Towards inter-related histories

KUMKUM SANGARI belongs to a group of Indian, predominantly female, academics from English departments who have brought to English literary studies a politicised vision and located it at the heart of social and cultural production in India, rather than in an airless New Critical urn where texts are prodded with ahistorial forks and apolitical knives.The first three essays in the book are directly literary. Two of them deal with the fiction of Henry James. The third is the classic eponymous essay that deals with magic realism - principally as written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (with a bit on Salman Rushdie) - and examines the politics of the production and reception of this writing. Attentive to the ways in which Marquez builds his politics into his narratives and finely disentangling his practices from a mindless postmodernism, Sangari delineates the dialectical and dialogic sense of history that unfolds in Marquez's fiction. It is by far the finest essay I have come across on magic realism and on the politics behind the marketing of "Third World fiction". The section on Rushdie is not satisfying enough if only because it is too short. One hopes Sangari will develop this further and look closely at the more problematic politics and position of Rushdie.

The essays on Henry James offer closely contextual readings of two central novels, The Portrait of A Lady and The Wings of the Dove. They posit that the construction of women or femininity in James and indeed his entire style are symptomatic of various changes in cultural and political processes in Europe and the United States at the turn of the century and earlier. Again, what is remarkable in these essays is the description of James' very particular style, as moulded by the pressures of historical formations. The essay that follows begins Sangari's forays into analyses of lesser-known texts which culminate, in further essays, with her looking at almost unknown tracts - conduct books, romances, prescriptions, textbooks - and mining them for an understanding of the complicated, intertwining histories of colonial society.

"Figures for the Unconscious" looks at two novels written a century apart (Romesh Chandra Dutt's The Last of the Rajputs and Arun Joshi's The Strange Case of Billy Biswas) in a attempt to come to grips with "the Indian unconscious", only to discover a multiplicity of pressures defining an ever-changing unconscious, mediated by class, caste and gender, uncovering plural histories. What follows are four long essays on the themes of colonial education and the introduction of English studies in colonial India, female misogyny, the role of domestic labour in the rewriting of political economy and colonial policy, and, finally, a multilayered tracking of consent, agency and resistance by women in the multiple patriarchies of Indian society. The arguments of these essays are too many and too subtle to dwell upon in a brief review, but their insights are truly remarkable.

What is consistent throughout Sangari's work is a sensitivity to caste and class and a perspective on gender that is inflected by these and other coordinates. The combined attention to all these factors makes Sangari's analyses rich and detailed. What is commendable throughout her work is the desire to retrieve plural, secular histories, to give the lie to hegemonic and oppressive understandings of either history or the present. Behind every essay is the political need to work towards more interrelated histories, all of whose components and genealogies must be respected. The essays have a political urgency, responding to every new manipulation by reactionary and right wing forces, pressed into the service of a more progressive politics. Sangari's work is never short of intellectual rigour and excitement. Even when one disagrees with her, as I sometimes do (for example, with her unilinear reading of Jane Austen), she is still stimulating and persuasive.

Finally, some comment must be made about Sangari's style which many find difficult. Her sentences can often be a concatenation of clauses strung together by a chain of commas and colons, her language is dense and borrows generously from contemporary theory, and her arguments can appear to get too cluttered together and often remain far too implicit (as in "Women against women"), but she demands patient reading. Her prose gets more lucid on closer inspection and re-reading, and the "cluttered" arguments in fact point to close and simultaneous processes that she attempts to record in the moment of their conjuncture.

ASHLEY TELLIS

Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives,

Colonial English; Kumkum Sangari, Tulika, Rs. 650.

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