States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century

Critical engagements with Sino-Indian literary and cultural productions have been a long-standing lack in comparative literary and cultural studies. Adhira Mangalagiri’s States of Disconnect is one of two studies in recent times—the other is Gal Gvili’s Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895–1962 (Columbia University Press, 2022)—that aims to redress this glaring shortcoming. Mangalagiri brings the two Asian giants together for analytical purposes in a creative, and somewhat counterintuitive manner. The author forewarns her readers at the very outset that the study “dwells in disconnect” and focuses on what she calls the “crisis of transnationalism” (1). It studies moments of the China-India literary encounter to focus not on textual circulation, connectivity, and contact (as would perhaps be expected) but rather on moments when the transnational relation falters and breaks down. Drawing on Chinese and Hindi texts from the early decades of the twentieth century to the 1960s, States of Disconnect examines how the literary content and form that emerge from this singular intra-Asian literary encounter articulate and are shaped by moments of political conflict and divergence.The study opens with an ambitious introductory chapter that offers readers an elaboration of the critical methods as well as the theoretical aims and stakes of the study. It outlines the specific deployment of the terms that are central to the critical enterprise of the study: friction, ellipsis, and contingency—categories the author returns to in the conclusion, which is evocatively called “A Comparatist’s Guide to Disconnect” (194–209). As the introduction makes clear, Mangalagiri seeks to privilege these categories and foreground the discontinuous in her readings to fashion a hermeneutical framework that provides a specific illumination of the world of Sino-Indian literary encounter. In another notable section of the introduction, Mangalagiri situates States of Disconnect within comparative literature to suggest that the discipline is particularly suited for reading disconnect since its “perspectival position . . . brings into sharp focus the divisiveness of national borders, the violence of exclusionary nationalism, and the vast peripheries beyond centers of national power” (5). I found these sections of the introduction particularly compelling, even though I came away hoping the author had engaged more substantially with the discipline and its protocols. The author clearly seeks to undermine the seamlessness with which comparatists “read” literary content and form across national literary-cultural enclosures. Perhaps a more substantial engagement with the implicit assumptions of comparativism would have helped foreground her considerable methodological innovations in starker relief. Mangalagiri’s constellation of India and China, moreover, is not simply empirically novel but also a significant counter to the “unthinking Eurocentrism” that has dominated comparative literature since its inception. It was therefore somewhat surprising to me that she does not discuss the stakes of reading India and China in a comparative register in any significant way. This is a missed opportunity surely, for many readers will find—as did I—this aspect of States of Disconnect to be a significant conceptual and methodological intervention.The chapters of States of Disconnect offer its readers engaged readings from a rich canvas of texts from China and India. Its first chapter takes up poems, novels, and short stories produced in Shanghai in the first three decades of the twentieth century to examine the figure of the Indian policeman that appeared in them. It situates this figure “of hatred and hostility” in relation to the “contemporaneous expressions of China-India friendship . . . in the discourses of pan-Asian of the time” (32). The second chapter moves from China to India of the 1930s to discuss three short stories by the Hindi poet-novelist Sachchidanand Vatsyayan “Agyeya.” Noting Agyeya’s “loss of faith in revolutionary violence” and his increasing turn towards Gandhian non-violence, the chapter suggests that these stories “celebrate the potentialities of history derailed, traversing the many detours of a road no longer heading toward a singular destination” (72).The next chapter locates itself in the 1950s, a decade that was marked by official proclamations of China-India Brotherhood and was the apogee of China-India political and literary relations. Significantly, the 1950s was a charged decade for China. It was the decade of the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956) when intellectuals and writers were invited to air criticisms of the Communist Party and its leadership. This invitation was rescinded within a year and was followed by the anti-rightist campaign the following year. In this chapter, States of Disconnect focuses on conference proceedings, reports, in addition to travelogues by Indian writers such as Ramdhari Singh “Dinkar” and Mulk Raj Anand, as well as Chinese authors such as Lao She and Ye Junjian. It seeks to find the “forms of literary relation” that were most readily articulated in the poetic practices of cultural diplomacy (97). It also follows—and this really is masterfully done—on one hand, a delegation of Chinese writers in India in 1956, during the height of the Hundred Flowers campaign; on the other hand, it tracks the travels of the Hindi poet Dinkar in China in 1957, during the Anti-Rightist campaign.The fourth chapter focuses on a selection of Hindi literary texts written in the months immediately following the Sino-Indian War of 1962. A nadir of China-India political and literary relations, the war saw the forced relocation and incarceration of about 3000 Chinese-Indians from various parts of India and their internment in camps in Rajasthan (a move similar to the US internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II). This chapter examines a range of texts: a self-proclaimed parody of a modernist poem on China-India Brotherhood from the 1950s, mistranslations of Chinese poetry, and a short story titled “New Madman’s Diary” that, as the name suggests, was a satirical rewriting of the famous work by the Chinese writer Lu Xun. Reading beyond the racist anti-China rhetoric and a virulent Indian nationalism, States of Disconnect shows how these texts cast doubt on the “fidelity of the written word” and the “claims of signification” and offer a locus for contemplating “the binds and unboundedness of . . . interpretation” (131). This is elaborated upon, in particular, through an engaged reading of the Hindi poem “A Parody: China” by Prabhakar Machwe that is meticulously shown to be a rewriting of Shamsher Bahadur Singh’s poem “China” from a decade earlier.The next chapter effects a singular pairing—it brings together the writings of two canonical figures of China and India, Lu Xun and Premchand. It reads the two authors comparatively to explore their participation in what Lu Xun termed “Mara” poetics, that is, a literary spirit of revolt waged against the claustrophobic confines of conformity. The author notes that the constellation of Xun and Premchand is not an attempt “to read dialogue as remediating disconnect,” but it is, rather, an attempt “to read disconnect dialogically” (162). I found this chapter the most ambitious and the most successful of the study—it not only provides an elaborate literary-critical annotation of the critical thrust of the study but also reinvigorates our understanding of Xun and Premchand, as indeed, the China-India literary encounter. As I read this chapter, however, I could not help but notice the shadowy presence of Rabindranath Tagore as the object of Lu Xun’s repeated jibes, negative and tendentious in equal measure. The figure of Tagore, I am tempted to say, haunts the Xun–Premchand dyad that forms the core of the chapter. As any reader of Bengali will affirm, Tagore is one of the best exemplars of “Mara” poetics in Bengali. The disjuncture between Tagore the writer and Tagore the received cultural icon—as evidenced in the comments by Lu Xun (but also, in other contexts, by those of Gyorgy Lukács and W.B. Yeats)—perhaps best showcases the abiding power of disconnect that States of Disconnect seeks to highlight.

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