SOAS Research Online

Abstract

A “model of world literature that does not include orality is comparable to an act of self-amputation: it entails the excision of a huge field of human cultural endeavour”, argues Liz Gunner. As “verbal art, it belongs to a universal practice of making or creating in language” (116). And yet, many have noted, it has been enduringly difficult to include orature, “the great unwritten” (Levine), within models of world literature. Although the ubiquity, portability and power of orature on digital and live platforms are undeniable in our contemporary globalising moment, so little of it seems to qualify as “literature”, even in the most capacious sense of world literature. So much contemporary orature is worldly and travels “outside its culture and language of origin”, and thus qualifies as world literature according to David Damrosch’s circulation-based definition, but is it “read as literature”? Here the ball seems to drop. In this chapter I argue that a located (or multi-located), multilingual and ground-up approach to world literature, such as that of our MULOSIGE project, can help us out of this conundrum, as the work of Karin Barber and Liz Gunner has already shown. Barber and Gunner have studied the entextualisation of verbal arts and have compared forms of oral praise poetry and epic across African languages and traditions to show the enduring vitality of orature. My chapter will not compare across languages and traditions but takes one example, that of Bhojpuri songs in India and in Mauritius, which have been studied in great depth by Catherine Servan-Schreiber. Bhojpuri, spoken in eastern north India and with a rich tradition of oral epics and songs, was carried far and wide by migrant labourers and traders in India and beyond, most notably across the oceans along the coolie diaspora. In Mauritius, Bhojpuri became one of the linguae francae of the island alongside Creole, particularly in the agricultural inland, and the most recognised among the Indian languages there. It has acquired a status there that it has never quite managed to acquire in India. Over time, the position of Bhojpuri in Mauritius, and its relationship with Hindi and Creole, have changed, and the traditional (folkloric) repertoire of songs and performance style have been enriched and transformed through the encounters with Creole Séga, Western music, and Hindi film songs. If, as Servan-Schreiber notes, the history of Mauritian Chutney music and songs is tied to a great extent to the evolution in the status of Bhojpuri, this relationship is now reversed and it is the success of Chutney music that supports the status of Bhojpuri on the island. My presentation will reflect on the “footprint” of Bhojpuri song orature in India and Mauritius and its parallel lives and meanings in verse and prose genres within different languages (Bhojpuri, Hindi, Creole, English). In many cases Bhojpuri orature embodies an attachment to or longing for a rural identity, but in others it also imagines new presents and futures. Does this extensive footprint count as world literature?