Event overview
020 7919 7745
A seminar by Dr Menon, who is Reader in History at Delhi University , and is about to take up a Chair at the University of Wits, Johannesburg.
It is not often that one man and his writings change forever the sensibilities of a people. In the decade of the 1930s, in the state of Kerala in southwestern India, A. Balakrishna Pillai (1889-1960), the erudite and politically committed editor of the Malayalam literary journal, Kesari, created a new literary aesthetic that veered the imagination of an entire generation of Malayalis towards European and world literature. It was as a critical nationalist that he imagined this seemingly paradoxical enterprise. The thirties’ were the high noon of Indian nationalism but Kesari rejected the dominant nationalist paradigm of the spiritual idealism of Gandhi. His first collection of essays evocatively titled Navalokam [New World] , published in 1935, lamented the fact that individuals and institutions in south India were unaware of French, Russian and other literatures in European languages which were far more revolutionary and aesthetic than anything that English literature had to offer. This talk will explore the meaning of this local cosmopolitanism as Pillai fashioned and perhaps continued an idea of an always already connected world that transcended the geographies generated by colonialism and nationalism.
Centre for Postcolonial Studies
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Jun 2009 | 4:30pm - 6:30pm |
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