Created in 2005, SARI (Société d'activités et de Recherches sur le Monde Indien) is a learned society born inside the hallowed portals of Sorbonne. It held its first conference on 16 September 2005, on the theme of the city in Indian worlds at the University of Paris12 in Creteil, under the auspices of CEREC (Centre for Study and Research on Empire Commonwealth).

 

At the crossroads of diachronicity and synchronicity, tradition and modernity, uniqueness and solidarity, here and elsewhere, repetition and reinvention, the SARI 11th annual conference entitled “Héritages et Ruptures” was held in the premises of the University of Paris Ouest, Nanterre La Défense on the 28th and 29th of May, and at the University of Paris 13 on the 30th and was devoted to the study of this topic in an inter and multidisciplinary perspective.

 

The conference began with the idea that in the postcolonial theoretical framework, the study of inheritance and ruptures is a paradigm rather well known. However, this is not an exhausted paradigm. Given the long history of the Indian subcontinent and the plurality of its culture, the way its languages, literatures and arts appropriate the past, capture the present and talk about the future, Heritage remains a relevant object of investigation.

 

Heritage and the capitalist approach favours affiliate concepts: conservation, enrichment, complaints and transmission. By 1921, TS Eliot had warned the West that tradition is not to say, follow the ways of the generation before by adhering blindly or being caught shy to its success. As the President of SARI, Prof. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré from the University of Paris 13 reiterated in her welcoming address, here we have something whose significance is greater because it involves the perception not only of the “past character of the past” but of its character now. This conference wanted all to accept the idea that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

 

Professor of British Civilization & Irish Studies at the University of Paris 10 and Head of CREA  Cornelius Crowley in his Presidential remarks set the tone by reminding everyone that Jacques Derrida had taught us in 1993 to take into account that inheritance may not want to speak, unequivocally, but, perhaps, require a contradictory and contradictorily mandatory manner. Prof. Crowley argued that inheritance is selective affirmation that can sometimes be reanimated and reaffirmed more by illegitimate heirs than by legitimate ones. – If conceptualizing Derrida bears the imprint of Marxism, the question he raised – how to respond, how to feel responsible for a legacy bequeathed you by conflicting orders? – could be implemented in the post-colonial context and studied in the light of new realities.

Prof. Corinne Alexandre-Garner from the University of Paris 10 and a member of the organizing committee spun the idea that the name of the nation and changing the name of the nation or cities in the Indian subcontinent illustrate the desire to preserve the legacy or break with it. Such failures could be radical and total or partial and minor. The moments and events that led to these failures and the actors who make it happen are worth exploring. The conference thus veered towards the political and ideological context that promoted either continuity or rupture, suggesting that it must be analyzed as geography and aesthetics of continuity, transition, rebellion, revolution and transformation.

 

While heritage can sometimes be questioned and rejected in order to create new values, it can sometimes be unwittingly diluted or destroyed in time of accelerated globalization. The conference served as a warning about such practices where migrants, trying to recover their heritage by reviving cultural practices or rebuilding of ethno-scapes or a return to the rooted, may want to get rid of the heaviness of the past and prefer the lightness of freedom and freshness of novelty. The conference was in favour of modern information technology that could be used in both modes of connection to the world and knowledge.

 

The conference was a reflection of the shared idea that academic and cultural collaborations could open up Indian Studies, unmoor it from its orientalist anchor and promote research on postcolonial India in France. This intellectual event was also put together to broaden Indian Studies by including neighboring countries like Sri Lanka and to share their cultural heritage. 

 

The conference also sought to highlight and honour the poetry of India and its cinema. Strangely, uncannily, it was two Bengalis, one from Maryland and one from Kolkata, who delivered the two Plenary Lectures at the conference. – Prof. Sangeeta Ray from the University of Maryland delivered her plenary lecture on “Ecology of Intimacies: An Ethics, Aesthetics & Politics of Reading South Asian Environmental Novels”. Novels, and fiction in general, play a crucial role in postcolonial ecocriticism. But precisely because criticism must pay attention to ecology or the ‘politics of nature’ or the intersections between science studies and political ecology, questions of intimacy seem to hover around the edges of postcolonial ecocriticism. Prof. Ray used canonical environmental novels to suggest how postcolonial ‘affect’ is produced as a result of complex relationships between intimacy and the environment.

 

Debasish Lahiri, University of Calcutta delivered the second Plenary Lecture entitled “In the City they Come and Go: Dialogical Modernism in Indian English Poetry” where he interrogated the circumstances that went into the making of what might be called ‘Indian’ Modernism by proposing to use art history as a marker for the understanding of Indian poetry in English in post-independence period.

 

The papers presented at the conference had subjects that ranged from Tamil Dalit Literature to the legacy of the Hastings Circle, from the hidden Buddhist meanings in the Sigiri Graffiti in Srilanka to Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction, and from the ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, through the fiction of R.K. Narayan, Hanif Kureishi and Kiran Desai to Bollywood. Universities from the length and breadth of Europe (from Prague to Salamanca) were represented at this gathering of distinguished academics. Filmmaker Krishna Bagadiya was honoured and his film Marine Drive was screened at the conference. The conference came to a close after two intense and cordial days of intellectual exchange at the beautiful Paris Ouest University campus at Nanterre La Défense with a day of poetry-reading and discussion at the bucolic University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité, where poets Jacques Coulardeau and Debasish Lahiri were featured. The wine and cheese that came afterwards only added veneer to an already rich and profound experience.

 

(This conference was made possible by the support of The Embassy of India, (the High-Commissioner, His Excellency Mohan Kumar was present at the inaugural), the Government of the Ile de France Region, the Paris West University, Nanterre La Défense, CREA, Paris 13 University, Sorbonne Paris Cité and CERAP Laboratory of the Faculty Law, Political and Social Sciences of the University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité.)

 

(A report by the Chief Editor, Caesurae)