his grandmother, died in 1978, the six year old boy who loved her a lot did not cry. For 37 years , I kept scolding and blaming him for not crying. I also made up that something was wrong with him and that he was suffering from an emotional disorder. I thought his emotions function abnormally . He has excess of them at times and at times none. Because of this he messed up his relations and no one understood him. When Aaji died his parents did tried to soothe him and support him. He felt abandoned and that no one cared for him.

In the Landmark Relationship Seminar I discovered that something was wrong with him was my interpretation and that it was perfectly OK not to cry, I invented the possibility of being kind, loving and compassionate with him by giving up my interpretation . I ran my fingers through his head and talked to him about his granny's death. He burst into tears and cried. I got his helplessness and misery and grief as being perfectly valid. I invented possibility of oneness with myself , fully getting myself.

In the Seminar I also saw that the interpretation that I so righteously held on to that people ,especially my father, did not care about me and that I was small and powerless took my self expression away. I thought sharing with others was futile: how can a small and powerless person communicate with indifferent people? I was lonely sad and resigned in my prison of owns interpretations. I carried resentment towards people and stayed alone on my own. I took the responsibility of this story and experience of feeling abandoned and not understood, thus ending my resentment towards people who I thought did not care for me. I gave up being right about others not caring for me. Suppressed anger, bitterness and resignation fell away. I created possibility of being peaceful and loving.

I also discovered my power to share and communicate irrespective of whether others are interested or not. In Landmark Relationship Seminar a whole new world of relatedness is opening up for me. A world I had no access to without the distinctions of the program.

Translation Studies in India: A Brief Overview

Translation studies in India is an evolving discipline.  Historically, it was only in mid-nineteenth century that the translation became a significant intellectual issue in India when the question of ‘imagining a nation’ became problematic with the realization of multilingual and multiethnic nature of Indian society. While the idea of nation as a linguistic and cultural unit based on the Eurocentric model started appearing clearly inadequate, translation started to appear as an urgent cultural necessity for nationalistic, indologicial and orientalist projects. The earliest writings on translation in India emerged during this period of the rise of print capitalism and Vishnu Shastri Chiploonkar’s Nibandhmala in Marathi in 1874 can be seen as one of the earliest attempts to intellectually confront the issue of translation. 
 Practitioners and thinkers of this period like Romesh Chander Dutt, and Sri Aurobindo reflected on translation from nationalistic, indological and orientalistic perspectives. The source language, needless to say, was largely Sanskrit and the target language was very often English.
It was only in post- independence period, that the dissatisfaction with the nationalistic, indological and orientalist idea of culture and nation made Indian intellectuals to search for alternative models of theorizing and reflecting on nation and civilization. The questions of regional and linguistic identities became prominent during the processes of linguistic reorganization of states. The questions of caste and gender identities and the movements against discrimination and injustice started gaining ground. In such a context, the idea of nation as an elitist upper caste, upper class and patriarchal construct started being vigorously interrogated. The little magazine movements challenging the predominant formalist and idealist poetics also started questioning the political underpinnings of the established literary culture. It was against this politics of interrogation and revision that the questions of translation started being posed. The major practitioners and scholars of this period like AK Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, Sujit Mukherjee among many others approach the questions of translation in the context of this shift from nationalist, orientalist elitist framework to more regional/ local and demotic outlook towards culture and nation. This shift is clearly noticeable in their choice of source languages and texts which are very often from the marginalized oral, folk and ‘native’ traditions or from bhashas instead of Sanskrit. Their reflections on translation also reveal these re-visionary attitudes.
However, most of the thinking about translation practiced by academics in this period not just in India was around the ‘problems’ of translation very often in a normative way and limiting itself to viewing translation as a process. Internationally, the shift from this normative, process-oriented and hierarchic view of translation to more descriptive, product-based, ideological and subversive view of translation emerged only with the rise of ‘translation studies’ as a discipline in the nineteen seventies.
The late nineteen eighties and nineties was an exciting period for the discipline of translation studies in India. Seminal writings like GN Devy, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature (1993), Sujit Mukherjee’s Translation as Discovery and Other Essays on Indian Literature in English Translation (1994), Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context  (1995)  and invaluable anthologies like  Promod Talgeri, and Verma.  S.B.  eds. Literature in Translation from Cultural Transference to Metonymic Displacement (1988),   AK Singh ed. Translation: Its theory and Practice (1996) , Dingwaney,  Anuradha and Carol Maier.(eds.)  Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (1996)  S.Ramakrishna ed. Translation and Multilingualism.  PostColonial Contexts (1997), Tutun Mukherjee ed. Translation: From Periphery to Centrestage(1998) and Susan Bassnett and Trivedi eds. Post Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. (1999) burst upon the scene. Most of these writing build upon the reflections and practice of translator-scholars like A. K. Ramanujan. These writings are not only informed by the ‘ cultural’ turn in translation studies but also draw heavily upon theorization of postcolonial studies, gender studies, Dalit studies and post structuralism.

With the twenty-first century, globalization permeated nook and corner of Indian society forcing people to seriously rethink the questions of nation, cultural identities, languages and civilization. The explosive growth of digital technology in form of the internet, cellphones and social media in the beginning of the twenty first century has altered the way people communicate and process information and knowledge. The economic reforms from the nineteen nineties of liberalization and privatization intertwined with the processes of globalization producing a new urbanized middle-class and a distinctive landscape dominated by multi-storied complexes, mega-malls and proliferation of multiple types of automobiles. The economic growth was not without its catastrophic implications. The rise of religious fanaticism, terrorism, alarming development of farmers committing suicide and environmental disasters accompanied by growing criminalization and corruption of public life raised new questions before Indian society. The politics of electoral democracy in the post-Mandal period when there was a reconfiguration of politics of caste and reservations has undergone substantial shift. The questions of very existence of Indian languages, marginal identities, ethnic minorities, and natural environment have become more acute than ever. At this juncture it will be fruitful to think of how translators and translation scholars engage with these new questions. It will be interesting to find out how translation studies scholars extensively and intensively deliberate upon the complex emergent issues like:·         Translation in India and the Digital Revolution·         Translation and the Fate of Indian Languages·         Translation and the question of Literary Historiography of post-Independence Indian Literatures·         Politics of Translation between the Bhashas·         Teaching Translation Studies in Indian Universities ·         Poetics and Politics of Translation of translating marginal literary discourses like the Dalit literatures, the Adivasi literatures and LGBT writings into English and into Bhasha·         Politics and Mechanics of Film and TV Adaptation and subtitling into Indian LanguagesTranslation and Corpora Linguistics in India

OF AERIEL ROOTS AND THE BANYAN CITY

In scorching Baroda summer of 1993, a young man from a place called Valsad walks into a smallish room full of renowned professors from the Department of English, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda for his viva of MA entrance test. He finds himself facing Prof. Ranu Vanikar, the then Head of Department, and Prof. G. N.Devy among others. In response to the standard question regarding his favourite writers, he has audacity of an undergraduate to say, “Sri Aurobindo is one of my favourite writers and I have translated some portions from Savitri into Hindi.” This brings smile on the face of Prof Devy. It is one of those famous Devy smiles which no can decipher whether it is ironical or pleased or both or neither. For Prof Devy, a renowned Aurobindo scholar himself, it was probably all these things. He asked me further questions regarding his poetry and the only answer which I recall after twenty years is that his poetry was ‘metaphysical’ but not in the sense Donne’s or Marvell’s poetry is metaphysical. (I actually got away with it).


Two decades after that curious incident, I will be sitting in the same room listening to such audacious undergraduates appearing for their MA entrance viva in the scorching Baroda summer, this time as a teacher. It is a privilege and a humbling experience to be in the same place where the internationally renowned scholars like Prof Devy, Prof Kar, Prof Joneja, Prof VY Kantak, and Prof Birjepatil or giants like Sri Aurobindo and AK Ramanujan once “professed” literature. Sri Aurobindo and AK Ramanujan are some of the most important names in Indian literature, famous for their fabulous creative writing, translations, sharp and erudite criticism and philosophy. It is the legacy of multilingual creativity, translation, and comparative research which I inherit as a modest practitioner of same activities. I write poetry and criticism in Marathi and English and I translate into these languages. I translate from all four languages I know. I have guts to say this as I seem to have retained some of the audacity I had when I was an undergraduate student.





The person who walked into the MA program of the MS University in the year 1993 was not the same person who walked out of it in 1995. I did my Bachelors from J. P. Shroff Arts College, Valsad.  Valsad is a small non-metropolitan town, where English is not just spoken in Gujarati, but also taught in Gujarati.  What we studied was a standard and astonishingly outdated ‘English Literature’ canon comprising of the usual suspects: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Pope, Dryden, the Brontes, Blake, Austen, Shelley, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning and ended with T.S Eliot, with lots of whimper and no bang.  For literary criticism, we had books like English Literature: An Introduction for Foreign Readers by R. J. Rees (published in 1973) and a strange book called The Making of Literature by Scott James written in 1946. The books were in the syllabus ever since they were published or probably ever since Scott-James was born. The reason for their eternal recurrence was the fact that the professors of the affiliated colleges were so much in love with the notes on books which they had inherited ( or made) when they students, that they were unwilling to part with their treasure. The Scott-James book was not even meant as an introduction to literary criticism. It grappled with a specific and rather worthless issue of literary criticism, namely that of whether only writers can be good critics. However, the only thing that can reassure Mr. Scott-James (if he is dead and in his grave) is the fact that no one read it. Most of the students read bilingual ‘guides’ brought out by Popular publication, Surat only, and most of the teachers too did not read it. Most of the teachers and most of the students gave a damn about literature and fancy things like that.  The students selected English as a major subject for their bachelors was because they thought it might improve their English, raise their social status and add some glamour to the BA degree which was groveling at the lowest rung of the Varna-Jati system of higher education in India.


I was obviously an odd man in this set up. I had completed my higher secondary schooling in the science stream, and much to the annoyance of many of our family friends and acquaintances selected Arts stream with English Major. My dad, a steno-typist and literature lover himself believed that a person who knows English and has a degree in English and knows steno-typing will never die of hunger. So much for parental expectations. When Dr. Madhurita Choudhary, a young, freshly appointed lecturer asked us why you have opted for English major, I bluffed that I wanted to go for journalism. Actually I did not have guts to give the real answer. The real answer was I had scored 53% in my HSC and doing BA with English and doing stenography side by side would ensure that I don’t starve. And yeah, I wrote poetry and yeah, I loved literature and yeah, I loved English literature. But then I loved English and Biology as subjects in my higher secondary education and when the board results were out, I had barely managed to pass in these subjects! I remember scoring 41 out of 50 in English in my internal examination and in the board examination, I retained the score of 41, but this time out of hundred! By then I had fallen in love with Lewis Carroll, Jerome K Jerome,  William Blake,  TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens( whose poems did not make any sense when I had read it then and do not make any sense even today for me, but who cares for silly things like meaning these days?) in my higher secondary English text books. Come to think of it, my school curriculum was in fact more exciting than my college one! However. The damage had already been done. I was beyond repair.
So when the undergrad college started, I loved Keats and was smitten with Macbeth and Julius Caesar. I even loved Milton. (Imagine!) (While doing my MA, Prof Devy had asked us to read Paradise Lost Book I and was convinced no one would read it. It so happened that I read it and told Devy about it. His comments were typical Devy comments: “Milton has found a reader at last.”). 
I was so much in thrall of Macbeth that I tried to translate some portions into Hindi! It was devastating magic of literature and its overwhelming power that turned me into translator.  I translated into Hindi because it was the only Indian language which I could write more or less properly and because I loved Hindi at school too. Yes, I loved literary criticism and actually found Scott-James interesting because he was looking at the relationship between the creative writer and the critic-the question which was staring me as a writer and wannabe scholar in face. 
When I joined the MS University Department, I was in a strange and exciting world.  Prof Kar was lecturing on Deconstruction and Derrida almost as if on auto-pilot.  Prof Joneja was talking about his Greek inheritance while teaching Aristophanes. I distinctly remember him mentioning in the class that his nose showed his Greek ancestry.

 Prof Devy had won Sahitya Akademi prize for his polemical nativist book After Amnesia and was a celebrity. It was the aftermath of the Age of Theory and it was the Age of ‘Crisis in English Studies’ studies debates in our country.  A wide array of theories like Feminism (didn’t hear much of Gender studies much in those days), Deconstruction, structuralism, culture studies and what have you.

 The Department had a paper called ‘Politics and Ideology of Teaching English’ in those days, probably modeled on something similar in JN University. I read a “radically heterogeneous” canon comprising of writers as dissimilar as Kafka, Holderlin, Faulkner, Stevens, Brecht, Namdeo Dhasal, Ravji Patel, Eliot, Stevens (Yea! Stevens once again, and this time too he made no sense but made me love him even more), Shakespeare and Basheer. And equally “heterogeneous” array of critics and theorists like Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Poulet, Iser, Stanley Fish and the rest of them. The leap from Scott- James to Lacan was indeed a quantum one. The seminars and discussions in the Department were exciting. I listened to the internationally renowned faculties digress from the topics they were supposed to teach with fascination and awe. The juicy digressions and debates opened up a wealth of insights which have shaped me as a researcher and creative writer today. 

Yes, I also realized that plays are meant to be performed on the stage rather than just read in classrooms. The Shakespeare Society staged plays often in those days and I remember watching Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Mahesh Elchunchwar’s Reflection. I remember enjoying Dr Arvind Macwan strumming on his guitar and Dr. Rani Dharkar, who is a noted novelist today, teaching us Girish Karnad. The program liberated me intellectually and creatively. All these things would not have been possible had I stayed in Valsad. 

I taught Lacan, Fish and Derrida for many years in Baroda. Whether I lived up to the levels of Prof Kar or Prof Devy, I simply don’t know. But what I do know, is the profound impact these teachers and texts have made on me is the one that has made me who I am today as a teacher. Obviously, the two years I spent doing MA are unforgettable not just because of the teachers and the texts, but also due to great friends I made- and yes most of them are on Facebook today. Someday I will write another entry about these things. 
So when the college reopens, I will be sitting in probably same room where I had faced my MA interviews as a student, and when yet another youngster from some god-knows-which place will walk into the room, I will wonder  about what influence this department will leave on her when she goes out. Frankly, I am scared. I am excited. 

Kavya Bhashantar Sutras

Sri Sachin Ketkar virachitam Kavya Bhashantar Sutras
Sutra 1: Poetry (and literature) is not one but many.
Karika 1.1 Definitions of the term ‘poetry’, are contested and multiple.
Hence the term ‘poetry’ does not refer to a single type of text but it refers to various types of texts.
Karika 1.2 The Sanskrit term like Kavya is a broader category than the English term ‘poetry’as it includes prose narratives, verse narratives, lyrics, oral narratives, narratives in standard languages as well as dialects. (See Bhamaha: Kavya Alamkara 6th Century AD).


Karika 1.3     What is poetry for Tom might be religion for Jerry.
Sutra 2:  Translation is not one but many.
Karika 2.1 Definitions of the term ‘ translation’ are contested and multiple.
Karika 2.2 Hence, the term does not refer to a single type of activity but it refers to various types of activities of rewriting and transposing texts in other languages. 
Karika 2.3 Roman Jakobson talks about three types of translations: interlingual, intralingual and Intersemiotic
Karika 2.4 Bhashya, adaptations and dubbing is also forms of translation. Consider ‘ Bhavaarth Deepika’ as a native form of translation
Karika 2.5 Anuwaad literally means ‘speaking after’ the teacher, usually to memorise.Bhashantar literally means changing language.Bhashantar is a form of Anuwaad.
Karika 2.6   What we are doing is we are repeating the production of the text in a different language.

Sutra 3: A distinction between a ‘prescriptive’ approach and a ‘descriptive’ approach to translation has to be made in any discussion of literary translation.
Karika 3. Most of the discussion on ‘problems of translation’ are of normative or prescriptive type.Prescriptive approaches have to account for relativism.
Sutra 4: What is translation for Tom is the original for Jerry.
Karika 4.1    The ideas of ‘ loss’ and ‘ gain’ in translation are always relative to the position of the observer.
The person who complains about ‘loss’ in translation is speaking from the perspective of the Source Language Bilingual  who notices that the Translated text is very different from the Source Language Text and hence does not like it.
The real audience of translation is the target language user who has no access to the source except through translation.
Karika 4.2: From the point of view of a such a target Language Reader any translation however bad is a gain.

Sutra 5: The Schleiermacher Sutra
Karika 5. 0 There are only two methods of translating: “Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.”
[‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. Andre Lefevere, in Lefevere’s Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig (Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum 1977), 67–89]


The first is nativizing the foreign text and the second one is foreignizing the native language. The first one is domesticating and the other is foreignizing.


Sutra 6: The Wittgenstein Sutra
Karika 6: There is no such a thing as a good or bad translation or the way of translation in the absolute sense of the terms.  
Wittgenstein in A Lecture on Ethics (1929) makes a distinction between what is ‘relative and trivial judgement of value’ and ‘absolute or ethical judgement of value’. The former is usually mere statement of facts while the later is usually nonsensical or consists of analogies, similes and allegories. Religion and Ethics usually end up using the second kind of language. Wittgenstein says that the second type hardly adds to our knowledge. 
Karika 6 :When we say a particular translation or a way of translating is good or bad we must ask good for what or to what purpose. A translator and translation critic should ask what is the purpose of the translation and what is its use.
Sutra 7: Strategies and Techniques
Karika 7:  The question ‘how to translate ?’ can be answered by asking ‘ Why to translate?’

Double Crossing Two Traditions: On Skin, Spam and Other Fake Encounters

One never knows where a poem may end up. The poems in Skin,Spam and Other Fake encounters, (Poetrywala, Mumbai 2012), began in Marathi, an eight hundred years old language of the western India with millions of speakers.  Now they are also illegal immigrants into English. However, these outlying Anglicized cousins of the Marathi poems display no symptoms of guilt.

The poems attempt to confront innovatively the new cultural material of the globalized Third World society I inhabit.  The cultural politics and traditions within which they are located in Marathi are obviously very different from the cultural politics and traditions in which they are placed after translation. During the late nineteen fifties and sixties, the little magazine movement in Maharashtra gathered momentum out of a need for alternative poetics and politics. They were often avant-garde and were closely associated with the leftist, the feminist, the Dalit, the grameen,nativist politics and activism. The entire thrust of these movements was to decolonize, democratize and debrahmanize literary values. The movement gave Marathi the poets like Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, and Namdeo Dhasal.   The movements lost force during the late seventies and the eighties due to altered social structures and values.
The little magazine movements resurfaced during the nineteen nineties, largely in response to the powerful forces of globalization rapidly altering the social and cultural landscape after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of the Indian economy. The digital revolution, explosion in newer forms of media and outburst of cable television played a decisive role in altering the ‘semiosphere’ we occupy.  These new little magazines acknowledged the importance and influence of the precursor movements, but insisted on moving on. The little magazines like Abhidhanantar, Shabdavedhand Sausthav in the nineties provided a platform for fresh poetic practice along with critical voices which demanded a new conceptual framework for studying this poetry. This, however, does not mean that the older dogmas of the sixties have completely given way to the newer ways of writing and conceptualizing literature. The resistance to the new and the emergent has stubbornly persisted, but it has not succeeded in blocking new creativity.  Seen in this context, my Marathi poetry contains both residual and emergent cultural material, used and abused for poetic purpose. The selection presented here is from my Marathi collections, ‘Bhintishivaichya Khidkitun Dokavtana’ (2004) and Jarsandhachya Blogvarche Kahi Ansh (2010). I am a Maharashtrian born and educated in Gujarat. English was the medium of instruction and Gujarati was the medium of social interaction. Marathi was largely confined to domestic conversation. Hence, one can say that my poems have emerged from the liminal in-between cultural spaces.
Marathi poetry like mine, influenced by the international modernist poetics, is marginal in the mainstream of Marathi poetry which is socialist realist, if it is not sentimental and popular. On the other hand, the status of Indian poetry in English translation is secondary compared to Indian poetry written in English.  It is from these double marginal spaces that I double cross both the traditions.
The translations appeared in New Quest, India.poetryinternationalweb.com, cerebrations.org and Museindia.com. I wish to thank all the publishers of my Marathi originals and the English translations. I specially want to thank Hemant Divate, editor of Abhidhanantar and the publisher of this volume. I wish to thank my colleagues Dr Deeptha Achar, Dr. Susan Bhatt and Dr. Aarati Mujumdar for going through my poems with a critical eye and making invaluable suggestions.

Synaptic Narratives and Half-Bodied Women: Poetics and Practice of Vilas Sarang’s avant-garde fiction

 ‘Literary creation is preeminently a synaptic activity’, declares Vilas Sarang one of the most exciting and neglected writers and critics of the post Independence India in his essay ‘Synaptic Narrative’. 


Vilas Sarang (1942- ) is known for his disturbing nightmarish short stories in The Women in the Cages (2006), The Boat Peopleand the novels like The Dinosaur Ship, Rudra, Tandoor Cinders (2008), and The Dhamma Man (2011). He has written remarkable short stories, poems, a novel and also brilliant pieces of criticism in Marathi and English. Conventionally his sensibility is closer to the modernist canon comprising of Kafka, Beckett and Joyce. His Marathi short story collections are Soledad(1975) and Atank (1999) and translations of his stories in English are collected in the above-mentioned collections. His Marathi collection of poems is published under the title Kavita 1969-1984 (1986) and his collections of English poems are A Kind of Silence (1978) and Another Life(2010). However, he is also someone who has reflected and theorized consistently about literature, especially fiction and translation. His collection of criticism in English is a self-published book Seven Critical Essays. He has also written significant criticism in Marathi Sisyphus ani Belakka, Aksharanchya Shrama Kela(2000) Manhole Madhla Manus(2008), ,Sarjanshodh ani Lihita Lekhak (2007), Vangmaiyeen Sauskruti Va Samajik Vastav (2011).He has also published The Stylistics of Literary Translation ( 1988 ) which is also translated in Marathi as Bhashantar ani Bhasha (2011) and edited the anthology Indian English Poetry Since 1950 ( 1989). He has also edited reputed literary journals like the Bombay Review and The Post-Post Review.


Elaborating on what the term ‘synaptic’ means, Sarang explains that the term is borrowed from physiology. It describes ‘synapse’ as a place where nerve-cells join and an impulse is transmitted from one cell to another. In Sarang’s narratology, ‘synapses’ is about narrative transitions, logical connections and the devices of narrative continuity. It is what linguists would call the ‘coherence’ or semantic or logical unity - as against ‘cohesion’ or ‘verbal unity’ of the text. Sarang wants to develop a theory and a method of ‘irrelevancy’ and ‘discontinuity’ in fictional narrative, which has unexplained narrative transitions and which help to create a deliberate effect of abruptness. Sarang adds that he does not want to focus on this type of calculated effect but ‘downright disregard for narrative continuity’.
Questioning E.M. Forster’s formulation of a story as ‘the king died and the queen died’ and the plot as ‘the king died and the queen died of grief’, Sarang asks, ‘this happened…then that happened....’ Okay, but who said it has to have logical progression?” Why not something like, ‘the king died and the prince ran away with the court jester?”. The point is, says Sarang, between “the king died “and the next byte of information, there is a chink that you can take advantage of. The degree of linkage -including its near absence- may be set according to one’s artistic choice. Forster’s emphasis on causality and logic was fine in 1927, Sarang points out, but today in the age of uncertainty, it tends to dampen the spirit of “synaptic adventurousness”.

According to Sarang, because of this powerful constraint of writing continuous, coherent fiction, the writer has no time to go in the search of the opposite impulse, that of discontinuity which a poet is free to explore. This has resulted prose fiction lagging behind in terms of form, as compared to poetry. Vilas Sarang notes, “By daring to set up narrative tensions synaptically, prose fiction can expect to generate unexpected possibilities of meaning, and go on to ever more complexities and richness. An adventurous exploratory spirit is built into this approach, for one always dares falling over the precipice of meaninglessness.”
Sarang notes that while the experimentation of discontinuous form is common in the modernist poetry, like that of TS Eliot, discontinuous progression is not so common in fiction. He argues that fiction, especially longer fiction, always runs the risk of becoming predictable due to the demands of intelligibility, of unity and continuity. These demands, Sarang notes, are largely due to commercial reasons. Poetry, on the other hand, is not as much enslaved to market place and hence has more freedom to experiment with discontinuity and ‘irrelevancies’. Sarang also points out that the devices of allegory, metaphor and symbolism that are common in poetry are actually ‘synaptic’ devices -linking and joining devices.
Sarang believes that though surrealism and magic realism in the latter half of the twentieth century have played a salutary role in contributing to “fiction technology” by loosening the hold of logic and magic-less realism, these techniques have grown predictable and formulaic in their own right. Sarang talks about the dramatic advances in animation techniques in cinema as exemplified in the films like Antz and Shrek. These films can make anything seem ‘real’ and blur the distinction between virtuality and reality. ‘Magic realism’ looks less ‘magical’ today, as the magic seems to be fading.
Best illustration of what Sarang means by ‘synaptic narratives’ would be his own practice as fiction writer.  An excellent example of ‘synaptic use’ of myth can be found in his story “The Odour of Immortality”. In this story, Champa a Nepali sex worker in Kamathipura dreams of freedom from her oppressive state by making quick money and returning to Nepal. The madam of her house demands fifty thousand rupees for her freedom and so Champa starts taking in more customers than most of other girls. Having heard of the myth of Indra who was cursed with thousands of vaginas on his body, she fantasizes about having ten vaginas all over her body so that she would be able to take ten customers at a time and make money faster. She remembers the supernatural powers of the tantric Mahant Satyendra who can actually help her fulfill her desire for having ten vaginas. The Mahant uses his powers and Champa develops vaginas on her body. Champa becomes a great hit in the market, and other madams and pimps become jealous of her success. They inflict black magic on her so that anyone who has sex with Champa immediately becomes impotent. Her business suffers and she is crestfallen. In a synaptic leap, Sarang introduces strange twist in the tale. One day a beggar comes to her and demands sexual favours. Out of pity and because of his good looks, Champa allows him to have sex with her. However, she realizes that the beggar is none other than Lord Indra in disguise. She falls at his feet and tells him that she has been cursed that anyone who has sex with her will become impotent. Indra says that was precisely the reason why he wanted to copulate with her, as he had grown sick and tired of his lust and ill repute as a fornicating god. In return, Indra blesses her that all the vaginas on her body will turn into eyes as they did once on his body.  When her body develops thousand eyes, the sight of her eyes dazzled people.  Champa dies of AIDS in the end and her picture is worshipped in Navratri in Kamathipura.
Sarang’s use of myth as can be seen in “The Odour of Immortality” is by no means a “shaping device” but a tool to generate new mythological forms. Sarang seems to be using myths to create new mythology of his own. The most famous example of Sarang’s use of myth as a synaptic device is his story “Interview with Mr. Chakko”. The story is imaginary account of an interview with a sailor named Chakko who is shipwrecked and marooned on an unknown island of Lorzan. The mythical/synaptic aspect of this island is that women on the island had only half bodies-either upper half or the lower half, while men had whole bodies. The protagonist, Mr. Chakko first marries a woman with lower half of body “who only knew how to open her legs”. Later as he feels that he needs someone to talk to, he exchanges her for a woman who only has upper half of human body. The story recounts bizarre details of Chakko’s life on Lorzan. One ‘synaptic’ incident is when his fellow mate Vaiko desires to go the island of Amuraha where men are half bodied and women are full bodied. When Vaiko reaches Amuraha he is torn apart from waist by hysterical hordes of women.  In the end when Chakko manages to flee the island after decades and return home, he marries a ‘full bodied’ woman named Lakshmi  In a gruesome ‘synaptic’ twist to the tale, Chakko gets hold of an axe and cuts Lakshmi into two pieces as he is too used to half bodied women.
The story is open to multiple interpretations. The author, however, puts an endnote to the story recalling Freud’s statement that there is something “in the nature of sexual instinct, which is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction.” Wendy Doniger (1999, 215-216) looks at this piece as a satire, a tongue in cheek allusion to the myths of splitting and doubling of women in Greek and Hindu mythology. The axe-wielding Chakko obliquely alludes to axe wielding Parshurama who on the orders of his father beheaded his mother only to have him revive her. Sarang however is more interested in creating a new mythical narrative, rather than using myth to impose order on the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.
When Jean Francois Lyotard in his ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism’ states, ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern’, he is accentuating the import of the avant-garde tendency of certain postmodern art, which is radically experimental and irreverent towards the established rules of art. This irreverence towards traditional and established norms makes the modernist work possible in the first place. One can also consider Sarang as a true postmodern Indian writer in English. Taking a cue from Lyotard’s theorization of the term postmodernism as nonconformist writing i.e. the writing that does not play to the gallery of the market, media or academia and  argue that the post -eighties postcolonial novel in Indian writing in English as popularized by Rushdie, Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri or Vikram Seth is not really ‘postmodern’, it is possible to argue that more marginal and experimental writers like Vilas Sarang who have courage to write against the grain of market pressures and academic outlook can be thought more profitably as ‘ postmodern’.
It seems that poetry, rather than fiction, was first to articulate modernist sensibility in India. When we come to ‘Indian Fiction in English’, however, we find entirely different story. Vilas Sarang (1989:4) points out modernity was available to the Indian English poet readymade that and modernism came to some Indian languages much earlier. The same can be said about postmodernism in Indian writing in English. Interestingly there is no counterpart to modernist fiction in the west in Indian writing in English. The great absence of the fiction inspired by Kafka, Camus, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway was filled up the fiction inspired by Marquez, Kundera and Grass. We started imitating the postmodern movement in fiction without imitating modernism in English. This shows that Indian Writing in English, though it pretends to be radical is actually extremely conformist, derivative and usually falling prey to fashions.
Unlike postmodernism in the West, which grew out reaction against establishment of modernism, postmodernism in Indian writing came out of desire to conform to the postmodernist movement in the west and especially the Latin American Magic Realism boom of the sixties and seventies. Influence of Marquez, Grass, and Kundera on Rushdie is unmistakable. However, Rushdiean School of fiction was obsessesed with the postcolonial themes of migrancy, allegories of nationhood and experience of Diasporas.  As I resist the tendency to conflate modernity and colonialism, I also tend to protest the tendency to conflate postmodernism with postcolonialism. The postcolonial novel, which came as postmodern novel after Rushdieian revolution in the early eighties has today become a cliché, dogma and conformity with Ghoshes and Kiran Desai’s still playing the raag postcolonial in their latest works. It conforms to the International market forces and caters not only to the western audience but it also caters to the tastes of postcolonial academicians armed with postcolonial theorization of the exile and the migrancy finds these convenient to discuss.
The genuine postmodern spirit, according to me, is non-conformist in Lyotardian sense. It resists the overwhelming forces of market, academia and established modes of writing and I find that the Great Indian Postcolonial novel is not really postmodern in its spirit.
The writer which I would like to term as postmodern are not the ones obsessed with postcolonial run-of-the mill themes of allegories of nation, colonial experience, diaspora, migrancy etc but are non-conformist and radical in their attitudes.  Vilas Sarang is severely neglected because of his radical and non-conformist mode of writing which combines grotesque imagery and extremely unsettling themes. Yet one of the reasons for his neglect is that he writes in a neglected form of short story.  Novel, as Sarang himself argues (2006: 283), is a ‘prisoner of the market place’ and short story is truly a Guerrilla form. Any theorization about postmodernism in Indian fiction will have to address the inequality among fictional genres. The novel remains the big boss and the other modes of fictional narration like short story or fables and this I think is because novel is more market friendly commodity.  Sarang is avowedly anti-representational modernist in his aesthetics and provides a refreshing alternative to over-hyped ‘diaspora' and ‘exiled' non-resident Indian English writers like Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul and Kiran Desai.
Read Vilas Sarang Special Issue of Khel in Marathi by clicking here.
REFERENCES
Vilas Sarang. The Women in the Cages: Collected Stories, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006
_________ The Boat People: Stories of the Dispossessed & The Caste-Out, Mumbai: Bodhi Tree Books, 2006
__________Seven Critical Essays, Self Published, Publication details NA

My Relationship with Money and the Three Laws of Performance

I don’t find it surprising that I have not written a single blog entry discussing my finances or issues relating to my income until now. What follows now is not a philosophy or s theory of people’s relationship with money or not even my personal philosophy of money. Here I am sharing my own relationship with money, the contexts through which I looked at money and how I transformed these contexts to generate new possibilities in the area of money using Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s Three Laws of Performance.  Read my review of the book by clicking here.



No, I did not have any severe ‘problems’ regarding my income. As a university teacher working on a granted post, I have probably one of the most secure and one of the highest paying jobs in the country.  However, I still put off buying that new PC or more expensive model of the car or buying a bigger house. At the end of the month, I still have a feeling that I could have saved more than I have and invested this saving. Very often, I do not save at all, apart from what the deduction of General Provident Fund from my salary. I am also worried about my future. What if the Government decides to discontinue paying what it is paying now in future if it goes broke?  I am also worried about my habits of spending fearing what if my family and I have these habits but I won’t be earning as much as I do? What if something happens to me? Whatever little I have invested, I have invested- not surprisingly- in insurance. Besides, financial transactions occur to me as very boring and mundane. Therefore, I keep procrastinating going to banks or paying my insurance premiums.  I try to take interest in stock markets, buy books, but later abandon my interest in these things. I still leave bigger financial transactions like buying and selling house to my dad. I also feel a bit guilty about my lack of interest in these things and my ignorance regarding these things. What was my ‘Default Future’? In The Three Laws of Performance, the default future is the future, which was not inevitable, but that which is probable and almost certain to happen unless something dramatic and unexpected came along.  I would continue doing and being the same thing for long time to come in the future- I would be remaining worried, trying to adjust my needs according to my salary, struggling to save, remain fearful about being at the ‘mercy’ of the state and so on. 

Zaffron and Logan’s Three Laws of Performance provide a powerful technology for transforming the area where we feel challenged. It does not offer ‘strategies’ or ‘tips’ or even theories for boosting performance. It lays down laws, which govern our performance, and getting these laws provides an access for transforming our performance. The first law of performance is “People’s actions are correlated to how situations occur to them.” Our actions are correlated, not to the facts and reality of the situation, but to how this reality and facts occurs to us. The perception that everyone is relating to the same set of facts of the situation is what the authors of the book call ‘reality illusion’. 
So my fixed ways of beings (being detached, being scared, being bored and irritated, being weak and small, being irresponsible, being casual etc) and my ineffective actions (putting off buying things that I want, procrastinating financial transactions, struggling to save, not taking authentic interest in financial matters, inconsistent interest in the stock-market, etc.) are perfectly matched, in Zaffron and Logan’s words “in dance with” how the situation occurs to me. 
So how does the situation occur to me? Well, financial matters occur as ‘peripheral’ to my life, the inflow and the outflow of money in my life occurs as if it “happening on its own”. I am “forcing myself to take interest in the matters which occur as “mundane and tedious”, because I “have to”. I am struggling to ‘save’ money because I ‘have to’ in case the state discontinues paying what it is paying now or something happens to me. The situation occurs to me as ‘insecure’. I occur to myself as being at ‘mercy’ of the government and university authorities. 
The second law of performance says, “How situation occur to people arises in language”. How situation occurs to us arises in our conversations and verbalizing about the situation. These conversations usually comprise of the use of ‘descriptive use of language’. They are mostly made up of our ‘interpretations and stories of what happened in the past’, decisions about future, which we took in the past, our ‘already always’ internal dialogue consisting mainly of our opinions, evaluations and judgments,  and our persistent complaints. We do not ‘have’ these conversations, we ARE these conversations. They form the colored spectacles through which our perception of reality and facts is filtered. We cannot see these conversations, we can only see through them. These conversations are most of the time “‘unsaid and communicated without awareness”. These past-based conversations are the hidden and default contexts –our blind spots- in which situations occur to us. 
So what were my past-based hidden and default contexts in which my relationship with money showed up? “Thinking all the time about money and running after money is bad” ( I am making those who are financially better wrong),  “One should always be content with what one gets ( one is content usually during the first fortnight after the salary day ;) ) ”, “ Financial matters are ‘none of my business’?”, “ I am at the mercy of the government and authorities”, the transactions are ‘mundane and tedious” , “ I am dumb and not capable of minding my own finances”, “I am small and don’t deserve what I am getting ( earning around a lakh rupees a month for teaching Keats and Derrida? What are my students going to do with that?) , “I am a steno-typist’s son and I haven’t done all that badly (I making my dad small! I shared all this with him; by the way)”, “Business is not in our blood (as a Maharashtrian Brahmin blah blah blah) and so on were my conversational contexts. I was a “clearing” a space for scarcity and insecurity. My life was the life of adjustment and compromise. The default context on my financial life was the context of ‘surviving and fixing/changing”. Not that it was ‘wrong or bad’, but it was definitely disempowering very often. There was hardly sense of power, freedom, self-expression and peace of mind inside this context. 
After I uncovered all these interpretations, stories, complaints and opinions and distinguished them from facts and reality, extraordinary things started opening up. The third law of performance says, “Future-based language transforms the way a situation occurs to people”. The future-based language is the language of creating a future rather than living into the ‘already written/default future”. It is the language of declaration, promises and commitments. 
Earlier, I was not taking responsibility for the inflow and the outflow of money, I was not seeing myself as causing it, but after I put these conversations aside, I invented a possibility of being at the source, and being the cause in the matter of my financial life and not at its effect.  In fact, I could see that whatever financial life I was living was because of conversational contexts, which I had created.
Money is MY business now. I have invented the possibility of being confident and courageous. I can relate to my expenses as not something “wrong” to be reduced or to be fixed but as what they are as expenses. Instead of relating to the people who are wealthier than me as being basically’ corrupt and dishonest and hence to be kept a safe distance from’, I can relate to them as who they are – as possibilities. Instead of seeing money as ‘given and fixed number’, an inflexible box inside which I have to accommodate my needs, I see flow of money as something to be caused and created. I have also invented the possibility of being enthusiastic and interested in finance.  Hence, I am looking for various ways in which I can now cause and create money. Landmark Education Advanced Course says you win whatever game you play. I was playing the game of survival, fixing and changing and winning at it, now I am playing the game of creation and possibility. The games begin with a declaration ‘X is more important than Y’ (scoring more runs or goals is important than scoring less runs or goals). So the declaration I am making in the matters of finance is “the game of creation and possibility” is far more thrilling and enjoyable than the game of survival and fixing.  Zaffron and Logan talk about our lives as three act plays, where the first act is our past, the second act is our present and the third act is our future. However, they point out our first act has already written and shaped our third act, as we have put decisions and interpretations made in the past not into our past but into our future we are living into. Using Three Laws of Performance I am rewriting my third act. 

WHY TRANSLATION STUDIES?

I will be teaching translation studies to the postgraduate students of English this year and the question I asked myself was- why should an Indian student of literature study translation? The answers I came up with are as follows: We study translation because
1) Translation makes literary studies possible today. Translation is the most widespread mode of accessing the key literary and theoretical texts from all over the world. Foucault, Neruda, Camus, Plato, Aristotle, Tagore, Marquez, Kafka, Simone de Beauvoir, Bhamaha, Anandvardhana, Roland Barthes, Ghalib, Nietzsche, Saratchandra, Freud, Rumi, Marx, Habermas, Mahasweta Devi, Kalidas and Gramsci are available to the students only in and because of translation. Looking at these texts as translation can help dispel the illusion (or pretense) of an unmediated, transparent and unproblematic transmission of such texts across cultures and time. Hence, even if students do not take translation studies as their primary area of research, studying translation will provide an additional critical handle on the research projects and provide useful insights into research involving translated texts.
2) For the student of English in India, reading is translating. Reading of literary texts from other cultures like English or American for instance is an intercultural and inter-contextual process. An Indian teenager who has never been to a Prom or not experienced the lifestyle of a typical American teenager does not read or watch Twilight saga in the same way as an American teenager does. An Indian youngster who dances for nine nights during Navaratri celebrating ‘Divine Feminine’ reads Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Codedifferently from his Western counterpart. An Indian student who has no idea what ‘curtsey’ is, reads Pride and Prejudice in a different way from her British counterpart. Serious study of literature and art is impossible without taking into account the differences between the source culture’s system of values and attitudes that produced these texts and the recipient culture’s system of values, which shape the reader’s outlook towards life. Oh, yes, the vampires-Pishachas- belong to a very low caste and are usually ‘meat eating’ types, so while you might be infatuated with them for a while, it is difficult for you to get married to one of them.

3) We are translated people living in a translated culture. Much of the cultural phenomenon in which we are immersed- TV shows, films, fashion, music, cuisine, literature, language, arts incorporates assimilated elements from other cultures. These processes of global traffic of cultural forms have become incredibly accelerated in the age of globalization.  TV ‘Reality’ shows, which have become extremely popular today, use the formats and promotional strategies similar to those in the US, and a lot of film and popular music is ‘inspired’ and ‘remixed’. These processes are not always unilinear (from the US to non-US) - consider the great escalation of Hindi films made for ‘overseas’ audience (Robertson calls this process ‘glocalization’). The idioms of languages that we speak today and hear today in media often sound ‘translated’, and hybrid. This ‘code remixing’ is central to our cultural lives today. The Shastras say that we are what we eat. Therefore, if we eat Chinese in the evening and continental pizzas during the day, our souls are invariably going to be hybrid. Literary translation is part of the larger processes of ‘remixing’ and hybridization of cultures. Hence studying the poetics and politics of translation will help us to understand these numerous processes and modalities of intercultural traffic. Globalization is translation and translation is globalization.

4) Translation as a profession and vocation is an excellent career option. While reading Keats or Yeats or studying Judith Butler or Dalit literature may not help you to earn your bread and butter unless you decide to become a professor or teacher, the study of translation theory and practice can help you become proficient in translation. When the Government of India considers Humanities and Higher Education as ‘burden’ instead of investment and reduces the granted vacancies, there are very few chances of permanent and secure employment. On the other hand, there is a rising demand for good quality translators and interpreters.  You can study foreign languages and start your own business. You can also work in the areas like film or TV industry where dubbing is essential or in the areas like legal and corporate communication. Besides, there is exciting work being done in the field of machine /computer translation and artificial translation.
5) You can be a literary translator.Like me. You can make literary texts from one language available in another language. It may not pay like technical translators. However, it is a creative act. It is an art that is at par with ‘original’ creative activity in terms of fulfillment, and in fact, more challenging and times more exciting the ‘original’ writing. It reinforces and enhances your own creativity. I remember how when I was doing my BA in the nineties, some of the passages in Macbethmoved me so much that I translated them into Hindi. As a poet who wrote in English and Marathi, and who is born and brought up in Gujarat and teaching English literature,  my choice to translate Narsinh Mehta into English for my doctoral research in the late nineties was the part of my personal quest for cultural identity. It was expression of my love for Gujarati language and literature. Narsinh has made me spiritually richer and happier human being, if not ‘better’ and he has become one of my closest friends. When I chose to thirty Marathi poets of my generation into English, it was again a manifestation of my own personal quest for my roots as a Marathi poet. Translation for me is the act of love. The fulfillment and joy of rendering my favorite work into another language is the act of sharing my life and passion with others.  At the same time, when you make literature in other language available for readers, you are in your own way contributing to that culture by extending the possibilities of the target language and culture.

People who complain of the ‘loss’ in translation or its impossibility usually have a very limited view of the process. These people are usually people who can read both translation and the original, and translations are not intended for such people. For someone who cannot read Hindi, any translation, however bad, of Kabir or Muktibodh is always a gain, because no translation is ‘complete’ any more than the so-called ‘original’ is complete. Jorge Luis Borges said that the original should be faithful to translation, and I agree.

Unpalatable Truths on the Entertainment Platter: Satyameva Jayate

The popularity of the recently started TV show ' Satyameva Jayate' is surprisingly on the rise. Surprising, because it speaks of some of the most unpalatable truths of Indian society like female foeticide, child abuse,dowry system, and corruption in health care sector, and these are the things which traditionally belong to more or less 'sarkari',or non sarkari NGOs or academic platforms, and not on the celebrity-page 3 and entertainment formats. Nor is the great Indian middle class which devours saas-bahu soaps and crappy reality shows famous for displaying genuine concern to tackle the real social issues. It is embarrassed by the reality of Indian society and prefers to skip the discussion of these things.  Aamir Khan's accomplishment lies precisely in bringing up on the hugely obese TV entertainment space, the one obsessed with titillation and sensation, those things which belong to the other genres and platforms which have been traditionally considered 'serious' and non-popular. He achieved something similar in his hugely popular films like 'Tare Zameen Par' and ' Three Idiots'.  A very significant strength of the program, in my view,  lies in Aamir not playing the usual blame games but asking us to responsibility for the systemic evils and asking people to take action.
Obviously, many people are critical of this ' celebrity/filmy activism'. Some people claim that Aamir is simply making money and becoming famous by talking about serious social issues and there by trivializing them. However, I dont think Aamir is in such a bad need either for money or for fame. When celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan are busy hosting 'Kaun Banega Crorepatis', and Shah Rukh Khan is getting attention by brawling with cricket ground security guards , I think Aamir's work is outstanding. Celebrities can do wonders when it comes to contributing to society, and I think this is Aamir's way of doing it. Most of the skepticism seems to stem from Aamir's celebrity status and the entertainment genre of the program, which actually is unjustified. Nor do I think he is ' trivializing' or 'diluting' issues. In fact the one about female foeticide was a real shocker.Not that I did not know about it, but I was largely unaware of its magnitude and growth. Like many of the viewers I used to think this was practice was more prevalent in rural areas and in more conservative states of the country and I was also unaware of the scale ,and I was really alarmed by its rampant growth. The episode on malpractices in health care sector was straight and eyeopening. 
Some people, especially academic-minded ones, were critical  of the discussion on gender without referring to social categories of caste, class or region. This criticism is definitely valid, but if you consider the format of the show and the audience of the show, a nuanced sociological analysis would actually take away its edge. The caste-class political configurations are extremely region specific and would make little sense on the national TV.

Some people, especially the activists, wonder if all this is 'real activism', after all they are the 'real' activists-don't they have a reason to be insecure when an upstart film-star, one time ' chocolate hero', starts doing there things and by being a hugely popular celebrity, taking all the attention and limelight? Well, they may not like it, but  then who cares, this is contemporary activism. It has moved away from socialist jholawala cynicism of the eighties and become more 'fashionable' , but what is more important contemporary activism is unimaginable without media, especially TV and social networking . The platforms which it has to invariably use - digital technology or corporatised media TV etc has dubious relationship with the evil it seeks to combat - capitalism in various guises. Having Reliance Foundation as 'philanthropy partner' for program on social evils is bound to raise eyes brows. Or is it very Indian? Gandhi had his ' philanthropy partners' like the Birlas too !!
For me, however, the real question is what will its impact be. Will it be another ' Anna Hazare'-type hot air balloon which hardly achieved any concrete results? Will it impact the nation of youngsters and teenagers? Will it impact the entertainment addicts solely interested in saas bahu soaps? When many of the middle class Indians who feel that these things do not happen to them, and they are 'out there',  such programs may be useful in hinting that you and your family may be the next victim and hence it is high time  you did something about it. And I am also waiting for the one on corruption and mafia-ization of education system. Let's wait for Rancho baba to give his gyaan....

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO DOING A PhD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

There is a sudden rise in the number of PhD aspirants in these parts of the country. This may be because many universities in Gujarat and elsewhere offering the PhD Entrance Test (TET) in a quick succession. It may also be due to the UGC resolution that those who have completed their PhD following 2009 norms will be exempt from National Eligibility Test (NET) for lecturership, and probably also due to the new Academic Performance Index being introduced by the UGC in the sixth pay commission.  However, not many are clear about what research in literary studies means, or why they are doing it in the first place.These dreadful questions may haunt them later in many forms if they jump on the bandwagon hastily.
This lack of clarity shows up in the stock responses to the question ‘why do you want to do Ph.D/doctoral research?’. The typical responses range from ‘ I want to develop myself further/ increase my knowledge’  or ‘ For intellectual pleasure’ to ‘ for a better job/salary/ status’. Though all these reasons are valid, it should be kept in mind that doing doctoral research is not the only way of fulfilling on these objectives. One could read widely, or clear the N.E.T., or get rich by starting one’s own business or by becoming a religious preacher, for instance. So why should one do doctoral or Mphil research at all? An answer to this question lies in knowing what doctoral or Mphil research is.
So what is doctoral or M.Phil research after all? Well, the obvious answer is that it is a program that trains you to become a systematic and disciplined researcher: it builds the foundation to the later research actitivity. Hence the real reason why should do Mphil or PhD is that you want to be researcher for the rest of your life, and the doctoral research program is the opportunity to equip and train yourself to become a serious researcher. It is a net practice and coaching program if you want to graduate from gully-cricket to international cricket. (Click here to read my other entries on research). 
Research is commonly perceived as as purposive and systematic search for information and knowledge about something. Even the hunt for a date on the internet can be an example of research. However, research as we understand it academically is not primarily  a search for answers to the personal questions. The whole idea of ‘objectivity’ in research does not imply that you are ‘ impersonal’ but what you are investigating and exploring has value beyond one’s personal quest for answers. Hunting for a date for yourself may also be research, but gathering information about pretty girls in your surrounding locality has relevance to more than one person and hence of greater social value.
So what is research, especially in literary studies, after all? In very ordinary language, research is a contribution to a particular domain of knowledge. By contribution, I mean addition to what we already know about the particular area. If I want to write one more thesis on ‘Postcolonialism in Amitav Ghosh’ ‘ Spirituality in Sri Aurobindo’ or ‘ Feminism in Shashi Deshpande’, I am not really adding to what scholars already know about these things. Research which provides knowledge which is obvious and already known is of little use to anyone.Reinventing the wheel may earn you a degree (very often in our universities we keep doing that) but that would not prove that you have done research.
By ‘particular domain’ I imply an area of research which is sufficiently specific and sufficiently narrow enough to be ‘ do-able’ within time and space of the thesis. Yet it should not be so narrow that the generalization we make would be nullified. 'Postcolonial consciousness in Indian Writing in English' would be too vast an area, and probably an analysis of a  single novel by Salman Rushdie would be too narrow for making valuable generalizations about either Salman Rushdie or Indian writing in English.


Learning how to develop an argument is a crucial research skill-after all, the term 'thesis' means 'a position.' It is very important to understand the logical movements from specific and particular to generalized knowledge or theoretical knowledge ( inductive approach) and from generalization ( theoretical) to particular and specific ( deductive approach) in your exploration. You may start with a general understanding of the area and form a hypothesis which can be verified by analysis of specific texts or patterns or else you may start with particular observations about the patterns in the texts/ authors and then generalize and theorize them. Which approach is suitable for your purpose depends on your research question. If you want to examine ‘ Representations of Masculinity in the post-independence Indian novels in English’, you may start with the hypothesis that the representation of masculinity in the post-Independence  Indian novels in English differs significantly from the representation of masculinity in the pre-Independence Indian novels in English, and that this shift occurs because of historical reasons.  The logical movement of your argument would largely be deductive. ‘Archetypal Patterns in the Post-nineties Indian Poetry in English by women’ may start with an analysis of patterns in various Indian women poets in English writing in the nineties and then may move on to theoretical generalizations in an inductive fashion. Though usually it is a combination of both logical processes, one process is often primary.
The key to successful research lies in asking a valuable research question, an important question which is not often asked or not sufficently  explored regarding the area of research. ‘The Elements of Grotesque  in Sri Aurobindo’s Poetry’ or ‘ Folk motifs in Shashi Deshpande Short Fiction’ would be yield knowledge that is not very common and hence,interesting. ‘Surrealism in Arun Kolatkar’s poetry’ is an obvious observation, the research,  however,  begins when you want to understand why surrealism is found in his works, how does he deploy surrealistic devices, what does it do in the particular cultural context and what is its significance.
One of the most important questions of writing a research paper or thesis is the question of  language of research. What is the appropriate ‘register’ for the language of research? What is the place of technical and theoretical vocabulary in the language of research? What about the jargon? The answer becomes clear when we understand that a research thesis is a serious dialogue or a conversation between two experts and scholars, and not between two M.A. students or even between a postgraduate student and the examiner, or even worse, between a teacher and a student.  In your research paper or thesis, an expert speaks with an expert. Hence the language has to be technical ( remember two lawyers discussing law in the court or doctors discussing a disease or treatment?). This does not mean that you should use the technical terminology to show-off your learning ( pedantary) or obscure you own ignorance (cheating). Bad research today often suffers either from naivette ( as if a teacher talking to her student) or from the other extremity- pedantary, obscurantism and masking of ignorance ( brahminism).


When we understand that in research writing, an expert is talking to another expert, we can also cut down and structure our thesis in a better way. What is already well-known is usually not elaborately discussed, and is often reduced to minimum. So the things like biographical details, details of various works or well known facts and information occupies minimum space.

This brings us to yet another important and problematic question: what is the place of ‘theory’ in the period which is ‘post-theory’. Theory as we know is not vaseline or Tiger Balm to be ‘ applied’. Theoretical approaches ( Psychoanalytical, Marxist, structuralist, postcolonialist,  Feminist,subaltern, LGBTs, poststructuralists etc etc) are perspectives, points of views, ways of looking and conceiving the object of our research. Today, we know what ‘IS’ our object of research ( what we once knew as ‘literature’ in our good very old days) has become more and more problematic and contested, and what is literature often depends on how we look at it. ‘What’ we see is very often a function of ‘How’ we see it, and so it is not as simple as there is preexisting ‘literature’ “ out there” and we use theoretical frameworks as spects to see it. You cannot imagine literature existing independently of a conceptual frame, and when you claim that you are not using any theory, it is very likely that some theory already is using you. Today, if you are honest, you have to be self-conscious of which the theory is using you, and you are using which theory, and you should have an awareness of advantages and limitations of your own conceptual frames ( those which are using you and those you are using). Literary research today has to be autocritical.
Besides, I have also often heard complaints that too much criticism and theory is  spoil sport and it takes away ‘fun’ from reading literature. You don’t need to ‘study’ literature in order to have fun and enjoyment. You may enjoy watching flowers, but you don’t become botanist in order to enjoy flowers. You may get pleasure and enjoy studying plants, but you need not produce a body of knowledge about plants to enjoy viewing them or tending them. You need not be an expert in evolutionary biology to enjoy playing with your cat. The same thing applies to the study of literature. When you ‘study’literature, you are engaging with a vast body of knowledge about literature. That it provides a distinctive type of intellectual pleasure  may be a bonus, but it is more likely to produce lot of pain in some unmentionable parts of your body.You HAVE to go beyond your personal likes and tastes , and you HAVE to read plenty of difficult theoretical writings, if you want to be a serious researcher. Reading Lacan, Judith Butler or Spivak is not an enjoyable pastime, but then research in literature is not a pastime.  
I want to end this longish entry by recommending two very useful books for the beginners here: i) Research Methods for English Studies by Gabrielle by Gabriele Griffin and ii) Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler. Critical comments, suggestions and feedback on my blog entries are welcomed.