Originally published at ABC Arts Online, November 2014
In September 2013, the Indigenous writer and poet, Ali Cobby
Eckermann, was walking back to her hotel one night during a translation
workshop in Kolkata, India, accompanied by Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty,
facilitator of Eckermann's visit, prominent scholar and critic and the driving
force behind the 2014/15 LITERARY COMMONS! project.
The pair walked past a familiar urban Indian scene: people
sleeping in the street and on the steps of buildings (not necessarily homeless
people, according to Chakraborty, more people who come from villages to work in
the city temporarily and do not have accommodation there). The reaction from
the Australian poet was a profound one.
"Ali said to me, 'I wish I could see Aboriginal people
be able to sleep on the footpath in Brisbane'," says Chakraborty, a
lecturer at University of Western Sydney (UWS). "It was a very astonishing
comment for me, because I had never looked at people sleeping on the footpath
from that perspective. For her it was freedom, the prospect of Indigenous
people being able to sleep uninterrupted in a metropolitan landscape."
This merely scratches the surface of an unprecedented
literary exchange between Indigenous Australians and Indians. Chakraborty has
embarked on an ambitious and heartfelt journey in uniting Aboriginal writing
with, specifically, Dalit writing in India, in a quest to discover synergies,
exchange ideas and introduce such writing to new audiences.
LITERARY COMMONS! sees Chakraborty taking 12 Indigenous
writers to India to attend literary festivals and university conferences, with
the first, a trip to Bangalore Literary Festival and Mysore University with
writers Brenton McKenna, Maria Munkara, Jeanine Leane and Dylan Coleman, having
successfully taken place in September. In December, Cathy Craigie, Anita Heiss,
Jared Thomas, Ellen van Neerven and Nicole Watson will attend the Goa Arts and
Literature Festival and Madras University, while in January, Alexis Wright,
Lionel Fogarty and Eckermann will feature at the famous Jaipur Literature
Festival, the Apeejay Kolkata Literature Festival and Jadavpur University.
The idea stems from Chakraborty's academic interests and
personal background. After several years at the University of Delhi, she spent
10 years at the University of Alberta in Canada before arriving at UWS in 2008.
Her first dabbling in establishing a link between Australian and Indian writing
came in 2012 when she organised the Australia India Literatures International
Forum in Sydney, bringing several Indian writers to Australia.
"I found there were a lot of similarities between First
Nations writing in Canada, Australia and India," says Chakraborty.
"In 2012 my aim was to create an Australian audience for regional
languages from India. I did not invite a single writer writing in the
mainstream English literature scene in India.
"I wanted to see what synergies cropped up between
those writers and multicultural writers in Australia, and I found that the
deepest connections were made between Dalit writers and Indigenous writers.
2012 was the germination of the idea that there is something happening, and it
can take us into a long-term, deep-impact literary exchange."
The word 'Dalit' means downtrodden, and represents an
underclass of people in India known widely as 'untouchables'. Traditionally,
they are the fourth rung of Hinduism's caste structure, where they are termed
'Sudras'. Their social responsibilities include cleaning toilets, cremating the
dead, dealing with sewage and other menial tasks. According to Chakraborty,
"discrimination against Dalits is deep and ingrained in all kinds of
everyday living", and stories of attacks on Dalits and indeed murders are
reported in Indian media regularly. Staggeringly, Dalits number over 200
million people in India, around 17 per cent of the country's population. It
should be said, though, that times have changed to a certain degree: the late
former Indian president KR Narayanan was a Dalit.
Dalit literature can be traced back to the 11th
century, however the modern 'Dalit literary renaissance', gathered momentum in
the 1960s, inspired by a lack of their recognition in governance in the wake of
Indian independence in 1947, the Black Panther movement in the USA and of
course centuries of abuse and persecution. And it is in the form and content of
this relatively recent literary movement that common ground with the Indigenous
writing of Australia can be found.
"Many of the first generation of Dalit writers were
writing autobiographies, and this has a lot in common with what we have seen in
Indigenous writing in the past 30 years - it doesn't follow the exact format of
the Western autobiographical genre and is more popularly known as 'life
writing'.
"Dalit writing is about seeking an identity that gives
them dignity, a social space and a right to speak out in the world they
inhabit, and I think that is similar to what has happened in Indigenous
Australian writing."
Naturally, innovation has led to both literatures evolving
away from life writing – Chakraborty notes that poetry became vital for both,
due to its "immediate connection" with politics as well as the fact
oral literature is so important in both domains. Now, novels, novellas, short stories,
detective fiction, speculative fiction and more are crucial to both Dalit and
Indigenous writing.
The greatest shared quality however, and one that LITERARY
COMMONS! aims to nurture and explore, is something that transcends literary
form and mediums: the sheer vibrancy and colour with which these cultures
subvert and redefine their circumstances, voice and history. In Bangalore,
author Dylan Coleman remarked, "Despite generations of trauma, our writing
is about liberation", which Chakraborty interprets as the emancipation of
individual expression, rather than a breaking of political or social shackles.
"I think indigenous writing is about the triumph of
imagination," she says. "If you think of somebody like Alexis Wright
and her books Carpentaria and The Swan Book, they are about this leap
of faith that words can make possible. You might live in absolutely entrenched
situations, yet it is the human imagination that allows you to soar beyond
those conditions.
"A lot of indigenous writing is no longer limited to a
just a narration of what has happened to people. For example, indigenous
writers are using humour to subvert established norms and codes.
"What I'm hoping is that in these exchanges between
Dalit and Indigenous writers, imagination can soar in different kinds of
ways."
LITERARY COMMONS! is therefore a celebration of imagination
and survival before it is a mourning over colonisation, oppression and
injustice, though it must be admitted that the spectre of these things looms
large over the project.
Dr Chakraborty says she has received certain questions as to
why Australian Indigenous culture should be compared to 'untouchables', a label
that is "not at all salubrious". The answer, she says, is that there
may be plenty they can learn from each other that may lead to a "global
indigenous culture", and while to some it may appear unproductive for
Aboriginal culture to be aligned with a people that has been victimised and
maltreated for centuries, it is undeniable they share comparable scars.
"A common scar would be the scar of colonisation, but
in the case of Indigenous people it would be the colonisation by British
settlers, and in the case of Dalits the colonisation by upper-caste Hindus.
Hinduism has colonised Dalits in their everyday lives, in their social
intercourse and how they might speak out or even be in public. I think both
groups have a story to tell about what it feels like to live under the yoke of
another person's perception of you as an animal, as inhuman, as property.
"The scar is about what colonisation does to the psyche
of a people. It might not be the same coloniser, but the experience of
colonisation is similar for both of them."
Other challenges for LITERARY COMMONS! include that of
funding, particularly in regards to a proposal to bring a selection of Dalit
writers to Australia in 2015, as well as media coverage. Despite healthy
exposure on radio, online and through NITV, penetrating Australia's literary
mainstream has been an eye-opening struggle for Chakraborty. "I've found
that in the mainstream media, the spaces for literature are extremely limited
in Australia, and this is a significant hurdle for a project like this. I think
Australian people are very intelligent and we shouldn't necessarily think this
is something they wouldn't be interested in reading about."
Nevertheless, LITERARY COMMONS! has a great deal of momentum
thanks to the Bangalore trip, as the next leg of the project in Goa approaches.
In terms of what the results of the program may be, its curator Chakraborty takes
translations of texts from and into Indian languages as a given, with the
overall objective somewhat grander than the mere proliferation of texts.
"What I would love most is for contemporary Dalit
writing to benefit from the cutting-edge innovations of Indigenous Australian
writing, and for Australian literature in general to learn from the Indian
model of literary traditions in so many languages.
"Given the reality of dying indigenous languages, it
would be great for Australia to take a leaf out of the Indian book and learn
from the model of multiplicity and diversity it offers, and perhaps contribute
to the preservation and regeneration of indigenous languages."
Other outcomes may rest on serendipity and the intuitive
reactions of Australian writers to India's literature and culture, such as Ali
Cobby Eckermann's elegant musings. LITERARY COMMONS! is nothing if not open to
whatever may manifest itself as a result of Dr Chakraborty's vision.
More information about
LITERARY COMMONS! can be found at http://www.literarycommons.com
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