World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, 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. The author demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers and translators. These people participated in global conversations that left their mark on theory in the early twentieth century. Reading through archives and ephemera, Kedar Arun Kulkarni illustrates how literary cultures in colonised 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.
In my current work, I analyze gender, class, and aesthetic performance, resistance to particular forms of class-based aesthetic practice, and the political space that emerges in the struggles over aesthetic form. I interrogate the formation of subjectivity and popular culture in western India from 1843-1900, by locating those themes within Marathi musical theatre. My central concern is how the emerging practice of popular theatre intervened in the formation of a new Indian subjectivity, and dispersed the intellectual discourse of religiosity, secularism, gender, and Indian-ness to a broadly illiterate public. Arguing that we cannot begin to think of subjectivity in colonial India without popular culture--specifically musical theatre--I divide my dissertation into three sections: a historiographic intervention into the periodization of Marathi drama, an exploration of the interconnections between translations of Sanskrit and English plays into Marathi, and their production of gender and subjectivity, and finally plays about marriage. The translations I analyze in my second chapter--of Shakuntala as Shakuntal the Musical by Annasaheb Kirloskar and a play by Govind Deval entitled Durga (1886), based on Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage (1694)--are, I argue, simultaneously an act of bringing the past into the present, but also of creating an equivalent Indian modern subjectivity, equivalent to the liberal bourgeois subject of David Hume and Adam Smith. Finally, in the third chapter I suggest that women were the first "modern" Indians. My conclusion, and the direction of the dissertation, is to chart a trajectory of how popular culture created typologies for behavior and conduct, thus engendering the modern Indian subject in the late 19th century.
World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, 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. The author demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers and translators. These people participated in global conversations that left their mark on theory in the early twentieth century. Reading through archives and ephemera, Kedar Arun Kulkarni illustrates how literary cultures in colonised 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.
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