9IÖÆ×÷³§Ãâ·Ñ

The Flâneur in South Asia: A Poetic Long Walk Through the Global Sixties and Cultural Cold War

Moinak Banerjee
English, 9IÖÆ×÷³§Ãâ·Ñ

The flâneur appearing as a strolling spectator who registers the vagaries of urban life became a ubiquitous figure of modernism following Walter Benjamin’s reading of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry in the Arcades Project. This talk draws on and distends such a theorization of modernism, addresses its limitations on a world scale, and situates two very different instantiations of the flâneur in South Asia. Specifically, it brings into conversation two long poems—an Anglophone text, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1976) and a Hindi text, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh’s Andhere Mein (1964)—to demonstrate how they act as specific forms of literary engagement with modernism. Kolatkar draws on the Marathi Bhakti or devotional poetry tradition to depict his flâneur’s journey into a sacred Hindu pilgrimage site that is secularized through a modernist vision. Unlike the Baudelairean flâneur who is an out-of-place witness in metropolitan centres, Kolatkar’s flâneur is far more conditioned to the rural and suburban spaces that he encounters despite being an urban middle class subject. On the other hand, Muktibodh’s flâneur walks at night in a cityscape mediated through an interior monologue. The text begins with mythologizing the mundane and ends with a vision of an impending rebellion hinting at the radicalization of a middle-class subject. Despite their overlapping influences, Kolatkar and Muktibodh, represent two very different ideological positions in modernism. Kolatkar bypasses most political issues of his time and chooses to focus on a certain aesthetics of modernism. But he published widely in Quest – a literary magazine later discovered to be funded by the CIA for countering the growing influence of communism in South Asian vernacular cultures during the Cold War. Conversely, Muktibodh never hides his political commitment in aesthetic engagement. This is also reflected in the text, as it brings together disparate world historical and local events of the time—particularly, the Sino-Soviet split, the Vietnam war, and the dual split in the Indian communist party.