CONTEMPORARY ADIVASI WRITINGS IN INDIA: SHIFTING PARADIGMS by Rajshree Trivedi & Rupalee Burke

Author:Rajshree Trivedi & Rupalee Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notion Press
Published: 2018-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Notes Towards Reading Adivasi Literature

Putul Sathe

In the last two decades various ‘adivasi’ voices have started making their presence felt on the literary landscape of Indian literature. The manner in which these literatures/oral traditions have entered institutional spaces has drawn attention to the manner in which literature as a cultural and ideological category has been constituted. In this article the term ‘adivasi’ has a terminology has been employed as been defined by Asian activists involved in the struggles and histories of these numerous hill and forest communities dispersed across India. However it is important to note the limitation of this terminology as has been pointed out by G.N. Devy about the impossibility of any normative framework to capture the “numerous” contradictions and “histories” of these communities.

Negotiating with these “culturally different” (Deb 2009: 49) literature has drawn attention to the question of “ethics of reading” and the relationship between adivasi literature and nationalist literature and critique of existing literary templates to accommodate distinct “cultural formations” (Vilie listened closely. He felt that he had come very far from the 48). As mentioned the “ethics of reading’ calls for existence of alternative frameworks to understand adivasi literary history and thereby initiate reading of texts different from those located within the classical literary tradition. The point made by Renate Eigenbrod in the context of understanding Australian aboriginal literature is perhaps relevant in the context of adivasi literature. Eigenbord draws attention to “indigenizing” and calls for a “responsible understanding” of aboriginal literature and emphasises “connectedness.” The emphasis on “connectedness” proposes a “more holistic approach” (50) towards the cultural text, which is “inclusive of multiple worldview of the writers, their dreams, prophecy and memory” (50). Therefore a cultural specific reading of adivasi literature will move beyond understanding these literary expressions as minority literature within the national literature of India and engage with the diverse and complex contexts within which these are located moving beyond postcolonial paradigms. It is in this context that orality, a defining feature of these body of literature has received critical acclaim, but has also created a context in which these traditions have been neglected:

If the visibility of tribal languages has remained somewhat poor, those languages need not be blamed for the want of creativity. The responsibility rests with the received idea that literature in order to be literature has to be written and printed as well. Tribal literary traditions have been oral in nature. After print technology started imparting Indian languages during the nineteenth century, the fate of the oral became precarious. A gross cultural neglect had to be faced by the languages which remained outside print technology (Devy 2009: XIV).

These literary performances are also “spaces of cultural assertion and creativity” (Phipps 2009: 369) and call for a ‘perspective’ not burdened by what G.N. Devy terms as “Western imagination” and the challenge to recognise the adivasi as perhaps the only Indian “unaffected by the colonial consciousness” (Devy 2002: XII). The larger question is the relationship between the adivasi imagination and the critical spaces created by these literary performances.

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