What We Can Read When We Read Between Languages

What does a courteous critic look like? The words critic, critical and criticism have acquired a certain combative valence to themselves, both in the literature classroom and in popular formats. In a world where fast-paced information exchange moves us to have hasty reactions, Kirtinath Kurtkoti’s Courtesy of Criticism argues for a different kind of engagement from its readers. Courtesy, for Kurtkoti, is an ethical engagement with a text for what it is. He is polemic in his call for such courtesy: “criticism should depend on literature, not the other way around,” he says, and that “problems arise when critical consciousness transforms into arrogance.”

Courtesy of Criticism is a collection of essays on literary history, theory and criticism by Kirtinath Kurtkoti, translated from the Kannada by Kamalakar Bhat. The book is unique in its position as a Kannada text that has been translated into English while also being, inherently, a multilingual text whose archive travels across different modern and pre-modern tongues. At the outset, the book is a collection of essays that places Kannada literature in the context of the Sanskrit literary cosmopolis as well as a more modern encounter between the subcontinent and the “West”. But Kurtkoti would be suspicious of such easy categorisations; for him, literature emerges out of continuous and constructive encounters between languages, communities and ways of being.

To borrow from Kurtkoti, “the role of the reader has altered alongside the birth of the critic”. This review of Kurtkoti’s work is from both perspectives with the addition of a third, scholarly, perspective. The reader, critic and scholar can be three different people, or one person, shifting hats and tools to savour a text through different senses. Courtesy of Criticism is equally appealing to these different sensibilities: to the popular reader it is an expansive, yet accessible, introduction to the Kannada literary landscape and the histories of critical thought in South Asia. To the critic, it exemplifies a situated comparative reading of text, context and intertext. To the scholar, it is a training in method that dismantles bounded categories of language, history, or even the nation-state.

Against rupture

A central concern for Kurtkoti is the relationship between literature and the world. And in a multilingual world, one must understand a literature through its relationship to the many languages that constitute its world(s). In this spirit, Kurtkoti’s essays span a wide expanse of interconnected genealogies of the literary. Literary Kannada, he notes, emerges not as a vernacularised offshoot of literary Sanskrit, but in conversation with it. Through each essay, Kurtkoti is insistent on the literary as a landscape of multidirectional exchange and constant evolution. He brings attention to this through the analysis of champu kavya, a literary genre that moves, perhaps counter-intuitively, from Kannada to Sanskrit. Similarly, his reflections on emergent genres in Kannada literature in the 20th century historicises the sangama, or confluence, of Indian literary tradition with that of Europe and the introduction of a new poetics of history, realism and individual psychology in the subcontinent.

Literature, for Kurtkoti, reflects its unique yugadharma, or the spirit of its time. As reminiscent as it is of Marx’s historical materialism, yugadharma incorporates a broader moral-ethical universe of human consciousness in addition to the material realities of a time and place. Furthermore, in his discussion of desi and marga literatures, referring to folk and elite literatures, Kurtkoti resists the instinct to hierarchise their differences and points to Kannada as an example of how language preserves desi sensibilities in its marga literature and vice versa. For Kurtkoti, the Sanskritic and the Prakritic need not be in opposition to one another; neither is marga a distillation of literary perfection, nor is desi an egalitarian representation of the masses. He draws attention to the dependence of folk literature on the puranic, which draw extensively from texts like the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and, in turn, how elite literature, such as that of Kalidasa, stays relevant in the popular imaginary through its desi afterlives.

Kurtkoti’s theoretical oeuvre stands out, particularly among contemporary European schools of thought, because his rendition of literary genealogy is a record of continuity and not rupture. Each yuga and its yugadharma evolves into the next, and its literary production incorporates these changes into itself. Despite palpable moments of historical animosity, Kurtkoti’s expansive archive does not slip into oppositional relationships. With each encounter, the literary corpus expands and grows, incorporating new ideas, concepts, and forms into an intricate palimpsest. Insisting on a continuity of literary tradition, and excavating such complex genealogical flows, then, allows Kurtkoti to read against the grain of historical teleology.

Translation as discourse

In the chapter “Translation and Rewriting,” Kurtkoti argues that acts of translation and rewriting are both discursive practices. A text, in its translation, encounters a new language world and becomes part of its literary-philosophical discourse. The English translation of Kurtkoti’s writings in Courtesy of Criticism, then, brings different strands of literary thought in Kannada into conversation with critical literature in English. While Kurtkoti is able to draw parallels between Moses and Bhishma, or Shakespeare and Kumaravyasa, Bhat brings Kurtkoti in conversation with Saussure and Derrida. The section on literary theory is extremely generative in its uninhibited claims and provides the scholar with the tools and inspiration to pursue concepts such as pratyabhijnana (mutual recognition) and yugadharma in comparative theory.

However, Bhat’s translation also opens Kurtkoti’s work to critical scrutiny. As his concepts and ideas travel between languages, finding novel resonances and unforeseen departures, it becomes evident, too, that Kurtkoti is a writer of his time, place and social standing. The reader of his historical essays will find the glaring absence of any mention of Islam in the region, Muslim contribution to the Kannada literature, or a deep engagement with women’s literature (the short chapter on “Literature and Feminism” stands out for its lack of close reading). His discussion of the Veera Shaiva tradition, too, has only a perfunctory nod to its radical anti-caste politics and poetics. Kurtkoti’s evident adulation for the past is often silent about the violences that have been integral to its yugadharma.

Elsewhere, D.R. Nagaraj has written about the fantasies of a glorious past and the anxiety of its loss that taints Kannada nationalism; Kurtkoti’s account of Kannada literature and its historical development has traces of such a fear, of new literature being too pedestrian and new criticism concerned with trivial problematics. At various moments in the text, Kurtkoti’s critical courtesy can seem uninterested in the significant ruptures that have marked the Kannada literary and political world, such as the Busa and Bandaya movements. His critical reading of Devanoora Mahadeva’s Kusumabale, for instance, is sensitive to the particularities of language, such as a distinctive Brahmin Kannada, that the author employs in his depiction of a caste-inscribed society. However, his insistence on reading harmony and continuity misses the disruptive accomplishments of Mahadeva’s work. Kurtkoti’s work reminds us to be more careful critics and nuanced readers of literature; it is perhaps also important, then, to read alongside our own yugadharma. We do not read silences only with paranoia (or some form of contested political correctness). Reading silences, from within and outside the Kannada world, is a matter of ethics – and courtesy.

Chandana Krishnegowda is a doctoral student at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University where she studies the intersection of food, language and caste in the Kannada world.