Armin Chiocchetti: Digging into anubhūti: Explorations in Hindi Adivasi Short Story Writing

Abstract

This study investigates the phenomenon of modern Adivasi literature, focusing specifically on Hindi short story writing and a selection of seven authors from Jharkhand. The study takes its starting point in the discussion on the author’s identity as the base for literary authenticity, which in the Adivasi literary debate takes the form of the dichotomy of anubhūti and sahānubhūti (roughly self-experience and sympathy/empathy, respectively). The argument builds on the idea that the Adivasi authors’ different worldview results in a literary production different and “other” when compared to the efforts of non-Adivasi authors to write about Adivasis. In this way, the proponents of this argument want to affirm an Adivasi otherness with respect to mainstream culture, which supposedly is reflected in literature.

Given the ubiquitous nature of this debate in the arts and the humanities, this study seeks to set the particular case of modern Adivasi literature in a wider framework. As I individuate the basis of the argument exposed above in a particular understanding of culture, namely one that tends to essentialise it without considering its internal fragmentations and stratifications given by social class and the intersections between cultures accelerated by capitalist economy and globalisation, this study strives to problematise such an understanding and its outcomes. The study does so by pointing at how social class and contacts with mainstream culture (particularly through education) have influenced these Adivasis’ worldviews, showing how this also emerges in the literature. By first retracing the history of ideas and closely reading the short stories later, the present study challenges both the argument as it is found in the Adivasi literary debate and the theoretical and methodological approach that sustains it, namely the postcolonial and postmodern paradigms, invoking a revaluation of Marxism as a more useful tool for analysis.

The main thesis of this study is that the contacts between Adivasi authors and mainstream culture and literature are such that their literary production, with all differences and gradations that it displays, is not fundamentally other but deeply tied to mainstream literature, despite the novelties that it brings and without in any way undermining its value.