By Poojil Tiwari
Arguably it was the experience of reading Chinua Achebe’s response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which he ripped into the orientalist stereotypes imposed on Africans and examined the relevance of studying what is now widely acknowledged as a racist text. Or perhaps it was the times I sat with scrunched up eyes, peering into Keating’s Inspector Ghote goes by Train—a novel that is currently out of circulation and is now passed on to generations of literature students in one hastily scanned pdf when I thought to myself, surely there must be one book that is—
Much of the thought process is of course, drawn from the ‘Canon Wars’ of the 90s and the 2000s. For the uninitiated, the wars were series of dialogues debating the evolution of the literary canon between conservatives led by Harold Bloom and multiculturalists like Toni Morrison. Bloom argued that there was a certain sense of timelessness that made up a defined body of ‘great works’ (the dead white men as the liberals called it). The other side argued, and not without cause that the then-current literary canon was more a product of erasure of writers of color and women authors rather than inherent greatness to the works that justified their continuous propagation. As teaching literature became interlinked with identity studies and the canon diversified to include more women and postcolonial authors, the multiculturalists were widely regarded to have won the wars.
And yet, almost two decades after the canon wars, as a literature student at University of Delhi, I would often find my semesters beginning with impassioned discussions on the relevance of studying a syllabus that is 40% British authors. “Literature syllabus in India is sometimes a blatant copy of the syllabi in Western Universities.” says Aditi, a literature student at St. Stephens College. “Most of the texts which are added for the sake of ‘diversity’ are mostly the ones that have been read by the Western readers or people in academia. I rarely see texts which have not yet been ‘discovered’ by the western syllabi.”
Like most of history, literature too suffers from its share of missing women. The inclusion of women authors in the traditional literary canon is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the canon wars can be credited greatly for that. I analyzed my own undergraduate syllabus to look at how women feature across papers. Recommended by the government’s education body, the syllabus is followed by Central Universities (such as University of Delhi) pan-India. Male authors feature at twice the rate of female authors in literature syllabuses in India today, and most of them feature in a single paper called Women’s Writing, a debatable subject in and of itself.
However, nowhere is this gap as wide as in the British literary canon. Archival efforts by researchers across the globe have pulled up the works of many of history’s forgotten women. And yet except for the Brontes, Austen, and Woolf, British literary canon has evolved at a slower pace than its American and Postcolonial counterparts. For every one female author in the British Literary Canon, the syllabus features four male authors.
Shreya is a graduate student of English Literature at Jawahar Lal Nehru University, one of the premier schools for humanities education in India. In Delhi, we were classmates who had shared much of these impassioned discussions on colonialist and gender biases in our syllabus. So when I interviewed her for this article, I was surprised at the perspective she brought from her years at JNU.
“In Miranda (Delhi University), we were taught this essentialist idea that women must be included since they bring some sort of feminine sensibility to the text. In JNU, that’s not really considered important. They say that we don’t look at the texts as gendered. So including a text written by a woman does not necessarily mean that it is a revolutionary thing. A man can write a very subversive text, and a woman can write a very patriarchally constricted text.”
Shreya admits that the perspective is utopian, especially when you look at the texts from an archival perspective. Women have been missing from history, and there is a need today to go back and bring them to the fore if only to say ‘yes they exist, and yes they existed two centuries ago.’ She herself had trouble reconciling herself to it initially. Eventually, she says, “it brought a lot of nuance to my understanding of literature.”
Admittedly, it’s an interesting perspective—the art belongs to the consumer. The reader here is responsible for placing the novel in the present-day context and critiquing it accordingly. Texts inherently don’t have an author-driven value, outside of what the readers assign to them. It certainly divests female authors of the responsibility of bringing to the table a ‘feminine sensibility.’ They can be writers, instead of being ‘women writers’.
Take, for example, the reading list for the Literary Theory paper, an optional subject offered by Delhi University. The paper is divided into four parts by the university: Marxism, Feminism, Poststructuralism, and Postcolonialism. And the only two female authors to be featured are featured under feminism. Men have shaped great ideas, women have only offered feminist critiques of them.
However the question remains—if we were to do away with a gendered outlook at texts, would that automatically mean we include more women and non-binary authors across the board? History would probably say otherwise, but the 21st century has brought unprecedented changes to our socio-political landscape (I’m looking at you, Internet!).
The canon wars were born out of the feminist and postcolonial movements of the 20th century, as more and more writers from marginalized backgrounds took up the subject academically and argued for representation of their voices. Today we are in the midst of another evolution in our understanding of gender. The gender spectrum is expanding continuously, and very soon the solutions might evolve beyond creating rooms of their own. “It’s Time for a World without Gender” read one Scientific American article I came across while writing this article. It might be time for academia without gender too.