Review | Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance
Reviewed by Rajeev Patke, Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore
Judith Brown’s Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance is based on an intriguing idea: that the representation of passivity in fiction and art can be seen as a viable alternative to aesthetic strategies of an assertively masculine and dominative kind. That is, showing human subjects as resigned, passive, abject, or slack—seemingly accepting of their plight in life—can be interpreted as a paradoxically positive attribute of specific cases of writing and art. This claim is meant to apply to work done largely in and about India. This relatively new approach to the representation of passivity in writing and art is meant to offer a corrective or supplement to how modernist aesthetics has been understood through a large part of the twentieth century.
The broad context for such a move is a revisionist approach to modernism. Brown’s book aligns itself with a recent development, which can be illustrated briefly by referring to Paul Saint-Amour’s “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism” (Modernism/modernity, 2018). The “weak” here can be misleading: it is being used with a positive connotation, just as ‘minor” had a positive intent in how Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote of Kafa as an exemplar of “minor literature,” showing how the seemingly “minor” carved out its own unique space within a “major” tradition. Likewise, in the present context, “weak” is to be read as upturning whatever tradition has valorized as “strong.” Saint-Amour provides an ingenious and compelling obverse to the wide-spread understanding that “Modernism is the production of aesthetic strength through iconoclasm and strenuous innovation. It is strong people exhibiting strength.” And “To the extent that the terms theory and modernism are still masculine-gendered, conjoining them with weakness further discomfits that gendering.” Such a perspective could provide refreshing counter-readings to conventional accounts of literary modernism in Western Europe and its assimilation into colonial cultures. Given the stereotypes that cross-stitch modernism with colonialism, which tend to represent colonizing cultures as masculine and colonized cultures as feminine, an approach based on giving passivity new teeth can provide a new understanding of how passivity might figure in a revisionist narrative connecting modernism to colonial creativity. In short, Modernism and the Idea of India is based on a promising new premise.
So far so good. But the moment one speaks of passivity in the context of colonial India, one cannot sidestep the importance given to a related notion that was actively promoted in the field of political resistance to colonial rule by the Hindu nationalist M. K. Gandhi. He played a major role in India, along with Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), gaining independence from Britain in 1947. The “passive resistance” to colonial rule which he promoted in 1909 provides Brown with a starting point for her selective reading of writers and artists connected to India, despite Gandhi’s later disavowal of the idea for how it might betoken weakness. Gandhi turned away from “passive resistance” in 1919 towards the concept of satyagraha, a non-violent holding firm to truth and justness. The rallying cry of satyagraha helped him mobilize resistance to colonial rule in ways that avoided direct confrontational violence of the kind evident in most resistance movements. But the references to Gandhi merely help Brown clear the ground for staking a broad claim on behalf of “passivity” as a sign of positive aesthetic energy. The aim of her book is to use this refurbished idea of “passivity” as a common thread on which to place a set of authors (and one architect) who confronted external forces in their art and writing with a kind of vulnerability that can be said to have been inspired more or less indirectly by Gandhi, even if the book concerns itself with “works engaged in ways of being that Gandhi disavowed” (5).
An argument about the potential or latent virtues of “passive resistance” entails converting the negative association of “weakness” that Gandhi came to link with “passive resistance” into the positive value imputed to “shared vulnerability.” Brown argues that “holding back” has greater viability in aesthetic matters than the kind of “pushing forward” asked for by satyagraha in the political realm. We are not very far from John Keats on the virtues of “negative capability.” Brown’s basic claim is that “From the knowledge of shared suffering, vulnerability, and this holding back, an ethos of compassion and an ethical relation connecting artist and audience become possible” (5). This makes of twentieth-century India “a rich and unpredictable site for the aesthetic experiments that emerged at the intersection of the English language, colonialism, colonial resistance, and modernist ambition” (6).
Again, so far so good, but the individual persons and works selected for discussion have about them a certain air of the ad hoc. And there is also the issue of disparities of scale in the works selected for analysis: one short play by Rabindranath Tagore, a sizeable corpus of paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil, the entire Malgudi oeuvre from R. K. Narayan, a long and lugubrious novel by Ahmed Ali, one wild and chaotic novel by G. V. Desani, two novels by Virginia Woolf, and the urban architectural work in India of Le Corbusier. This adds up to a curious assembly. Several questions can arise naturally in the mind of any reader: first, will the idea of “passive resistance” provide a common thread for such disparate work? Second, what accommodations might be called for if painting and urban architecture are to be discussed alongside works of fiction (that is to say, how is one to do justice to the visual and the three-dimensional arts in the context of the verbal arts)? Third, will discussion of these works throw new light on the likely connections between modernist practices and cultural productions from the colonies, or at least from one large portion of the British empire? And fourth, will it be possible to demonstrate an ethical compassion in all these works that makes a virtue out of vulnerability?
The results are mixed, though I should say right away that this last question is the easiest to answer with assent. Yes, the works selected do demonstrate the strengths to be secured through “shared vulnerability,” which can lead to forms of ethical compassion. As for the first question, it can be answered in the affirmative for most of the book (though not all of it). Tagore, Narayan and Sher-Gil, in their different ways, can be said to subsidize various forms of “passive resistance” in how they represent their subjects, and the human condition in general. The claim can be made to work with Desani’s novel, whose picaro-like protagonist has so many things done to him, by others and by fate or chance, that volition and free will and freedom of action get muted. Thus, we do have passivity in the novel’s subject. But what transfigures the narrative is the style and mode of narration, which is modern (if we can call Tristram Shandy “modern’”). The energy, zaniness and extravagance characteristic of Desani has a spirit of natural ebullience that can make the work stand out for far more than the fate of its protagonist. Thus “passivity” and “shared vulnerability” may indeed be a necessary condition for the novel’s uniqueness, but not its sufficiency condition. For that we must turn to Desani’s own high spirits and his contagious verbal energy, which bespeaks optimism and affirmative joy despite all the chaos and mess that is life as depicted in the novel. The claim might also apply to Woolf, but why she is included in a book that is focused on India remains unclear. Likewise, the idea of passive resistance does not fit as well to urban planning and architecture as it does to painting and fiction
The second question can leave misgivings or queries unresolved: one is left wondering if enough allowance has been made for how Sher-Gil’s short life shows her experimenting with styles, techniques, and modes of representation under the influence of several successive or partially overlapping influences. Any general claims to be made about the nature of her art must take account of her apprenticeship to many styles and influences. If an argument for a revisionist modernism must be made, in her case it would have to look past the seeming apathy of some of her human subjects to the stylistic energy and elan at work in the painter’s handling of brushwork and color and shapes and dynamic tensions. Brown focusses a lot on how still and glum and listless the subjects look in the paintings done by Sher-Gil in her final years in India. When so much emphasis is placed on the seeming apathy of her female subjects, there is insufficient leverage within the analysis to lift the argument towards anything recuperatively positive in that art. However, there is positive energy in that art. It is to be found in her stylistic metamorphoses—not in her determination, in what proved the final years of a nonconformist and tragically short life, to focus on agrarian India. The risk of using a singular claim to link work in different media hovers over the discussion of Sher-Gil and the functional art of Le Corbusier’s urban planning, inviting a question: can art and architecture be discussed the same way we discuss novels? Do the material, efficient, and formal causes of such artworks require a vocabulary and style somewhat different from that which works well enough for fiction?
However, the complex connections between Western modernism and colonial aesthetic modernity do get apt recognition with Sher-Gil, Le Corbusier and Desani. These three might well fit together in a narrative regarding the adaptation of various modernist techniques and strategies to the colonies. But that can hardly be said of Narayan or Ali. Narayan’s deliberately low-profile provincialism has little to do with any form of the avant-garde. Ali’s novel is so much more about nostalgia for a moribund Mughal empire than about anything that can be connected to literary modernism. And while Brown has some interesting things to say about the application of Walter Benjamin and the role of translations and quotations from Urdu poetry in Ali’s novel, his preoccupation with Urdu as a language and a culture is too backward-looking for it to provide a plausible foothold for a revisionist modernism. As for Tagore, he always stood for a cosmopolitan modernity at odds with the Gandhian focus on anti-Western nativism. Therefore, to bring Tagore into a conversation about modernisms adopted to the colonies is not a problematic project. And indeed, the short Tagore play discussed by Brown gives a central role to the modern amenity of the postal service, but that can hardly be said to provide sufficient basis for any claim about Tagore and modernism. What it does provide is a unique example of how a young protagonist grounded by illness and consigned to a forced passivity can still show aspirations and energy that can transcend bodily passivity and embody a spirit of eager hope and optimism.
On the side of readerly gain, “passive resistance” is kept in the forefront of attention (though with varying degrees of plausibility) in the case of Tagore, Narayan, Ali and Sher-Gil. And India and its place in the British empire figures more clearly in Tagore and Ali than in the case of the others. However, Narayan’s Malgudi has a heterotopic relation to the “real” India before and after 1947. His kind of Esperanto English raises a larger question, once Brown acknowledges that “The passive, dreaming, non-players I consider in the works of Tagore, Narayan, Sher-Gil, Ali, and Desani either do nothing or engage in activity that is circular, ineffectual, or self-effacing” (9). Given this concession, it becomes a matter of a sleight-of-hand or a willed suspension of disbelief as to how “non-playing” is to be accepted as a form of playing the game, though to a different set of rules. We have not really moved far enough from the simple binarism of East as weak and feminine, and the imperial West as strong and masculine. All we see done is an inversion of that binary: a claim being made that being ineffectual or passive is of itself a different kind of strength. I am unsure as to whether I can find this convincing as argued here, without more of the finesse that Deleuze and Guattari bring to bear on Kafka’s modernism. There is also the question of volition: if an author is a “non-player,” is that a matter of mere or sheer temperament? Or a matter of strategic choice? Can a matter of (almost involuntary) temperamental predilection also be called a strategy? Is “passive resistance” an issue of happenchance more often than “an act of the mind” emanating from conscious choice? What might be the necessary and the sufficiency conditions for “passive resistance” as an alternative aesthetic practice?
Despite whatever genealogical connections may be claimed for Woolf’s partial Indian ancestry, that chapter feels quite like an outlier. Modernism and the Art of India would perhaps have appeared more cohesive in its focus without that chapter. Brown’s discussion of Jacob’s Room and The Waves offers much that would interest any reader of Woolf. But the connection of that discussion to modernism seems to operate on a different plane from the discourse applicable to those whose work is based in India. Woolf ‘s two novels relate well enough to claims about the virtues of a certain kind of “passivity,” but her kind of modernist practice seems unconnected with India or colonial cultures or contexts in general.
In summary, and as a subjective response in which sympathetic willingness to believe is mixed with a small element of skepticism, I think Brown is onto a good idea that can provide a useful handle to turn discourse about India and modernism towards a new direction. In trying to realize this potential, at least one reader finds that the case is most plausible with reference to the small Tagore text and the large Desani novel, and with the paintings of Sher-Gil, provided a distinction is made between a character within the artwork who is confined to physical passivity, and a creative transmutation of that physical passivity into something radically innovative and affirmative. It works partly with Le Corbusier but with Narayan and Ali it seems—at least to this reader—that to discover a strategy or a technique or a new handle on modernism in their work is to give them too much credit, or to be looking for the wrong thing in what they do have to offer. Where Modernism and the Idea of India does deserve credit is in putting on a singular thread a bunch of works that would otherwise seem unconnected. Or to switch metaphors, the turn given by this book to the kaleidoscope of critical discourse does reveal patterns, and possibilities of patterns, that can hold attention and promise interesting possibilities for further research into the idea of “passive resistance.”
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