World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India

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In 1818, the East India Company defeated the Maratha confederacy, acquiring vast domains in central and western India. Through coercion if not outright violence, the Company transformed many aspects of India’s social, economic, and cultural landscape. Literature in the Making charts one such shifting landscape-Marathi language literary culture-in order to expand the field of world and comparative literature.
Kedar A. Kulkarni describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, especially balladry and epic storytelling, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture, owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the newfound wide availability of print technology. However, the process was far from a simple mutation of genre. He demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers, translators, among many others. And, these people also participated in a global conversation that left its mark on theory in the twentieth century.
Ultimately, World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India situates Marathi literature within contemporary world literature studies and critiques “eurochronology”- the perceived backwardness of colonial and postcolonial locales when compared with literatures produced in Euro-American metropoles. Reading through archives and ephemera, it demonstrates that literary cultures in colonized locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, a unique literary modernity.

Kedar A. Kulkarni is a literary historian whose current work focuses on the 18th-20th centuries, on Marathi Literature within a global context. His articles and essays have appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, Asian Theatre Journal, South Asian History and Culture, Scroll.in, and other venues.

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