LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

The Countershelf: How Latin American Writing transformed South Asian Literature

• In Event: Literary Encounters between Asia and Latin America II (English)

Abstract

Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,” South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. Fed up with this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America.

Generations of novelists, poets, and even painters from the 1960s onwards replaced the “single, good shelf” with a “countershelf” of Latin American literature. Ironically, it was by turning their backs on the Anglophone canon, imagining themselves instead as an equal contributor to this worldly tradition, that these writers entered the commercial center of the Anglophone literary scene.

In this short talk, I contrast the positions of two different generations of Indian writers who imagined affiliations to Latin American literature as part of a larger "Third Worldist" project. In 1971, the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra used an encounter with Octavio Paz to posit Latin American literature as a source "from which we ought to learn." In 2013, the novelist Tanuj Solanki stages an imagined conversation between Saadat Hasan Manto and Roberto Bolaño in the afterlife to reflect on the politics of writing literature in the present.

Author

• Roanne L Kantor, Stanford University