Culture and Circulation presents a cross-section of some of the best recent scholarship on the early modern (1500–1800) vernacular literary traditions of Gangetic South Asia. The theme that ties these essays together is a concern with the cultural logic of the period: questions of circulation and hybridity as indices of an emergent proto-market society's literary cultural logic. The authors include many of the most talented members of the field of modern Indian literary studies. The diverse scholars converge in their passionate connoisseurship, sensitive insight and healthy iconoclasm. Their guiding categories (circulation, hybridity, early modernity, etc.) reveal tremendous heuristic value, and serve to carve out an understanding of some of the most dynamic and least-known moments of these often neglected literary traditions. Historical perspective is matched with a care for aesthetic experience and the deep structure of verbal–artistic reception.
Many of the essays explore questions of inter-religious appropriation and exchange, as well as parallel appropriations and exchanges on the level of poetics and aesthetic analysis. Stefano Pellò examines Persian poetry beyond the framework of Islam, querying whether religious identity is even a salient category for analysing the literary system of Mughal Persian. Heidi Pauwels’ essay explores the mutual constitution of Rajput and Mughal culture through an Urdu Bhakti poet, and indeed most of the essays touch on questions of Persianization, the genesis of Hindi-Urdu, and the interrelation of Bhakti and Sufism. Yet some contributors discuss an even broader range of interactions: Catharine Kiehnle's essay on the Marathi Vārkarīs studies shared themes in medieval Bengali and Kannada works, suggesting intensive vernacular interexchange in both the devotional and esoteric domains. Overall, however, peninsular India figures very little, and I am left wondering why, since the basic theme and periodization would seem to apply equally well.
Allison Busch and Francesca Orsini both explore the conversation between Bhakti, especially Kṛṣṇa-oriented, and Sufism. They also trace the dialogue between Sanskritic/early-Hindi/Hindavi/Braj literary categories and Perso-Arabic-Islamic categories of aesthetic experience. Thomas de Bruijn, however, draws attention to the dangerous image of the “Oriental mystic as a prophet of unity” (p. 157). Yet Orsini's essay, in deep fidelity to her sources, evokes a refreshingly unidirectional appropriation of Vaiṣṇava religio-aesthetic categories in an Islamic context; where the former always point to the latter, offering no potential to disturb belief. Busch's essay, on the other hand, is about intersection and something potentially genuinely destabilizing:
If Brajbhasha texts occasionally generated meanings that were not necessarily linked to Vaishnavism, or even specifically connected to Indian literature, there is also considerable evidence of deeply committed connoisseurs of vernacular poetry from within the Indo-Muslim community (p. 202).
So circulation means measured exchange and appropriation, a new level of generality or abstraction within and among complex, interconnected modes of faith and aesthetic experience.
Some of the essays delve into questions of space, and the relationship between literary registers and localities or translocalities. Thibaud d'Hubert's evocatively titled “Pirates, poets, and merchants” discusses a Bengali poet in the Arakan kingdom of Mrauk-U at the frontier of eastern South Asia. D'Hubert describes how every choice of language and genre entailed an elaborate self-situation and self-consciousness, in an age defined by multiplicity. In a similar vein, John Stratton-Hawley and Gurinder Singh Mann explore the way the figure of Mirabai metamorphosed in Punjab. Ironically, Mira was imagined for once as a sedentary being in one of the few places she was not supposed to have actually visited in her wanderings (p. 112). Yet the authors point out that only a circulatory, as opposed to a historical-diffusionist, understanding – in which there is in a sense no original Mirabai – allows one to make sense of such multiplicity. The volume returns again and again to the theme of multiplicity – of languages, genres, religions, aesthetic categories and registers: a new level of exchangeability among verbal-artistic and religious phenomena; modernity inchoate if not incarnate.
Finally, essays by Corinne Lefèvre and Robert Van de Walle examine the relationship between states (the Mughal and Colonial British, respectively) and the circulatory dynamic that forms the theme of the volume. Lefèvre traces a multifaceted Mughal cultural policy: facilitating the interaction of a multiplicity of verbal-artistic, cultural, and religious forms, while nevertheless maintaining the paramount status of Persian. Circulation is not always without end, and there are moments in these essays where it is shown to have been artificially halted, reminding us that this is early, rather than post, modernity.
Van de Walle looks at the way in which Braj literature – a dialect of early Hindi associated more with premodernity and traditional romanticism – was reinvented in a colonial milieu, in the context of colonial educational institutions. Here the premodern entered the modern via a strong Orientalist classicism, which would inflect the writing of both Braj and Khari Boli Hindi texts. In this essay a certain temporal circulation is evident, where the premodern permeates the modern and the modern, the premodern. Yet the peculiar Braj poet under discussion, Jagmohan, manages to defy any hint of linearity, employing a Braj literary idiom that is equally classical and modern:
in one and the same work, he can be the colonial administrator keen on enlightening the people of his district on Western science, the erudite poet fully conversant with centuries of Sanskrit and Braj poetry, and the proud scion of a Rajput family (p. 290).
To summarize, the volume is a path-breaking collection of literary–historical vignettes of the eve of modernity in South Asia. One might sense that defining the early modern in terms of motion and circulation could itself seem somewhat circular, but I think it is overall a good circularity, and as de Bruijn and Busch point out in their introduction: “… historians consider enhanced mobility one of the constitutive features of early modernity itself” (p. 7). Yet in this consideration of cultural consequences, a deeper discussion of historical periodization might have been worthwhile. In a more historical materialist vein, we could have been asked to think of textual and socioeconomic practices in terms of each other, without necessarily reducing one side of the equation to the other. This might have allowed for a more precise theorization of early modern cultural logic, and even allowed for a discussion of the status of culture itself during this period; or a discussion of historical transition, and the implicit teleology in the term “early modern”. Yet even without such an explicit theorization, the richness of the essays and the sustained exploration of shared themes, make for a truly satisfying and edifying compendium.
