1. The public and social turn

Lowenthal’s Literature and the Image of Man: Sociological Studies of the European Drama and Novel, 1600–1900 highlighted “the changing image of man in relation to society as revealed in some of the great literature.”Footnote ⁹ In his other work, Literature and Mass Culture, Lowenthal maintains both these positions as well as the tension between themFootnote ¹⁰:

The “public turn” in the humanities, therefore, constellates a moment of critique, identifying literature’s dis-embedded and elite orientations, mostly institutionalized by academics and the reigning world systems or the world historical forces of social totality.Footnote ¹² The reified literary space and its ultimate syllabification have dematerialized literature. Even the radical literary hermeneutics of postcolonial studies, Black studies, and Dalit studies have, on several occasions, gradually morphed into mere and elite academic practices that seldom respond to the real sociology of knowledge on the ground.Footnote ¹³

This paper tries to populate the emerging domain of public humanities and public literary humanities with non-European references, underscoring how vernacular literary and cultural practices in the Global South have been very much public-facing in nature since precolonial times. The initially cited epigraphic lines from the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and leading American theorist Judith Butler are important cases in point. Both of them, located at two different geographical, temporal, and cultural locales, share identical thought currents to embed our literary, spiritual, and academic quests within the very matrix of public life and living.

Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, dwelling on the heterodox and dialogic traditions of India, argues how public debates and public dialectics were an inherent part of people’s life in the Indian subcontinent for centuries.Footnote ¹⁴ Sen, in fact, structured his fundamental treatise through his projection of democracy as “Public Reasoning” and “public choice theory,” strengthened further by people’s voices of heterodoxy and pluralist debate in India.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the question remained about the proliferation and reach of this tradition among all the people. Was the tradition of “arguments and disputations confined to an exclusive part of the Indian population?” As “India has had deep inequalities along the lines of gender, class, caste and community … The social relevance of the argumentative tradition would be severely limited if disadvantaged sections were effectively barred from participation.”Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, precolonial Indian history demonstrates the opposite, tracing the argumentative spirit among all sections of the vernacular publics.

2. “Europhonism” and vernacular publics

For Sen, the resistance and “challenge to religious orthodoxy” in India “has often come from spokesmen of socially disadvantaged groups [counterpublics] … Many of these counterarguments are recorded in the epics, indicating that opposition to hierarchy was not absent even in the early days of [socially stratified] caste arrangements.”Footnote ¹⁷ Subsequently, this tradition of public debate and subaltern skepticism was taken forward by “medieval mystical poets” in the fifteenth century

The questions I pose here inquire whether the postcolonial and decolonial literary enterprise completely ignores this large corpus of vernacular public voices and mostly relies on predominantly anglophonic references or on what Ngugi Wa Thiongo described as “europhonism.”Footnote ¹⁹ The “dictatorship of monolingualism” (i.e., European language) and its concomitant “linguistic and cultural feudalism” have dominated the global critico-aesthetic realm for centuries, and this has led to the “monolingualism of the conqueror.”Footnote ²⁰ Ngugi perfectly captured the crisis when he said:

This sustained “pauperization” of the vernacular and the vast archive of vernacular local texts is highly injurious to public humanities as these indigenous texts articulate daily struggles and cosmopolitan visions of the people, sculpting the real life-world of the actual publics and the counterpublics. Footnote ²²

The heterodox and subaltern dimensions of the publics—the counterpublics—also expose the conformist and majoritarian character of the publics. This project, therefore, argues for the restoration of the publics in literature while at the same time problematizing the ideological and hegemonic kernel of the category of the publics itself. At stake here is the definitional concept of the publics; therefore, can the idea of the publics also be critiqued for its essentialized and totalizing entity? How do we account for majoritarian hatred and the ethno-nationalist persecution of minorities getting enormous public endorsement on grounds of nationalism and cultural moorings? If the category of the publics, however, stands as a figuration of the larger grounded reality as opposed to the purely abstruse, the marketized and the academic, then the restoration of the people’s voice in literature is not a new idea as advocates of critical theory, subaltern studies, decolonial theory, and critical race theory have been voicing their concern for a materialist praxis of literature for a long time.

3. Counterpublics and people’s literature

As the idea of the counterpublics signifies a greater materiality of critical vision, this paper posits the idea of the critical inadequacy and conceptual limitations of public humanities as it is currently theorized and argues for a counterpublic humanities, and it empirically examines the vernacular Sahajiya literature (people’s literature of cosmopolitan amity and love) of Bengal (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), which has so far received little critical and scholarly attention.Footnote ²³ Sahajiya literature involves the voices of the Bengali counterpublics such as the Bauls and the Fakirs, the medieval rural mystics and minstrels who embodied the Sufi-sahajiya or Sufi-Vaisnab heterodox traditions of opposing Hindu Brahminical orthodoxy and social hierarchy.

Before we proceed further, however, some elaboration on the conceptual metrics of the “counterpublics” is in order here.Footnote ²⁴ One way to define the counterpublics would be those publics who “are defined by their tension with a larger public” and they are “structured by alternative dispositions or protocols … This kind of public is, in effect, a counterpublic: it maintains … an awareness of its subordinate status.”Footnote ²⁵ In a similar vein, Fraser’s idea of the “Subaltern counterpublics are discursive arenas that develop in parallel to the official public spheres” encourages members of subordinated social groups” to “invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”Footnote ²⁶ This entire excursus around the publics and counterpublics, therefore, is premised on Western notions of Habermasian public sphere and the civil society, which travelled across the globe and got translated through local vernacular equivalences. In the Indian context, the idea of the publics and the counterpublics can best be translated through vernacular terms such as the “Janata,” “lokayata” or “loukik,” or “janabadi.” The Sahajiyas and the Vaishnaba heterodox practitioners in India have been described as the “lokayata,” and the idea of “Loukik Sahitya” or “Loko Sahitya” or subaltern counterpublic literature is quite well known in India.Footnote ²⁷ However, when “loukik” or “loko” is translated as the counterpublics or “Janata” is translated as the publics, some cultural specifications and unique linguistic markers are lost, and yet, categories such as the publics and the counterpublics can be used as universal shorthands to signify the heterogeneous totality of the people, as well as the resisting and heterodox inclinations of the counterpublics who defy all totalization and normative proclivities. The primary argument of this paper widens the discursive frame of the publics and the counterpublics by locating them within non-Western contexts and examples. The Sahajiya Bauls and the Fakirs can be translated as indigenous examples of the counterpublics, as they perfectly resonate with the core idea of deviance and resistance signified by the counterpublics. In fact, any elaborate discussion on the Sahajiya practitioners and their literary texts will globalize and provincialize the idea of the counterpublics.

This Sahajiya tradition of heteronomy inspired later day modern Indian social reformers like the founder of Brahmo Samaj in nineteenth-century India, and later literary cultural voices like Tagore (1861–1941) and Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976).Footnote ²⁸ While mainstream Indian literary history sings paeans of Tagoreana and the Brahmo Samaj, the Sahajiya actors have become obscure and faded out voices in the archive. These grounded public voices shaped and determined later literary articulations in Bengali literature in the early modern and late modern periods. In the writings of modern Bengali author Nabarun Bhattacharya, one comes across counterpublic fictional embodiments such as the “Fyatarus,” who rebel against the elite social mainstream.Footnote ²⁹ Another Bengali poet, Nazrul Islam, born in India and active throughout his entire literary career in India, later moved to Bangladesh at the fag end of his ailing life. Subsequently, he was granted honorary citizenship of Bangladesh and was honored as the “National Poet” of Bangladesh. This recognition of Nazrul Islam by the Bangladesh state, however, had a political backdrop. In 1971, Bangladesh, the erstwhile East Pakistan, was born as a new nation that separated itself from Pakistan and built its nationalist identity not on the Islamic religion and the Urdu language (usually associated with Islam in South Asia) but on the Bengali language. This version of Bengali nationalism was marked by a secular and syncretic model of cultural assimilation, and Nazrul Islam, known as the poet of cultural harmony, offered the new Bangladesh regime the iconic endorsement for a secular and syncretic nationhood premised not on ethno-nationalist creed but on a common language used by both Bengali Muslims and Bengali Hindus. Nazrul Islam has been described as the first poet of mass following (“Janaganer Kobi”—a public poet) in the South Asian subcontinent, and he was deeply inspired in his poetic vision by the Sahajiya philosophy of interfaith dialogue and cross-cultural solidarity—a public tradition that continues to animate Hindu–Muslim and other cross-cultural relations in contemporary India.Footnote ³⁰ Therefore, Nazrul Islam’s elevation as the national poet of Bangladesh does not take away from him his heterodox counterpublic orientations. In fact, the ideological battle in South Asia around the question of majoritarian religious nationalism continues to afflict everyday life and democratic politics, and Nazrul Islam’s legacy of syncretism and heterodoxy is and has been challenged again and again. Nazrul Islam remains a poet of the masses or a public poet or a poet who scripted the counterpublic Muse, articulating the tradition of conviviality and interfaith dialogue, defying all attempts of majoritarian dogmatism. Krishnapriya Dasgupta has elaborated this unique tradition of conviviality born out of centuries of sahajiya living practices and vision in his recent work on interfaith dialogue among Bengali publics and counterpublics.Footnote ³¹ Further examples of such a public culture of amity and intercultural solidarity in precolonial Bengal are evident in the rich and enormous collection of vernacular songs of the rural Bauls and Fakirs, or the rural Sahajiya-Sufi minstrels in Bengal. Footnote ³² Kshitimohan Sen’s long treatise on the medieval practices of Hindu–Muslim conjoined religious dialogues in Bengal is amply reflected in recent studies by Dasgupta on how ordinary Hindus in Bengal used to worship and accept Muslim icons and rituals, and in a similar vein, how ordinary Muslims used to adopt Hindu iconography and religious festivals.Footnote ³³ Nazrul Islam, the Muslim poet, is still enormously famous both in West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh for his superb composition of Hindu devotional songs, popularly known as Shyama sangeet, devoted to the Hindu goddess Kali. These are, therefore, archivally proved public facts, and their remnants are still alive in contemporary cosmopolitan (counter)public vision in both Bengal and Bangladesh.

4. The “untranslatable” and “against world literature”

The idea of a counterpublic humanities as distinct from public humanities, therefore, throws up challenges through the projection of the local, the geographically unique, and the culturally singular, which are difficult to be appropriated and translated through the Globish (global standard English), and therefore, the vernacular plays an important role in the making of the counterpublic literary humanities or the vernacular humanities.Footnote ³⁴ Barbara Cassin’s notion of the “untranslatable” and Emily Apter’s argument regarding “Against World Literature” or against what she called “big tent world literature,” comprising random and institutionalized selection of big names of Anglophonic writings from different countries of the world to constellate a model of big basket world Anglophone literature, are important in this context.Footnote ³⁵ The idea of the “untranslatable” recognizes the value of the local and the vernacular, which are more deeply embedded in local realities and therefore more representative of the unique life-world of the publics and the counterpublics. This also points to what Gayatri Spivak describes as “epistemic humility,” giving space to the “small voices” of vernacular literature, something akin to Thiongo’s critique of what he called “europhonism.”Footnote ³⁶

In what follows, I will first engage with the genealogy of public humanities as the emerging field, positing how modern humanities education as we understand it evolved as a Eurocentric institutional discipline, whose rise and dominance relied on different structural and economic tropes of hegemony. Circulation of the knowledge-power nexus of various elite educational institutes and associated world academic systems led to the reified university curricula and pedagogic models. Renewed and sustained reification of institutionalization of humanities education also resulted in its alienation from actual life, and over the years, even seemingly radical conceptual fields, including postcolonialism, decoloniality, and gender theory, slowly exhausted their critical valence and gradually ossified into fashionable theoretical fads, relying on academic hierarchies, maintained through dominant academic norms and fashions.

5. Provincial university, academic hubris

This persistent gradation of front-ranking and the so-called “provincial public universities” is a case in point here.Footnote ³⁷ Has the public university model failed only because of massive financialization of the academia, or also owing to the growing disparities between the elite and the “provincial” public universities? If the public university, by its definition, is concerned with the actual publics, then how can it forge a direct linkage not just with elite ideologues but also with the real publics and their life-world, articulated through the vernacular? Non-Western vernacular authors, scripting their lived experiences with a direct bearing on people’s lives, remained under-recognized as their works were seldom recognized or accommodated in the higher echelons of literary world systems, ruled by literary-academic celebrities and big publication houses.

The elitism implicit within institutionalized education was bound to cause public disdain and alienation from humanities education, with which they failed to relate. Any attempt at public humanities or literary public humanities, therefore, requires the inclusion of the vernacular, the ordinary, and the people without, however, discarding the critical gaze that constantly evaluates even the categories of the “publics,” the “people,” and the “popular.” After all, we are living today in an age of populism and populist democracies that are mostly autocratic in nature, sustained by popular vote, and popular hatred for the cultural or the racial Other. Recent studies on new authoritarianism and the crisis of liberal democracy have looked into these rising autocratic trends across the globe and the growing popular support for it, raising doubts about the efficacy of modern humanities education to address this reality of public support for authoritarian regimes.Footnote ³⁸

In reality, critical visions as practiced by centuries of people’s vernacular thoughts never reached the modern academy, or we never allowed vernacular cosmopolitan vision of the counterpublics to infiltrate our modern institutionalized educational modes. Studies on the debates around “rethinking the relationship between popular culture and the public sphere” are important to recognize the importance of people’s participation in critical deliberations in the public sphere.Footnote ³⁹

It is a pity that only after centuries of modern educational failure, we today concede to the slogan of “becoming indigenous.”Footnote ⁴⁰ People’s vernacular vision remained at the margins because indigenous thought geographies were considered germane only for a few area studies specialists. The vicious fall out of current neoliberal necropolitics compelled modern academics to reach out to the publics or the counterpublics whom they ignored or overlooked owing to their elite academic hubris. It is only after decades of worshipping the elite sophistication of mainstream literature that one comes across recent calls for “ultra-minor” world literature or micro-literary voices as a possible survival tool for public literary humanities.Footnote ⁴¹

6. Sahajiya and public literary humanities

As stated earlier, this paper empirically examines the Indian case study of people’s literature or Sahajiya Sahitya, which has been and continues to remain as an active form of public literary humanities and vernacular cosmopolitanism, practiced and promulgated by ordinary people, a trend that nineteenth-century Bengali academics critically engaged with in their research agenda. Examples of this include Dinesh Chandra Sen’s critical appraisal of the Eastern Bengal Ballads (Maymen Sing Geetika 1932), Manindra Mohan Bose’s critical edition of Ragatmika Sahitya, Postchaitanya sahajiya literature, and even ancient or premodern forms of people’s narratives, community songs, and literary gatherings, which were effective examples of public criticism and public literary writings, something Tagore brilliantly argued in his book Loukik Sahitya (People’s Literature).Footnote ⁴²

Tagore, in this text, clearly established how rural folks and their life-world determined the nature of the people’s Muse and ultimately how it had a lasting impact on mainstream Bengali literature in subsequent periods, casting their shadows even on modern Bengali literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The term sahaj manus or the sahajiya way connotes innate or intrinsic human qualities unaffected by institutional norms and people’s ways of simple life and living.Footnote ⁴³ These sahajiya practices animated the medieval Bengali literary and cultural ethos of the publics and the counterpublics. Subaltern studies’ historian Ranajit Guha argued similar views in his later Bengali writings, including Sahityer Satya (The Truth or Value of Literature).Footnote ⁴⁴ These obscured public writings are still alive in many parts of India in the rural and tribal areas. Postcolonial academic institutions either essentialized or hyper-nationalized these indigenous practices or systematically obliterated or downplayed the importance of these forms in favor of derivative Eurocentric theoretical discourses.

In what follows, we will dwell further on counterpublic literary humanities, and subsequently, I will engage with leading theorists of public humanities only to demonstrate how this very call for public humanities or public literary humanities is redolent with exclusively anglophonic and Eurocentric references both in terms of the crisis of humanities education and the solutions being meted out to address the crisis. More than a century ago, Matthew Arnold’s diagnosis of industrial England and its Victorian Hebraism or total reification prompted him to imagine the redemptive poetic figure of the “scholar gypsy” who left this modern age of “sick hurry and divided aims” to learn from the indigenous publics or the gypsies. The upshot of Arnold’s story is quite simple—our complete ethical bankruptcy, demanding a total unplugging from this culture of consumerist subsumption to reimagine and re-energize literature and values practiced among the rustics or the publics. Today, the situation is more complex than what Arnold could have imagined. The total subsumption of the life-world under capitalist profiteering has devoured all forms of life. Our renewed quest for public literary humanities has to refashion that lost time zone of being with the Other and being with the World. Literature has the power to facilitate such a reconnect. The easiest way would be to strengthen existing and surviving forms of public art and people’s literary imagination, as mentioned and established in Doris Sommer’s The Work of Art in the World Civic Agency and Public Humanities, where Sommer makes an excellent case study of people’s bottom-up experimental art practices through the inspirations of Brazilian artist Augusto Boal to solve the civic problems in conflict-ridden Colombia, Latin America.Footnote ⁴⁵

7. Counterpublic literary manifesto, small press writings, “ultra-minor literature”

A new agenda and manifesto for public or counterpublic literary humanities can think of enacting a retreat to declining but active forms of people’s literature and artistic traditions. Literary and critical theory have so far been a walled city, beholden only to elite and “europhonic” trends and jargons. A new counterpublic literary manifesto has to script a slogan of Becoming Vernacular, ending in that process the “language of power” or the “dictatorship of the monolingual”:

I will explain this further in the context of postcolonial India through my engagement with vernacular literary practices from precolonial Bengal, but before that, a quick detour through the current call for public literary humanities or the public value of literature is perfectly in order.

The call for papers for this special issue of the journal, while citing Reitter and Wellmon, echoes the “ongoing crisis” of humanities education, a predicament that induced what is argued as “increasing interest among scholars of literary studies” to “turn towards, to engage with and learn from various publics beyond the academy.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This beyond-ness or demolition of institutional confinement of literature is what constitutes the “public humanities practice” and is argued as part of a larger concern for literary studies practices and its worldly impacts. This paper tries to offer a concrete example of this beyond-ness and peripheral literary small voices through references to small press writings and vernacular “ultra-minor literature.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Given the above debate around vernacularization, how do we examine the role of vernacular Little Magazines or minor literary-cultural voices that foster Avant Garde experimentation, introducing new genres of world literature and counter-cultural trends? As a specific case study, one can refer to an ethnography of the burgeoning archive of Little Magazines and Small Press publications in India, or in Bengal, to be more precise, in the last three decades. A closer analysis of this archive of non-canonical and mostly small town-based publications will unfold possibilities of an alternative de-canonized and vernacular world literary history and cultural theory in India.

Usually, most eminent Bengali authors begin their literary career through lesser-known and self-published platforms, and yet the moment they become established writers, their works are appropriated by market norms and profiteering codifications. Literary-cultural scholarship concentrates mostly on city-based mainstream big names and popular Anglophonic trends, and therefore, deviant and vernacular minor voices are silenced or completely ignored, even though such small press publishers are materially grounded and catalyze newer literary experimentations. Current research in the domain of world literature has taken new turns towards what they call “ultra-minor literature,” or peripheral micro-world voices—a trend that deconstructs mainstream hegemony, responsible for representational asymmetries and the politics of Anglicized canon-formation.Footnote ⁴⁹

8. Booker prizes to small press vernacular authors

The commodified ecosystem of the contemporary publishing world in India has recently witnessed the influx of many vernacular minor literary-cultural voices and digital literary platforms. Recent Booker Prize-winning Indian authors were both vernacular writers. Both Geetanjali Shree, the 2022 Booker winner for her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English as Tomb of Sand, and the 2025 Booker winner Banu Mushtaq’s translated short story collection, Heart Lamp, originally written in the Kannada language, clearly testify to the wealth and importance of vernacular literature that directly connects to people’s lives. Both these authors began their literary careers by writing in local small press publications.

Any empirical research on these small press writings and their digitized portals will therefore unearth their role in fueling alternative literary-cultural movements. Any project on public literary humanities has to examine how small press experimental publications strategically function amidst the pervasive ideology of mechanical reproduction, profiteering, and populist subservience. The larger objectives and research questions for a vernacular or public literary humanities would be the following: Dwarfed by big publishing brands, what transformative role do suburban and ephemeral publishing platforms play in terms of public aesthetic radicality and alternative vision? How do they offer alternative histories of minor or vernacular world literature? How do they redefine literary theory and cultural values? Can there be a Digital Database of the Archive of vernacular Small Press Writings to preserve their research value? How do the Little Magazines address crucial questions of inequality, racism, gender, neo-colonial power relations, and the Anthropocene? Do they envision pre-figurative ways of public aesthetic solidarity and non-commercial transnational cosmopolitanism? Methodologically, one needs to adopt an archival and ethnographic study of small press publishers and Little Magazine Fairs in the city and small-town suburbs. All progressive literary cultural movements in India (in this specific case, Bengal), including the Dalit literature movement (writings about the caste system by the so-called “untouchable” castes in India), the Kallol Poets group, the “Hungry Poets’ group,” the Krittibas group, the Chaturtha Duniya collective, and Samya Stree publishers, were made possible because of these low-cost mimeographed little magazines. Any serious effort to launch a public literary humanities manifesto cannot be complete without recognizing the roles played by these Small Press Little Magazines. A digital database on Vernacular Small Press World Literature is also required to be initiated.

This attempt to restore the public and vernacular dimension of the humanities is also described as “reparational work” or “public-facing writing,” and citing Jen Gurr’s understanding of “public debates,” one may argue about the transformation of “our working in public—creating public access, valuing engagement, becoming public intellectuals, or turning into genuinely public scholarship”—practices that include and are in fact given over to the publics with whom we work, and taken together, this is what Philip Lewis describes as the “public humanities turn.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Given this public turn of humanities education, how do we fashion an identical literary humanities project that will be similarly public-facing, and therefore, “what would or what does a public literary humanities look like?”

Put differently, since literature too has failed in recent years to elicit public interest both institutionally and among the larger publics, for this special issue of the journal, the most important research questions are the following: How can literary humanities produce values? Or, what roles can literary humanities scholars play to generate direct impacts on the fiscally determined social space that is showing minimal interest in humanities education? Closely connected to that would be the other important inquiry related to the role of the universities to facilitate a new and different version of public literary studies and whether it can challenge exiting tropes of area studies discipline, world literature, and postcolonial or decolonial literary studies.

Furthermore, who are the real stakeholders (publics) of decolonial studies or world literary studies, and how do we approach existing systems of publication networks, big publishing houses, and flagship journals in actualizing the emerging domain of public literary humanities? Pace Judith Butler, “the question of the value of the humanities and the general task of making public what that value” is or “establishing the humanities as a public value or indeed a public good,” can encourage an understanding of literary studies as “literary-humanities that crosses languages, and national literary and disciplinary boundaries.”Footnote ⁵¹

9. Postcolonial publics, power-violence, loss, and recovery of self

My proposed demand for a counterpublic literary humanity in the Global South pivots around three crucial registers: carcerality, violence, and the fluidity of the self and textual signposts. These three categories have corresponding links with the three axioms embodied by the State, the Self, and the literary-intellectual-critic—they have a braided relationship of entangled power relations. As a student of the postcolonial, the central question for me continues to be the question of “power” and the architecture or operating ecosystem of this power that plays out in the postcolony.

That brings us to the ground reality of daily public life, and if we look into the postcolonial public space, what are the key issues that stare the eye? These include social and political violence, detention, draconian laws in the name of securitization, state apparatus, bureaucratic regimes, boundary making, the nation question, questions of cultural homogeneity versus heterogeneity, economic deprivation, and the distribution of power and wealth. Postcolonial literary and cultural signposts are premised on or attentive to all these issues, and public humanities or literary humanities-oriented interventions are supposed to emerge from these grounds as well.

Perhaps right from the beginning, the question of violence has haunted the postcolonial publics; in fact, the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent was the violent crucible that resulted in the birth of the two nation-states. But what next? In the aftermath of the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 or the South Asian ethnic cleansing, was there any ground for a social contract that we all agreed upon? Lodged as the postcolonial, publics are within the logic of nationalism and national unity: How do they negotiate with ideological discourses that are redolent with inherent activation of violence and disciplining? If we focus on the Indian case study and go back to history, during the Indian anti-colonial struggle against the British colonial rule, there was a battle on the idea of India or a battle to win the heart of India.

That pedagogic moment which catapulted the postcolonial publics into a liberated horizon of performance in post-independence India demanded further postcolonial pedagogies and performatives of “nation as narration.”Footnote ⁵² In fact, conflictual pedagogic battles to win the heart of India constitutes the idea of the normative postcolonial nation-state forged through popular public will. This popular will or public desire for a strong postcolonial nation also thrived on the idea of a culturally other entity, namely the Islamic state of Pakistan, to be looked through the hostile lens of a Hindu majoritarian notion of India.

Post-independence from the British colonial rule, the nation-state emboldened with “public support” and “popular mandate” adopted all forms of draconian rules to execute regular alleged fake police encounters, causing custodial deaths in countries of the Global South. Postcolonial India is seemingly poised for another battle on the real swaraj (autonomy) or another phase of nativism, deepening in that process a nation-state which is modelled on colonial or Euro-normative templates. Postcolonial nations’ militarism and rogue nature encourage it to resort to what Mbembe would call necropolitical measures of brutality and masculine projection of violence, which is flaunted and characterized as the strength of the postcolonial nation. History books are being doctored today in India to decipher and indoctrinate one uniform version of majoritarian Hindu nationalist Indian history that obliterates the pluralist and heterogeneous nature of India. The Gandhian hypothesis of swaraj was a liberal and humane way of attaining freedom from the tutelage of Euro-modern discourses on the Self under colonization. But once free, which India are we looking for? Which self? After the loss of the precolonial self, what recovery? After colonized amnesia, which memory? After white mythology, which mythopoeic narrativization of the nation? Any response to these questions, requires a retreat into the endangered and counterpublic notion of conviviality or of fluid self-hood, practiced by the people in precolonial times. In what follows, we will see how people’s literature born in medieval India and emerging out of an important people’s religious reform movement, called the Bhakti movement, generated the wealth of Sahajiya literature, and these literary practices were instances of public literary humanities.Footnote ⁵³ Along with the Sahajiya Sahitya, we also had other examples of people’s literature or literature of the commons such as the vast corpus of the Eastern Bengal Ballads. This also answers our previous questions regarding the elementary features and values of public literary humanities—it has to be people’s literature, integral to their daily life and living, and has to relate to their immediate existential values and concerns. It is not confined within the walled city of the academic-institutional researcher.

10. Reparation through Sahajiya Sahitya and subaltern vision

To understand the inherent value of vernacular Bengali literature of the medieval Bengali literary period, known as Ragatmika Pada Sahitya or Sahajiya Sahitya, this paper unpacks the public good offered by Sahajiya literature, and in cross reference, it elaborates on how subaltern studies’ founder and historian Ranajit Guha explained the value of literature in his Bengali book Sahityer Satya (Truth or Value of Literature).Footnote ⁵⁴ Guha, the die-hard historian, confessed about his “literary turn” in 2002 when he realized the limitations of traditional historicist methods which he wanted to replace with the primacy of literature through his sustained references to Tagore and many other Bengali literary voices, including the sahajiya writings of Lalan Fakir, the nineteenth-century Sufi-Sahajiya mystic-minstrel in Bengal.Footnote ⁵⁵

Since 2002, Guha, known worldwide as the illustrious founder and exponent of subaltern historiography, discarded all claims about normative historicist analysis and began producing an enormous amount of Bengali writing on Indian and Bengali literature. Interestingly, in a recent tribute to Guha published in the Bengali journal Anustup after Guha’s death, Umar Khalid, an Indian student activist who is still languishing in a Delhi jail and who wrote that tribute piece from the prison, described Guha as a “public historian” and any cursory reading of Guha’s later Bengali writings on literature will demonstrate how Guha emphasized on the public literary pieces of Tagore and other poets in Bengal.Footnote ⁵⁶ Guha’s critical study of Brahmo reformist leader Ram Mohan Roy’s treatise on “Daya” (human compassion) and human ethical values is a brilliant rendition of public good and public values, as prescribed by humanities education. More on that in the subsequent sections.

The Sahajiya tradition has its roots in the infusion of medieval Buddhist, Natha, Yogic, Vaisnava, and Sufi knowledge systems in ancient India.Footnote ⁵⁷ The beginning of some of these Buddhist or Yogic practices is very old and can be traced back to the ninth or tenth century AD. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, under the impact of Vaisnava or Sufi practices, we witness the emergence of the hybrid and fusion-oriented translational forms of Sahajiya dharma or Sahajiya philosophic ways, which prescribed non-orthodox and simpler forms of cosmopolitan philosophic vision. As told earlier, etymologically, the word Sahaja signifies the simple, innate, or intuitive forms of knowledge and vision. The idea of Sahaja Yana, in which the word Yana signifies path, posits the idea of simple, non-orthodox mystical ways of harmonized thinking. In the medieval Bengali Sufi text of Suratanama or Nurjamal of Haji Muhammad, we find similar expressions of intercultural dialogue and endosmosis.

They encourage and practice inter-textual translation among religious and philosophical symbols and are truly cross-cultural in nature, or believe in intercultural exchange of ideas.Footnote ⁵⁸ Therefore, they practiced dis-bordered thinking and harmonious use of symbols and mystical imageries, adopted from different cultural affiliations, showing liberal and deconstructive approaches in precolonial India. Based on these medieval heterodox philosophical practices of cross-cultural dialogue, there emerged in Bengal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a whole corpus of literature known as “Post Chaitanya Sahajiya” Sahitya or Sahajiya literature, centering around the life and progressive preachings of Vaishnava reformist religious thinker Chaitanya (1486–1534), who preached his doctrine of love and equality among the masses or the publics. This sahajiya tradition of innate love and heterodoxy was also evident in the folk or people’s literature of Bengal as well. In what follows, we will see how the Eastern Bengal Ballads, excavated in rural Bengal in 1923, demonstrate instances of public or counterpublic heterodoxy, so important in today’s climate of jingoistic majoritarian violence.

11. Eastern Bengal Ballads, literature of the commons

The year 2023 marked the hundred years of publication of Mymensingh Gitika (Eastern Bengal Ballads) by Dinesh Chandra Sen. The significance of this publication can hardly be overstated, as it helped change the course of understanding of the history of Bengali literature. The centenary, however, went completely unobserved by the Bengali literary establishment.Footnote ⁵⁹ Dinesh Chandra Sen’s oeuvre is marked by his interest in unearthing people’s history and public culture of Bengal—an effort strongly evident from his writings on Bengal reformist religious philosophy of Bhakti exponent Chaitanya, his study of the folk literature, and his collection of the ballads from rural Mymensingh of Eastern Bengal (today’s Bangladesh). His study of the history of the Bengali language and literature also testifies to his people-centric approach. This interest in the popular beliefs and practices and the literature produced by the common people of Bengal perhaps led him to understand the public culture of Bengal.

Standard historiography of early and medieval Bangla literature testifies its plebeian inflections, foregrounding its public (loukik) or vernacular norm-subversion. The Charyapadas (the earliest Bengali texts of the late ninth or tenth century) are reflective of Buddhist or non-Sanskritized ideologies, running counter to Vedic Hindu orthodox hegemony. Subsequently, the Mangalkabya literary texts of the medieval period and the Vaishnava Padabalis (Vaishnava poetry) of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are superb articulations of subaltern world views and social praxis. The cultural upheaval of the Vaishnava doctrine of egalitarian Bhakti or the flattening radicality of love even inspired Nobel Prize-winning Indian author Rabindranath Tagore in forging his cosmopolitan aesthetic pluriverse. Tagore was deeply embedded within this vernacular tradition.

Subsequently, the Vaishnava doctrine (a medieval religious reform movement within the Hindu order unleashed in the fifteenth century) for equality and love inspired cross-cultural or inter-faith dialogues; it even drew Muslim poets in medieval Bengal to compose poems on Hindu Vaishnava themes. Jatindra Mohan Bhattacharya, in his seminal research work, Banglar Vaishnav Vabapanna Musalman Kobi (Vaishnavite Muslim Poets of Bengal), has identified 102 such Muslim poets who were enamored of Hindu Vaishnavism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bengal.Footnote ⁶⁰ The hunt for a new imagination and ethical quest even inspired authors to translate pre-existing canonical works into vernacular renditions, marked by thematic liberty and new hermeneutics.

Remote geographical locales in sixteenth-century Bengal, relatively unaffected by the necropolitics of royal power play and cultural orthodoxy, catalyzed robust proliferation of rustic ballads or what is commonly called, Loukik Sahitya (public literature) and Musalmani Sahitya (literature of the ordinary Muslim written in their everyday language) in the Mymensing and Chittagong-Rosang regions of undivided Bengal (now situated in modern-day Bangladesh and Myanmar). The poetic oeuvre of poets like Daulat Kazi and Alaol in the Arakan or Chittagong and Myanmar region of the seventeenth century evinced unique themes of cultural syncretism and unorthodoxy, blending Hindu and Islamic motifs in Sufi mystic world views of conjunctive love.Footnote ⁶¹

In a similar vein, the Eastern Bengal Ballads, or what is popularly known as the Mymensing Geetika, are clustered texts of placid rustic life, lived by ordinary rural folks who were not vitiated by the toxic intrusion of violent communalization and ethnic division. These texts also affirm a superb rendition of gender power as most of the ballads are characterized by lead female figures who are exalted embodiments of autonomy and subjective courage, something unthinkable to figurate in the Brahminical social setting of mainstream Hindu orthodoxy. Dinesh Chandra Sen and his research assistant Chandranath Dey were instrumental in excavating these ballads from remote rural areas of Mymensing in Bangladesh, and then they were published by the University of Calcutta in 1923. The remarkable archival discovery of these ballads impacted the entire historiography of Bangla literature as it forced a complete overhauling of scholarly opinions about the central motifs of Bangla literature. Living in a time of cultural reification and ethnic orthodoxy, it is imperative to revisit these unique ballads, which offer a wonderful world of unorthodox cohesion and conviviality, practiced by the counterpublics of Bengal, the rural folks who subscribed to heterodox notions of life and society, and therefore, challenge the normative ethnocentric narration of the nation as a majoritarian Hindu democracy.

Any new study on the centenary of the Mymensing Geetika can critically engage with the strong undercurrent of non-canonicity and subaltern publics’s counter-culture within the history of Bangla literature. This can help in projecting the Eastern Bengal Ballads to the global literary stage, which it highly deserves. Dinesh Chandra Sen, in his Preface to the English translation of the Mymensigha Geeetika (translated as Eastern Bengal Ballads), described his acts of literary labor as the “patriotic advocacy of the cause of our vernacular.” This is interesting, as seen from the perspective of decoloniality, postcolonial studies, or public humanities studies, these medieval vernacular texts, exemplifying wonderful instances of public cosmopolitanism and gendered equality, offer fresh insights of vernacular and indigenous modernity that predates colonial Euro-modernity that was imposed on India during its British colonial rule. Texts like the Mymensing Geetika, therefore, offer fascinating glimpses of an archive of indigenous public literary modernity that is unique and significant in the context of world literary studies.

12. Conclusion: disenchantment, Adorno’s Flaschenpost

The office of literature was supposedly public- or people-centric right from the word go, and therefore, notwithstanding the corrosive impact of capitalist profiteering on humanities education, what are the other factors instrumental for the dilution of its materialist praxis? Is the crisis in humanities education a recent one and an exclusive product of “neoliberal” fiscal policies and profit maximization, or was it in the making for a long time? While Reitter and Wellmon acknowledge the crisis of humanities education, identifying the decline in course enrolment for humanities courses as opposed to STEM areas that are lucrative, they also offer important critical insights on how this crisis in humanities studies can also be attributed to the very ontological crisis of modernity, manifest through its reifying and disenchanting process, something scholars like Max Weber, critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and subsequent poststructuralist thinkers also flagged early in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁶² At that time, we were not even familiar with terms like neoliberal economy.Footnote ⁶³

Reitter and Wellmon, while recognizing the crisis of the humanities, also reiterate that this is nothing new, as there has been a long history of challenges toward humanities education.Footnote ⁶⁴ They recount how, from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century in Germany, thinkers, including Kant, Humboldt, Nietzsche, and Max Weber, were alarmed by the modern instrumentalized understanding of life and living.Footnote ⁶⁵ Scientific education and the global capitalist economy absolved everything of meaning and disenchanted all spheres of our life. The Frankfurt School’s critical theoretical analysis of the “dialectic of Enlightenment” and “bureaucratization of reason” elicited Adorno’s thesis of “minima moralia” or his “Flaschenposts” or the bottled messages of looming barbarity where poetry was dead.Footnote ⁶⁶

In addition, we need to understand that the Renaissance concept of studia humanitatis is distinct from what we understand as the contemporary idea of humanities studies.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Renaissance of classical knowledge, alongside new forms of philosophical and scientific endeavors, has provided humanities education over the centuries with a sense of stable grounding. On the contrary, modern humanities education is a part of the history of the modern Western university that emerged in Germany after the French revolution.Footnote ⁶⁸ The institutionalized humanities, therefore, quickened the disenchantment process, and because of this systemic reified nature, university education failed to overcome this growing disenchantment, signaling a permanent crisis. Butler’s emphatic concern for the publics and their everyday use of folk songs, folk tales, and public literary practices and their everyday sacred narratives can facilitate the way we manifest a revival and recognition of already existing vernacular literary practices that sustain vast and varied lived experiences, something the Sahajiya practitioners actualized through their poems and songs and cosmopolitan public vision long ago.Footnote ⁶⁹