Afterword: Rising to the Challenge

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

This appears as an afterword to a special issue of the print journal Modernism/modernity (Volume 32, Number 3, September 2025): The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia, gueste edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow

In the work I’ve been doing over the past ten years, I have discussed the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual literature, culture, and entertainment and called for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing languages inside and outside the university.[1] I have sought to explain how, why, and when artworks began to use languages differently, where they have drawn on early twentieth-century modernist paradigms and where they have diverged. Along the way, I have highlighted two approaches to the history of modernism and language that have shaped our understanding of multilingualism as a concept and a philosophy. 

One approach is the “expansion narrative”: modernist writers were driven by, and sought to drive, a capacious multilingualism. They sought to expand the reach of their own languages by importing words, ideas, and images from other languages; and they sought to blend and borrow across languages to create intellectual, social, and political solidarities that would exceed the borders of a single nation or culture. Modernist writers valued and often demonstrated multilingual expertise. The other approach is the “deficit narrative.” By combining words, making up new words, neutralizing and solipsizing words, modernist writers regularly questioned, diffused, and impeded multilingual expertise, including the expertise of native or monolingual fluency. Modernism can’t be all in one language, as Ezra Pound almost pronounced, but language can’t be all in one language either. Experiments in format, media, and type created works of literature that required translation across medium as well as idiolect. Alongside an expansive multilingualism, modernism developed deficit multilingualism, which valued and sought to animate the experience of not-knowing, including the experience of not-knowing or not-possessing, the language you perceive to be your own. 

These two approaches to language and modernism, while they acknowledge competing ideas and goals of multilingualism, tend to presume a normative environment that supports distinct languages and a national paradigm that can be mapped onto those distinctions. This special issue on South Asian modernisms focuses our attention on what happens when the normative environment is sometimes a goal, but not always, and almost never an achievement. What happens when the boundaries between languages are much more fluid, and when the association between language and national identity has not been or cannot be established? Three threads run through this special issue. One is a descriptive thread: how the complex political and philosophical registers of language operating across twentieth-century South Asia created the conditions—opportunities and constraints but also symbolic meanings and historical textures—for modernist literary innovation. These registers are both political and philosophical because writers operating inside, alongside, and against nationalist movements were debating not only what a language can do, but also which language and which version of that language can do it. This is an important thread because it identifies why the problem of language was a central theme, as well as a formal medium, for South Asian writers in this period.

A second thread is methodological: how does the modernism of South Asian modernist literature compare to the modernism of literature produced in Europe and the US? What’s different, what’s the same, and why? The essays included in this issue are deeply thoughtful about the history and theory of modernism, and anyone looking to understand the emergence of modernist literature across the geographies, histories, and languages of the twentieth century will benefit from the work that is done here. Comparing the South Asian context to the European context, and re-reading many of the seminal theories of modernism, enlarges what we understand about how different histories of nationalism, migration, and colonialism have shaped the experience of language alienation and language renewal, among other drivers of modernist innovation.

A third thread is disciplinary: what does it take to enlarge the archives of modernist scholarship such that readers who do not know, or perhaps cannot even recognize, regional Indian languages can engage with works of modernist literature in those languages, as well as read about them? This project is implicit in the special issue, rather than explicit, but the model Jennifer Dubrow and Preetha Mani have provided here is exemplary and therefore contributes pedagogically not only to the history of criticism in English but also to the history of modernist writing translated into English, to which the translated selections appearing in these essays have now been added.

The first and third threads are worth highlighting because it is unusual to see them addressed within a flagship journal that is seeking to expand linguistic representation: it is rare to encounter within a project of linguistic expansion the philosophical question of how we use and deploy languages, and whether languages operate as distinct and countable wholes that can be, simply, expanded; and it is rare to encounter the disciplinary question of how to present and discuss, in an English-language journal, literary works whose languages many readers do not understand and perhaps cannot identify.   

We normally associate modernist writing with the strategic renovation of language through projects of intentional multilingualism that are interlingual (adding foreign words or phrases), intralingual (representing vernacular idiom), or both. Dubrow and Mani track this approach in their introduction to the issue. But what they also track—and what we see in the essays—is a more complex dynamic, in which unintentional and uncanny multilingualism operates in conjunction with the purposeful collation and blending of languages. Throughout the essays, therefore, we are asked to consider spectral, absent, invisible, implicit, or symbolic registers of language. This is a poststructural approach to language: a reminder that words are inhabited by prior use and by accidents of sound as well as sense. But it is also an historical approach that is rooted in the recent paths of South Asian colonialism and in the much longer, sometimes ancient paths of regional languages and literary genres. Individual writers are possessed by histories of language and by the ardent debates about language that surround them.  They are using languages that are unfixed ontologically and historically, and which have operated alongside and inside other languages in dramatic ways. 

Some of the most striking examples of literary multilingualism in this issue involve the mixing of themes and genres, such as when Hindi writers adopt the poetic form of the ghazal, commonly associated with Urdu (Goulding), or when Urdu writers adopt the imagism of the haiku, commonly associated with Japanese (Dubrow). Several other essays also highlight genre and specific sub-genres as containers and drivers of multilingualism: containers, because they bring languages and themes associated with one genre into contact with literary histories associated with another; and drivers, because they create opportunities for new symbolic and historical registers for expression. The multilingualism created by genre, like the multilingualism created by media and format, is an understudied and underrecognized condition. It is worth noting here, as a contribution of the special issue, because the essays identify as carriers of “language,” including so-called national language, the visual, aural, material, and historical paratext that we typically exclude from language proper. We see that a language is defined not only by words but by histories of writing, publishing, performing, printing, and reading that operate behind, beneath, and around the reception and circulation of words.

Alongside its important reflections on the varied, dynamic, and spectral multilingualism of South Asian modernism, this special issue includes long passages from its literary examples, presented in the original scripts and in English translation, as well as careful, detailed readings of those passages. Sometimes, these literary works are embedded in the essays, and sometimes they are included in appendices. We are also provided with reproductions of magazine pages that show how South Asian modernists used print culture to shape linguistic expression. The special issue therefore operates as an anthology of multilingual literature as well as a collection of essays about that literature. We are indebted to Dubrow, Mani, and their colleagues for the labor of archiving and translating as well as the work of analysis, which allows English-language readers to see and to read, and potentially to teach, works of literary modernism that were produced in, across, and with Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, as well as English. The twenty-first-century authors of “The Language Challenge,” like the twentieth-century writer-editor-critic-translator authors they analyze, are makers as well as theorists of language. They have accepted the challenge of language, and they are rising to it. 

Notes