“GLOBALIZATION is a monologue of power,” said Dr Gopi Chand Narang in his presidential address at the inaugural session of the South Asian Literary Conference, recently organized by the Sahitya Academy in Delhi. To support his view point, he also quoted Baudrillard: “Globalization is the greatest form of violence in our times.”
Apart from Dr Narang, Prof K. Satchidanandan, the academy’s secretary, spoke on the occasion.
In his address, Dr Gopi Chand Narang touched on the root cause of this newly-emerged evil known as globalization. He said: “The western view is linear and binary, and therefore social thinkers like Huntington speak of a clash of civilizations between the Christian and the Muslim worlds.”
He added: “It is difficult for the West to appreciate Tagore’s description of his Bengali family as a byproduct of a confluence of three cultures — Hindu, Muslim and British.”
The Sahitya Academy is a reputed literary body, where all Indian languages and their literary traditions find themselves represented. Perhaps it’s for the first time that it organized a function on such a huge scale, involving South Asian countries.
From Pakistan, too, a number of writers were invited to participate in the conference, including Ahmad Faraz, who inaugurated the event. Does it all hint at a new kind of awareness emerging in the intellectual world of India?
After many years of partition of the subcontinent we are seeing some intellectuals emphasizing the need for one culture, influencing both sides of the border. It is now that they appear to be thinking in terms of multi-culturalism. Should we express our gratitude for this new realization to the devil of globalization, which seems to be threatening the diversity of cultures and languages pushing us all to a monolithic world, dominated by one super culture and one super language?
Dr Narang was very explicit in dilating upon this point. “Today,” he said, “we are on the verge of losing our indigenous culture because of the onslaught of the global market, which believes in coopting, homogenizing, and appropriating the diverse identities and cultures for developing a monolithic structure of one identity and one culture.”
This observation led him to say: “In our subcontinent, which is a significant part of Asia, affirmation of one’s diversity, in fact, helps in creating a landscape of harmony of democracy and freedom, and of tolerance, solidarity and dialogue between pluralistic world-views and its multi-cultural and multi-religious reality.” He added: “We cannot fail to notice that whereas the mono-cultural landscape is totalitarian in nature, the landscape of harmony based on multi-culturalism and dialogue guarantees freedom, and brings us closer to each other. It is this brotherhood and desire to understand, which is the most potent strategy of acceptance of diversity of the South Asian cultural polyphony.”
Discussing the culture of South Asia, he said: “The spirit of South Asian multi-culturalism thrives on the ideal of unity in plurality. It attempts to comprehend ‘differences’ with love and affection. It is our metaphysical heritage whether advaita or non-duality, Bhakti and Sufi thought, or the compassion of Lord Buddha, which stresses that all of us are rare manifestation of the same divine, and that the self and the ‘other’ are spin-off of each other.”
South Asian literature displays a vast sky reverberating with many voices, but in these voices one can still detect some kind of a similar responsiveness for human pain and suffering.”
In his key-note address, Harish Jrivedic welcomed the term of ‘South Asian literature’ as a new idea, the latest in a series of academic buzzwords such as ‘commonwealth literature’, ‘Third World literature’, and ‘post-colonial literature’. He rejected the previously coined terms on the plea that they reminded us of our colonial past and “recognize and highlight, by and large, writing only in the former language of the colonized English”. As compared to them the newly-coined term won his favour because, according to him: “The many linguistic and cultural streams that flow through our past of the world come to a confluence, a sangam, which is South Asian literature.”
However, the very language in which he and other participants spoke kept on reminding us of our colonial past. Of course, a few Hindi and Urdu writers dared to speak in their own languages, but they ran the risk of not being fully understood by the writers coming from regions other than the Hindi, Urdu or Hindustani belt.
“GLOBALIZATION is a monologue of power,” said Dr Gopi Chand Narang in his presidential address at the inaugural session of the South Asian Literary Conference, recently organized by the Sahitya Academy in Delhi. To support his view point, he also quoted Baudrillard: “Globalization is the greatest form of violence in our times.”
