Issue 5.2 Performing Arts and South Asian Literature, Editorial more

Editorial SHIRLEY CHEW The essays in this issue were originally presented at ‘Performing Arts and South Asian Literature’, at the School of English, University of Leeds, on 19-20 March 2005. They explore the key roles that song, dance, theatre, film, and television drama play in current debates on nation, identity, and cross-cultural translation, and their interactive relationship with modern prose fiction. The presiding spirit of this issue is bodied forth in Salima Hashmi’s keynote lecture with its detailed and inward account of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his lifelong commitment to forging a new cultural idiom for post-Independence Pakistan. Recognizing as he did the richness of the performing arts, the cultural space Faiz envisioned and inhabited was both broad and eclectic, and, in his cultural policies as in his own poetry, his aim and achievement was to draw together and to integrate the traditional and the modern, the ‘popular’ and the ‘elitist’. Something of the capaciousness of Faiz, one might venture to say, evinces itself in the writings which follow Hashmi in this issue: Ranjana Ash’s reinvocation of Tagore’s songs in which the political and the aesthetic are one and the same; Ananya Kabir’s argument for song and music as alternative resources for resolving, in the face of the limits of linear narrative, the crises of displacement and relocation brought about by the Partition of 1947; Pallabi Chakravorty’s practitioner engagement with dance as confluence and a way of speaking to contemporary issues, Neluka Silva’s investigation of teledrama as a vehicle for social and political transformation in Sri Lanka. While the resourcefulness of the performing arts comprises one thematic strand in these essays, another involves itself with the protean nature of the novel form and its inherent ability to undermine and exceed its own limits: Aamer Hussein, re-reading Sughra Humayun Mirza’s Sarguzasht i Hajra, draws attention to its transgressing of generic and formal boundaries; Claire Chambers, delving into the reinvention of Bharata Natyam as an art form of middle-class women in the twentieth century, scrutinizes R.K. Narayan’s The Guide for its covert handling of the issue of masculinity; Alex Tickell analyses Arundhati Roy’s inclusion of kathakali dance-drama as a layered and selfreferential narrative strategy in The God of Small Things; and Rachel Farebrother probes the ambiguities and violent conflict which music, like words, can give rise to in her consideration of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. And finally, if one may end with a paradox: amid so many ways of speaking, amid the ceaseless striving after meaning that is the subject of, and, indeed, can be said to be ‘performed’ in these pages, one image which this issue embraces, and which comes from Satti Khanna’s film clip on storytelling, is the figure of the listener – ‘only clay, nothing to be proud of ’ – absorbed beyond the reach of words, beyond self. [Note: it will be found that aesthetic, conceptual, and formal terms appearing in these essays are reproduced throughout in roman letters and not italics.] moving worlds 5.2 1