It was in 1954 that Akademi was established in India. It was a time when the latter, the
freshly de-colonized India, reflected a kind of postcoloniality, yet to prevail as a discursive
utterance in the ‘public sphere’ (Johnson, 2012, p. 10), the literary salons that existed at
that point of time, but sensed, with a kind of Althusserian ‘obviousness’ (Buchanan, 2008)
in ‘historico-nationalist’ terms. Or rather it stood as an ‘affect’ (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987, p. 393) seeking release through the ‘desiring ontologies’ (Buchanan, 2008) that the
former had put in place then.1 Though postcoloniality is to a large extent identified with, if
not rather spontaneously sensed, in a similar way by the ‘hoi-polloi’ nowadays, for what
we may call the ‘futural community in the making’ stands far removed from what
postcoloniality, as a term, attempts to bind them to and equally pursue them to reclaim, the
nation’s colonial past and the ‘carnivalesque moments’ of de-colonization—moments that
fashioned our nation’s long cherished ‘pluralistic homogeneity’. However, it must be said
that this postcoloniality, spontaneously sensed in 1950s and effortlessly identified with
nowadays by the people of India, stands sharply distinct from its critico-epistemic variant.
This is what the ‘third world’ intellectuals had fashioned in the West, which rather flauntingly
appropriated the Western epistemic models. It is of a kind whose current redundancy is
lamented in the academic circles, and whose ‘pitfalls’2 the academic community, in particular
that of the developing nations, seek to therapeutically address so it can stand as the sole
‘third-worldist pro-marxist resistant epistemic’ alternative to the ‘concentric immanent
globed existence’ that the ‘global rhizomic flow’ culminates in.3 So what was this
‘spontaneously sensed postcoloniality’ of 1950s all about? In fact, it ‘opened up a space’
where sovereignty was understood in terms of a ‘clear break from the colonial past’. It
was a time when policies, acts, charters stood dedicated to the process of consolidation
of nationalist identity, which had perhaps begun when India chose to fight a ‘collective
battle’ against the official colonial rule. No wonder then, the aim that Akademi was both
geared to, and driven by, during these times was to reaffirm what perhaps stood freshly
consolidated—‘leading a haloed existence’, as one might say—then in the unified, yet
‘contingently ironic national consciousness’ of our divergent populace, the cultural unity
of India. It was perhaps natural too at that point of time for an institute to precipitate some
sort of anxiety about rather unexpectedly losing what the Indian multiplicity had wrenched
out from the hands of their rulers at the ‘stroke of the midnight’ (Nehru, 2012), their
identity as that of sovereign individuals, committed to that dignifying nationalist exercise
of building their nation from the rubbles it resembled after being subjected to years of
colonial politics, with its divide and rule policies. Though this does not stand tantamount to
saying that Akademi too precipitated this anxiety—there is no evidence regarding this
whatsoever—it had ‘contextual-rational’ (White, 1988, p. 21) justification for doing so at
that particular juncture. |
