2. What are some of the typical characteristics of South Asian literature that we have come across so far in the texts we have read (such as Heer Ranjha, the Ramayana, and short qissas)?
Answers
Explanation:
The idea of South Asian literature is not new. Our literature and the literature of our neighbouring countries, is perhaps, older than the Western civilisation. The Vedas, the Puranas and our mythologies have been studied for centuries by western scholars. The western world has sent numerous ethnographers to study Asian culture and its manifestations in war and daily life. So what is new about South Asian literature?
More than a hundred years of British rule in most of the South Asian countries has made the generation of civil servants and their children who were the only educated class, unaware of the importance of, or even existence of our own literature, and the importance of studying and analysing the good and bad from the contrasting cultures of the East and the West. We have ended up aping the West completely, sometimes fooling ourselves into believing that everything in the West is better than this poverty-ridden, backward developing world.
India got its Independence from the British in 1947. Our generation still went through English education with papers coming from Cambridge. We had this romantic image of England as seen through the eyes of Thomas Hardy, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and many others from English literature. Many of our friends moved to England and, of course, we sent our children to Oxford and Cambridge. These children suffered racism in their schools. They grew up resenting their culture and the food that made them, and their house’s smell. The only culture they were exposed to, while visiting their own countries, was of long waits at train stations, visiting relatives who were often jealous, and seeing poor children on the streets they couldn’t bear to see. How could these kids, brought up abroad, even want to know their culture? Their culture was seen by them through the eyes of the western children they interacted with. Arranged marriage, vegetarianism, spicy food and all kinds of eastern nuances were treated with deep suspicion and negative connotations. This continued till the end of the eighties till a confident second generation took root in the West and started celebrating their culture, food and music which was then accepted and celebrated by the West.