Mohan Rakesh, Modernism, And The Postcolonial Present

Abstract

Mohan Rakesh, Modernism, and the Postcolonial Present: The fin-de-siécle critical trade union movement of redefining the spatio-temporal boundaries of modernism has lately gathered newly momentum by taking up the question of modernisms relation to colonialism and postcolonialism. Appearing at the intersection of modernist studies and postcolonial studies, important recent essays by Simon Gikandi, Susan Stanford Friedman, Ariela Freedman, and others argue for a recovery of the global networks of twentieth-century modernism that is predicated on cultural interflows alternatively than a unidirectional and hierarchical relation between the occidental center and its non-Western peripheries. Linked by the emerging concept of geomodernism, the new approaches, however, continue to privilege Western locations and the European languages, especially English, as the primary sites of modernity, often relegating non-Western spaces and non-Europh whiz works to the status of gross art.

This essay extends the reach of geomodernism through a discussion of Mohan Rakesh (1925-1972), the iconic post-independence playwright in Indias majority language, Hindi, and one of Indias leading twentieth-century authors, irrespective of genre and language.



As a share of the first generation of Indian-language writers whose careers unfolded after political independence in 1947, Rakesh exemplifies many of the larger literary, political, and cultural relations (and ruptures) that are originative to any discussion of Indian modernism-those between colonial and postcolonial modernities, original traditions and Western influences, the Indian languages and English, bourgeois-romantic nationalism and ironic individualism, Left political theory and a skeptical humanism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, center and periphery, village and city. Approaching him as a paradigmatic figure, the essay first considers the concepts of modernity and modernism as they emerge at the levels of taxonomy, theory, and practice in Indian literature and culture after the mid-nineteenth century, providing a conceptual mannequin for successive generations of pre- and post-independence writers. It then examines the modernist positions that appear in...

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