Globalization has emerged as an issue of
concern to people from all walks of life,
and it was entirely appropriate that the
Saarc writers conference held recently in
Lahore should have focused on this question.
The message sent by the writers was loud and
clear: globalization should not destroy the
concepts of society and the individual. This
has a direct bearing on the literature being
produced in South Asia. Globalization,
according to Ashok Vajpeyi, "strives to
change the world through the market economy
which in actual practice amounts to
replacing the concept of society by the
concept of the market". There are,
therefore, serious fears that globalization
may hamper the development of the intrinsic
values of a society and its indigenous
culture.
The South Asian region in particular faces
its own problems as globalization threatens
the aesthetic criteria of its writings
characterized by its own culture and
tradition. The writers' creative sensibility
is undergoingchange and so is the nature of
relationship between literature and
nationality. "The market, based as it is on
human greed generating artificial needs, is
promoting a culture of ceaseless, insatiable
consumerism," said Ashok Vajpeyi. "The
earlier concept that the local could rise up
to become global has been substituted by a
growing tendency of the local being
abolished, suppressed or sidelined to make
way for the global."
One significant fall-out of this phenomenon
is linguistic imperialism, which continues
to bother many writers belonging to the
Saarc region. As the lingua franca, English
is the dominant language on the Internet
though software for other languages and
scripts have been developed. Regional
languages therefore face a greater threat to
their survival. "Linguistic diversity in the
world has been crucial to human and cultural
diversity. All languages, other than
English, are facing a new crisis," observed
Ashok Vajpeyi. This, however, is not to say
that other languages are totally losing out
as a lot of literature is translated and so
readers are able to grasp the nuances of
other languages. Many Hindi, Bangladeshi and
Urdu stories are translated which share a
common wavelength as they are written
against the same cultural backdrop. When
read by the reader in another country, these
stories introduce a new literature and
society to him.
Abbas Ibrahim, a writer from the Maldives
and one of the speakers on the panel, said
that most of the Asian writers today are
using literature as a reaction to
globalization - either for or against it.
But there is no conscious effort among
writers to penetrate the international
market and their works are becoming more
local. "With declining readership in the
developing countries, due to the pervasive
influence of the electronic media, the
barometer for the success of literature is
its adaptation to a movie."
Urdu/Hindi films are understood by a vast
majority across the subcontinent and the
world. They have also helped transport South
Asian culture to societies abroad. Many
writers from the region, however, are also
defying the indigenous social norms and
religions back home, which has cost them
heavily. There are many writers whose
writings have been banned or they have had
to abandon their native abodes to avoid
persecution.
The creative sensibility of this region has
undergone a change over a long period of
time but history has always made its strong
presence felt in literature. This has
attracted readers worldwide. Kunwar Narain
made a succinct analysis of the
civilizational roots of the Saarc region as
reflected in its literature. "An
investigation in this regard," he says, "can
well begin with Buddhist literature,
specifically the most popular genre, which
is the short story. This has a tradition
that goes back to the Jatakas.
Surprisingly, as a literary form, the short
story has retained its nascent freshness
without showing signs of fatigue even after
centuries of its usage."
Narain emphasized that the significant
factor in the development of languages and
literatures of the Saarc region has been the
ever-changing pattern of various ethnic
groups coming together, intermixing and
interacting with each other. Hindi and Urdu
languages have greatly benefited from
various linguistic and cultural sources such
as Persian, Sanskrit, Turkish, Arabic, etc.
Many earlier poets knew these languages and
reveled in being poets in the original
languages. Ghalib boasted of the fact that
he was initially a Persian poet.
Despite a melting pot situation within the
region, Narain felt that the response to
modernism in this region is quite mixed.
"Modernism has been a global movement and
different literary cultures have responded
to it differently. It depends largely upon
the receiving culture - what kind of
influences it accepts or rejects in the
process of its own creative evolution".
In Urdu poetry, the free verse for instance,
has made inroads as a medium of poetic
expression but ghazal still remains a
popular form. "They have their ups and downs
but never die out. They vaguely resemble
civilizational cycles. Their roots lie
dormant but alive and return to life in
favourable conditions."
Shamim Hanfi explored the role of history in
shaping the creative sensibility in this
region. "Nearly three decades ago one of our
fiction writers (Enver Sajjad) had observed:
'I am not concerned with history itself but
with history making.' Brave words," says
Shamim Hanfi.
He went on to add that by history we only
meant political history. "Power wielding
groups designate buffoons as historians.
Those in power want to reshape the present
in accordance with their political motives.
In the present human situation the clutter
of the past prevails over the present."
He laments that the issues faced at the
close of the twentieth century are complex
and different from those faced after the
Second World War. The social consciousness
during the 19th century adhered to
rationalism and enlightenment as they were
handed down by the West. "The definition of
personal resistance, at least for writers,
has entirely changed. The primary question
is how one should handle one's
responsibilities as a writer, without
running away from history. Protecting one's
privacy as a writer is much more important."
Kunwar moved on to ask the thematic question
- can the alternatives offered by science,
technology, and the market-economy solve our
problems, or are they in times to come
themselves likely to become problematic? "A
literary sensibility fully aware of these
problems can have a more sensitive grip on
the existing realities, and can go a long
way to help us in making the right social
and personal choices at the right time -
perhaps when we think about life as human
beings living together on this planet-earth,
we have most in common with each other and
feel closest to a reality that is
universal."
Modernity and the issues of globalization
are posed with an ethos that we as natives
of this region feel passionately about.
Speakers at the writers' conference felt
that our definition of modernity will also
have to emerge from our own consciousness
embedded in our culture and tradition.
Sensitive yet precarious, the issues of
globalization are complex. They breed in a
new sensibility that "doesn't make a
distinction between literature and
propaganda."
The literature of the Saarc region, said
Ashok Vajpeyi, emerges as a space of
resistance, critique and self-criticism. "A
space where the struggle to rehabilitate the
individual and the social, to save plurality
and its local manifestations, to exercise
self-restraint against the limitless greed
of consumerism." Whether this will lead to a
degree of ambivalence vis-a-vis
globalization is something we need to probe. |
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