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Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist - Coggle Diagram
Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist
DATA
'My son won't learn English; your son won't learn English; but Jyoti Basu will send his son abroad to learn English'
South Africa and Pakistan, for instance, are not members
of the Commonwealth. England, which, as far as I'm aware, has not been expelled from the Commonwealth quite yet, has been excluded from its literary manifestation.
Anita Desai, too, gets into trouble when she states with complete honesty that her work has no Indian models. The novel is a Western form, she says, so the influences on her are Western.
Rebuttal
It is incompletely fallacious to suppose that there is such a thing as a pure, unalloyed tradition from which to draw.
I said that the concept of 'Commonwealth literature' did disservice to some writers, leading to false readings of their work.
Yet eclecticism is not really a nice word in the lexicon of 'Commonwealth literature'
This seems to me to be a 'real' theory, bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative.
WARRANT
In my interview, I admitted that I had begun to find this strange term, 'Commonwealth literature', unhelpful and even a little distasteful;
The three interviews appeared, therefore, under the headline: 'Commonwealth writers ... but don't call them that!' By this point, the Commonwealth was becoming unpopular with me.
Van Herk spoke eloquently about the problem of drawing imaginative maps of the great emptinesses of Canada; Wilson Harris soared into great flights of metaphysical lyricism and high abstraction; Anita Desai spoke in whispers, her novel the novel of sensibility
CLAIM
It is possible to think of Hindi as a future national language;
Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist
English is an essential language in India
English is by
now the world language.
If history creates complexities, let us not try to simplify them.
Her reputation in
India is much lower than it is in the West
Backing
Its technical vocabularies and the international communication which it makes possible, but also simply to permit two Indians to talk to each other in a tongue which neither party hates.
But in South India, which is at present suffering from the attempts of central government to impose this national language on it, the resentment of Hindi is far greater than of English.
In Europe, of course, there are enough instances of uprooted, wandering writers and even peoples to make Ruth Jhabvala's work readily comprehensible; but by the rules of the Commonwealth ghetto, she is beyond the pale