EV Ramakrishnan’s A Cultural Poetics of Bhasha Literatures: In Theory and Practice is a compelling and timely anthology that challenges how we think about Indian literary traditions, particularly their historiography and aesthetic values. The essays in the volume push back against dominant critical frameworks—whether drawn from Sanskrit poetics, colonial historiography, or Euro-American literary theories—that have long shaped the perception of Indian literary studies. In their place, the book proposes a plural, dialogic, and context-sensitive poetics grounded in the diverse languages of India.
At the heart of this volume is a straightforward but radical proposition: that Indian literary cultures have developed through sustained dialogue across languages, regions, belief systems, and historical periods. This interanimation, as the editor Ramakrishnan terms it, is what defines the aesthetic and theoretical distinctiveness of Indian literatures. The contributors argue that the aesthetic formations of bhasha literatures are not derivations of some classical ideal, but original, complex structures shaped by oral, performative, and textual interactions over centuries.
Ramakrishnan’s introduction makes clear the limitations of applying Sanskrit aesthetic theories—particularly the rasa-based model—to the grounded, everyday, and often subversive expressions found in bhasha literatures. Sanskrit poetics, with its emphasis on disembodied emotional states, often elides the political and ethical stakes of vernacular expression. The essays that follow take this critique further by demonstrating how literary value in Indian contexts has often emerged from tension, improvization, and negotiation rather than fidelity to inherited forms.
Many essays engage with the process of vernacularization as generative forces that produced new idioms and redefined older ones. Essays such as those by Dipti Pattanaik and Debendra Dash (‘A Local Habitation and a Name for Knowledge: The Case of Odia Bhasha Literature’) and Rajendra Chenni (‘Re-inventing the Literary: Two Moments in the History of the Kannada Tradition’) show how literary creativity emerged in response to shifting sociolinguistic landscapes. These studies reveal how poets and thinkers carved out alternative poetics in their own languages, often by subverting or reinterpreting dominant classical traditions.
This approach is further developed in Sachin Ketkar’s piece (‘World Literature and Literary Historiography of Pre-colonial South Asian Vernaculars: Towards a Methodological Model’) on Marathi literary historiography, which interrogates the colonial portrayal of decline during the Islamic period by revisiting the intercultural richness of figures like Namdeo. Similarly, Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta (in ‘The Search for Form and Authenticity in Bangla Novels: A Reading of Debes Ray’s Tistaparer Brittanta’) examines how Bengali novelists like Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and Debes Ray experimented with older indigenous narrative forms—charit, panchali, upkatha—to craft novels that could hold subaltern experiences. She argues that these forms reflect an ‘anxiety of authenticity’: a struggle to represent lived realities without being co-opted by the imported logic of the realist novel.
Another significant line of inquiry in the book concerns the interface between poetics and performance. Sukanya Sarbadhikary (‘Embodied Inheritance of a Dancing Philosophy: Text and Practice in the Chaitanya Charitamrita’) writes about Chaitanya’s ecstatic dance traditions as examples of embodied devotional poetics, while Dhurjjati Sarma (‘Visual Poetics of the Vaishnava Literary Culture of Assam: Towards a Multimedial Exposition’) explores illustrated Vaishnava manuscripts from Assam to highlight a visual and oral aesthetic unique to that context.
The anthology also attends to ethical and philosophical dimensions of bhasha literatures. Vipin K Kadavath’s reading of Kumaran Asan’s Chintavishtayaya Sita (‘Kumaran Asan and the Poetics of Freedom: On the Moral Transformation in the Vernacular’) interprets ‘thought’ not as abstraction, but as a political and ethical gesture—a refusal to accept dominant frameworks of power and morality. In a similar spirit, Ramakrishnan’s own essay on Sree Narayana Guru (‘From the Poetics of Self-Knowledge to the Politics of Social Change: Sree Narayana Guru as a Social Reformer and Philosopher-Poet’) positions him within a lineage of socially engaged poet-philosophers like Kabir and Tukaram. Guru’s poetic expressions, shaped by Tamil Shaiva and Advaitic traditions, are read as efforts to forge an intercultural and pluralistic vision of society.
Other essays, such as Mrinal Kaul’s on South Asian poetics (‘Is There a “South Asian Poetics”?’), and those by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (‘Toward an Indian Poetics’) and Anisur Rahman on the Urdu epic (‘Revisiting Urdu Literary Culture: The Curious Case of Razmia’), draw attention to aesthetic forms that fall outside dominant critical narratives. Kaul urges us to adopt an open-ended, inclusive view of South Asian poetics—one that challenges inherited Victorian aesthetic categories and recognizes the interconnectedness of creative forms. In his essay, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi contends that poetics must emerge from the specific concerns and contexts of a culture, arguing for an aesthetic rooted in the Indian conception of the arts as interlinked and symbiotic, while critiquing the continued dominance of Victorian-Western paradigms that obscure this pluralistic vision. Rahman revisits razmia (martial) poetry in Urdu, challenging the assumption that Urdu lacks epic traditions, and instead revealing their presence in forms not often labelled as such.
The intersection of language, education and gender comes under scrutiny in Zarana Maheshwari’s essay (‘Domestication of English, Education and Perpetuation of Sexual Difference: A Study of Govardhanram Tripathi’s Leelavati Jeevankala’ ) which shows how colonial modernity’s educational models, particularly the privileging of English over classical Indian languages, reinforced patriarchal norms and circumscribed women’s access to knowledge. Hiren Patel’s essay (‘Quest for a New Discourse in Literary Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: Interface between Gujarati and English, 1850-1890’) traces how a new evaluative discourse emerged through an uneasy negotiation between colonial categories and local intellectual traditions.
Tonisha Guin’s study of the Amar Chitra Katha series in her essay (‘Adaptation/Transformation: Locating Amar Chitra Katha’s Mahabharata within Indian Bhasha Narratival Traditions’) and BS Bini’s analysis of Aithihyamala (‘The Lives of Aithihyamala: Textuality, Region, History’) explore the translation of oral and popular traditions into print and visual media. Both essays examine the frictions and transformations that occur when dynamic, performative traditions are fossilized into fixed textual or visual forms. These inquiries, while focused on specific media, raise broader questions about cultural memory and the shifting forms of transmission.
One of the recurring insights across the essays is that Indian literary cultures cannot be understood through a single aesthetic or historical lens. Concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘epic’, or ‘authenticity’ must be revisited in the light of the multiple genealogies and expressive practices that constitute bhasha traditions. The volume suggests that the evolution of literary forms in Indian languages has often involved a productive tension with both classical models and colonial frameworks—never wholly rejecting or accepting either, but reshaping them in the process. The volume’s strength lies in its refusal to impose a single theory or synthesis. It allows each essay to speak from its own context, using its own tools and concepts, while contributing to a shared conversation about what it means to study Indian literatures today. The editorial approach values specificity and dialogue over system-building, making the collection especially useful for comparative and multilingual scholarship.
In a time when the homogenizing pressures of nationalism and globalization threaten to reduce India’s linguistic diversity to a narrow canon, A Cultural Poetics of Bhasha Literatures is an essential intervention. It does not offer closure or consensus, but something more valuable: a space for complexity, disagreement, and sustained attention to the textures of language, form, and history. For scholars, translators, comparatists, and readers invested in the multilingual futures of Indian literature, this book is indispensable.
Professor Kamalakar Bhat, bilingual writer and translator, has published four collections of translated poems in Kannada and has translated/edited four books in English, the latest being Courtesy of Criticism: Selected Essays of Kirtinath Kurtkoti (Penguin India, 2024).