Ankhi Mukherjee’s What Is a Classic? makes the much argued question of “what is a canon?” specific by scrutinizing the process by which classics are made. The title, borrowed from Coetzee’s lecture in 1991, contains an implicit criticism of J. M. Coetzee for being in thrall of the Western classic and, thus, for not being attuned to African sounds and tunes. The objective of Mukherjee’s study as stated in the introduction is simple: “If literary migrants are free and willing to choose literary antecedents, what worldly criteria determine their selection or fine tune their calibrations of choice?” (7). Mukherjee then goes on to pose the question of how a classic emanates from postcolonial histories and geographies. In her own words: “This book analyzes and documents the invention of alternative canons, and the formation of what Patricia Waugh calls new ‘imaginary unities’ ” (9).
She begins with a detailed examination of the history, etymology, and power of the word classic. Instead of the familiar postcolonial rhetoric of dismantling canons, Mukherjee looks at classics both as a point of arrival and a point of departure. This allows her to acknowledge the place of the classics while at the same time open an avenue for new works to enter the hallowed space occupied by such works that we call classics. The making of a classic, therefore, is a dynamic operation reflecting history, politics, geography, and power.
Mukherjee dramatizes this by exploring the literary careers of Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott. The exploration begins with an attempt to anchor the multiple and sometimes opposing notions of the word classic. Thereafter, it moves onto another concept—the novel—in the chapter “What Is a Novel?” Starting inevitably with Naipaul’s well-known essay “Conrad’s Darkness,” she explores the Conradian and Naipaulian visions of the novel and literature. Both authors, she argues, were “secret agents” forever torn between destroying the canon and renewing and giving it life with errant narratives. For her, Derek Walcott’s works represent a significant departure from the vision of Conrad and Naipaul. A manifestation of the postcolonial politics of mimesis, Walcott’s “renovation and invention of classics in the present day postcolonial and postnational world” exemplifies both the movement from the marginal to the classic and a redefinition of the parameters of the classic.
In Part 2 Mukherjee shifts her attention to two concepts: reinvention and repetition. Adopting “classic” postcolonial rhetoric, she examines the poems of Derozio whose Harp of India both mimics and reinvents the classic in the modern/anticolonial/postcolonial form. The exercise is definitely entertaining and instructive, especially in those sections where she analyzes the works of Amitav Ghosh, Arvind Adiga, and Hanif Kureshi, among others. Most impressive is her reading of Kureshi’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, two novels that playfully use classic Western tropes like the bildungsroman in a transnational global English that “commute[s] the acrolects, sociolects and idiolects of a failed state.” My favorite part of the book has to be the final chapter. Mischievously titled hamarashakespeare.com, it looks at a theater group in India whose performative translation of Shakespeare plays into Indian languages resonates with Ania Loomba’s seminal Postcolonial Shakespeare.
What Is a Classic? is a valuable addition to scholarship on canons, canon building, and the meaning of “classics.” Where the text fails, however, is in considering that argument in a larger multilingual context. Although she acknowledges the existence of the multilingual texts to which David Damrosch refers in his projects on world literature, she does not study texts in a language other than English in its dialectal variants. The final chapter recalls the various reinterpretations of Shakespeare in Indian languages, but these are performative rather than literary. There are ways in which the classic and canon argument gets complicated in a postcolonial space such as India where multiple literatures jostle in a colorful narrative space, all the while trying to cross regional, linguistic, caste, class, and gender borders. What is classic in Bengali may not make that coveted mark in Marathi or Malayalam. In this context, the concept of the classic is much more decentralized. A discussion of this decentralization of the concept would have enriched Mukherjee’s argument and made her critique of the Western canon a more effective one. Nevertheless, What Is a Classic?, a comprehensive analysis of the conflicts between and the conflations of the postcolonial with the classical and canonical, makes for a very satisfactory reading. It is a book research scholars in postcolonial literary studies must read.
