Could a silly cartoon serve as anti-colonial resistance and community building in 19th and 20th century South Asia? On Wednesday, Sept. 17, doctoral researcher Ashmita Mukherjee argued that a satirical magazine could do just that in another of UConn Humanities Institute’s (UCHI) Fellow’s Talk.
Mukherjee is a doctoral researcher in Comparative Literature at UConn. She also hosts the ‘Anti-Library’ podcast with her partner on YouTube. The podcast is about texts that aren’t well-known — it’s not her avenue to smack talk libraries. Mukherjee presented her dissertation on the day of the Fellow’s Talk, titled “Textual Pleasures: Amusement and Affect in Post/Colonial India (1850-1950).”
Afterwards, Peter Constantine would provide a response to Mukerjee’s talk. Constantine is the Director of the Literary Translation Program at UConn. His translations, including works by Tolstoy, Gogol, and Voltaire, have been published by Random House.
Mukherjee first introduced some key concepts for her talk. She told us she was using Affect and Rasa theory to describe the emotional effect texts and art can have on individuals and the group.
This talk also went into how literary humor can be used as a tool for fostering a community space and for criticizing colonialism. She said the main impact these texts had was creating “lighthearted pleasure” when one read them. These texts were created to make their reader laugh, if for just a fleeting moment.
Next, Mukherjee went into the key theories driving her argument. The first was that emotion was more than just an individual feeling, as it can be experienced by a group and one’s emotions can be culturally political. The other was Rasa theory, an Indian classical performance theory that sought to record how texts affected South Asians on a physiological level.
Mukherjee introduced different types of texts and how they could have impacted their audiences. Firstly, there were editorial satires in Bengali and Hindi, whose magazine covers would include the jester Vidushaka of Hindu mythology scheming something up. Mukherjee argued that these satires and Vidushaka were vehicles for authors to critique British imperialism, highlighted by the anonymity of the writers who did so.
Science fiction was another avenue for writers to combat Western ideals. These texts would critique Western ideas of science or try to relate it in a way that’s approachable for a South Asian audience. The concept of play is a recurring trope in this kind of literature, which helped create a sense of wonder for the reader, or “Adbhuta rasa,” according to Mukherjee.
Thirdly, you have the world of pedagogy and children’s literature. Writers used funny stories and rhymes to counter the effects of the British curriculum on South Asian schoolchildren. Along with instilling ideas of pride and imperial resistance in 8-year-olds, these texts created a sense of joy in these children, or “Balya rasa.”
Lastly, Mukherjee delved into the use of satirical sketches and humorous essays. These ranged from pleasant essays to biting social observations — mostly on topical concerns — created to polarize its readers. Mukherjee described these satires as “imperfect but informative.” Despite parallels with Western forms of satire, this genre eventually created its own national identity.
Mukherjee concluded her talk by summarizing how amusement affects a population, arguing that it’s a force for dissent and community building that can be found across many cultures and historical periods. She hopes to study this idea in other mediums such as dance, art and sports to see how people derive amusement from each medium.
Peter Constantine provided a short response to Mukherjee’s talk before beginning a Q&A session. He talked about his and Mukherjee’s prolific translation efforts of Indian languages. Constantine also shared a witty quote by Mukherjee about India’s strenuous relationship with the English language. Quoting Mukherjee, he said If all the Indian languages had to sit down with English, they would say ‘we have to talk.’”
During the Q&A session, one person asked Mukherjee who the general audience is for these texts. Mukherjee answered by citing three different groups who’d be amused by these texts. There would be Anglo-Indians, satirically called ‘babu’ by Brits and Indians alike during colonial India. People who were literate in different languages, such as one who is fluent in Bengali but not Hindi, and the working class, as some of these text were cheaply printed, copied and handed out on the road.
Another person asked why the British Colonialists censored so much texts. Was it because they couldn’t get the joke? Even if they did, would the humor of the original text be lost through translation? Mukherjee argued that it’s difficult to translate jokes across language barriers. Jokes may be language specific or only relevant to a group of people. Patrick Le Febvre is a first-semester student double majoring in human rights and political science, with a minor in history. He was drawn to this event because of his experience with Indian culture, saying “I’m immersed in the [Indian] culture, and I really care about learning more about it and becoming more engulfed with it.”
“It was a really interesting approach to resistance and history, it’s very eye opening to approach oppression in the form of community building through the use of humor and how humor can project a group forward to overcome that oppression,” he said.