From India to India: the performative unworlding of literature

World literature, a field that ostensibly transcends narrow ethnic, religious and nationalist boundaries to encompass the world's literary reserves, has enjoyed a recent scholarly revival, its influence spreading across post-colonial theory, comparative literature and cultural studies. Concurrently, it has been criticized both for its normative tendency towards cosmopolitan, Eurocentric ‘world-making activity’ and, not unrelatedly, for its genealogical links to orientalism.Footnote ² Cosmopolitanism, as Pheng Cheah glosses it, ‘is about viewing oneself as part of a world, a circle of political belonging that transcends the limited ties of kinship and country to embrace the whole of deterritorialized humanity’.Footnote ³ This sentiment, articulated in 1827 in Goethe's foundational interpretation of world literature as the ‘universal expression of mankind’, is echoed in the older logics of the universal library of the orientalist knowledge revolution. As a colonial project of cultural mapping, orientalism accomplished a comprehensive cultural reformation on a planetary scale, whereby a wide and diverse range of written material was assimilated, evaluated and compared as ‘literature’, ‘fundamentally transforming in the process’, as Aamir Mufti puts it, ‘their internal distribution and coherence, their modes of authorization, and their relationship to the larger social order and social imaginaries in their places of origin’.Footnote ⁴ The advent of world literature was consequently dependent ‘not only on the dissemination of the textual materials made available for the first time by the orientalists’ translational labors but also on the canonizing of orientalist procedures and concepts of cultural difference as such’.Footnote ⁵

Aamir Mufti traces this genealogy of world literature going back to orientalism through the historical ascendancy and dominance of globalized English, which cannot be considered as merely a language but also as ‘an apparatus for the assimilation and domestication of diverse practices of writing on a world scale’.Footnote ⁶ However, due to his focus on the assimilation of ‘forms of textuality’ or ‘diverse cultures of writing’ as literature, Mufti fails to account for the pre-colonial imbrication of indigenous textual tradition in a ritual performative matrix, one that often occluded writing practices.Footnote ⁷ The comparative basis of world literature reflects print culture's revision of the figurative, typological, ephemeral and allegorical into the nominalist, disenchanted and immutable. In response, in this article I explore the self-reflexive relationship between ‘dramatic literature’ and imperialism, as well as the possibilities for their subversion within histories of oral transmission, literary circulation and theatrical performance, by examining the chequered history of the transcreated play Savitri, adapted from the polymorphous and multi-thematic form of the Mahābhārata. Beginning in 1878, Count Angelo de Gubernatis, an orientalist with theatrical aspirations, translated the myth that formed the basis of numerous embodied ritual practices in South Asia from Sanskrit into an Italian two-act idyll. Subsequently, Savitri was retranslated into English by a fellow orientalist, Joseph Gerson da Cunha, and then from English to Gujarati by the playwright Nahānābhāi Rūstamjī Rāṇīnā, so as to fulfil the count's wish to popularize the tale in its birthplace, India. While the Italian and English translations achieved popularity in Europe as literary works to be read, as did subsequent versions in French and German, the Bombay theatre production in 1883 was a failure. Through analysis of the text's transmogrification and the contrasting receptions of the Italian, English, French, German and Gujarati versions, and a subsequent cinematic adaptation, I attempt not only to trace the imbalanced economies of world literature but also to untangle, through the course taken by the play(s), the knotty roots of the ‘literature’ in world literature.

Orientalism and the worlding of literature

In Mufti's Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures, the trajectory of the institution of Indian literature begins with the landmark translation by William Jones of Kalidasa's Sacontala (henceforth Shakuntala) in 1789, establishing the process by which the orientalist essentialization of ancient Sanskritic culture as Indian culture eventually served the interests of a nation-building project. However, despite his emphasis on the constitution of ‘literature’ as a ‘plane of equivalence and evaluability’ for ‘heterogeneous and dispersed bodies of writing’, Mufti misses a striking element that features prominently in the opening lines of Jones's preface: that Shakuntala, known in the north of India as ‘Nátac’, resembled the English conception of a play.Footnote ⁸ As Jones's orientalist successor, Horace Hayman Wilson, declared several decades later,

The affective function of the South Asian nāṭak, a series of ritual enactments thick with historical allusions, benedictory rites and hierarchical forms of delivery, was to proffer, like pilgrimage, meditation and darshan, a tactilic enounter for the reading of divinity. Hence its significance was far removed from the sensus literalis notion of scripture, which privileged chronology, textual evidence and enlightenment reason, as well as the Kantian idea of the work of art as a pure object of beauty characterized by disinterested aesthetic judgement.Footnote ¹⁰ Jones, cognizant of the convergence of the Sanskrit nāṭak with history, religion, philosophy and (not least) sociopolitical potency, attributed his reasons for learning Sanskrit both to the fact that it was the language in which the Hindu drama was ‘originally composed’ and to its intimate ‘connection with the administration of justice to the Hindus’.Footnote ¹¹ Colonial conquest, as is widely known, involved the invasion of an epistemological space made possible through translation; that is, as Bernard S. Cohn puts it, processes of ‘establishing correspondence [to] make the unknown and the strange knowable’.Footnote ¹² Translations of ritual practices, as exercises in the performance of colonial power, were reifications of a larger episteme of political and religious signs and correspondences fashioned into informative, self-contained texts. Through the iconoclastic disenchantment of language and cosmology, Sanskrit ‘dramatic literature’ or ‘dramatic poetry’ was invented. Its resulting aesthetic forms privileged subject-centred reading, book-based knowledge and comparative valuations of texts and the cultural systems they sought to represent, radically refiguring the content in the process. Orientalism, religious reformation, and a burgeoning global literary system were thus imbricated in the selfsame processes of textual normativity, the ends (literature) fulfilling the means of a teleological account of universal historical progress.

Hence Jones's puritanical interpretation of Shakuntala, extolled by Wolfgang von Goethe and Augustus Wilhelm von Schlegel, circumscribed not only erotic and comic elements that were ostensibly unpalatable to European taste, but also and relatedly its performative character as a communicative idiom between deity and devotee offset by the polyvalent form of the Mahābhārata.Footnote ¹³ In provincializing Shakuntala as India's finest specimen of ‘dramatic poetry’, Jones's excision of a precarious body politic resisting translation – the ‘religious’ constituting what Etienne Balibar calls ‘a point of untranslatability’ – was rendered imperceptible.Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, the text, with its overdetermination of the semantic, literalist dimensions of language, evinced what Schlegel called a ‘striking resemblance upon the whole of our Romantic Drama’, disguising both the inevitable inadequacies of translated language and its political project within an unethical epistemological encounter.Footnote ¹⁵ Arguably, therefore, it was not, as Mufti postulates, the ‘destruction of heterogeneous and ancient cultures of reading and writing’ that contributed to the codification of a world literature, but of ritually embedded performative media. Accordingly, literature, rather than English per se, constitutes the ‘vanishing mediator’ of the Eurocentric colonial and post-colonial world of letters.

Jones's landmark ‘discovery’ was followed by Wilson's Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus (1827). Comprising both a summary of Indian dramatic theory and several translations from Sanskrit, it was to remain the backbone of Indian theatre historiography in the colonial era and beyond.Footnote ¹⁶ While retaining Jones's emphasis on the ‘romantic’ nature of the Hindu theatre and concession to the privileged position of Sanskrit, Wilson's book reflected a romantic and orientalist evolution in European intellectual discourse. In seeking ‘to secure to the Hindu Theatre a place in English literature’, Wilson traced a shared Indo-Greek philological, mythic and dramatic lineage. In this respect, Wilson's book was an early antecedent of the literary compendiums that Emily Apter succinctly describes as world literature's ‘entrepreneurial bulimic drive to anthologize’.Footnote ¹⁷

According to Alexander Beecroft, during the early nineteenth-century phase of the emergence of European ‘national’ cultural models, there were ‘two literatures not defined by the nation yet too important to leave out of the (literary) system altogether: Ancient Greek and Latin. Each belied the notion that state = nation = language = literature’.Footnote ¹⁸ However, his postulation that the prestige of these languages was not allowed for non-national – that is, non-European – entrants into an emerging and allegedly unified literary system is erroneous. It is no coincidence that Goethe, expounding on his belief that poetry was ‘the universal possession of mankind’, referred to ancient Greek literature as ‘a pattern . . . in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented’.Footnote ¹⁹ As ancient Greek was not readily assimilated to the national model, it constituted, according to Schlegel, the source of all European poetry, and a means of orientation through the new ‘science’ of comparative mythology. Literature was thereby ‘worlded’ through Greece as a locus of authenticity, even as performative media were decontextualized from their semi-religious pedigrees in their places of origin. Works such as Max Müller's Comparative Mythology (1856) and George William Cox's Mythology of the Arian Nations (1870) sought to undercut ritual as pagan idolatry even as the normative force of textuality reached its apogee with the institution of a shared Aryan lineage that ostensibly uncovered morphological truths. Ancient Greek, through its supposed etymological links to ‘classical’ Sanskrit and, in turn, to the origins of the Aryan race, thus came to be seen as a Greenwich meridian of literature for all ‘Aryan’ nations and a methodological tool for the perceived unification of language, theology, race and, hence, mankind.

Savitri in Europe

In the midst of these sweeping intellectual developments, Count Angelo de Gubernatis (1840–1913), born in Turin to a noble Piemontese family, began developing a keen interest in comparative philology that would lead in turn to his lifelong work on ancient India.Footnote ²⁰ After spending a year studying Sanskrit under the guidance of the celebrated Indologist Albrecht Weber in Berlin in 1862–3, de Gubernatis returned to Florence to compile a Sanskrit–Italian dictionary. The dictionary introduced the field of Indology to Italy, with de Gubernatis its primary exponent. At the same time, de Gubernatis, inspired to become a dramatic poet, wrote his first dramas in verse, Sampiero di Bastelica (1857), Werner (1859) and Pier delle Vigne (1860). Four years later, on 10 April 1869, these two ostensibly incongruent interests, theatre and oriental studies, were unified through the recitation at the Accademia Filodrammatica dei Fidenti in Florence of the count's first play in verse, Il Re Nala (King Nala). Set in ancient India and adapted from the episode ‘Nala Damayantī’ from the Mahābhārata, the play was recited before the minister of public instruction, Emilio Broglio, and Florence's most venerated literary men.Footnote ²¹ Spurred on by positive reviews of the recitation, as well as by Il Re Nala’s translation into German by the philologist Friedrich Marx, de Gubernatis published a dramatic compendium, Drammi Indiani (1872), comprising Il Re Nala, Il Re Dasarata (King Dasarata), and Mâyâ. Il Re Dasarata, based on an account of King Daśaratha from the Rāmāyaṇa, was recited at Florence's Teatro Nuovo for two nights. Meanwhile, Mâyâ, adapted from the Vedic legend of the sage Sunassepa made famous by the orientalists Max Müller and Martin Haug, was translated into Polish by the multitalented artist Count Władisław Tarnowski.Footnote ²²

Consequently, de Gubernatis's dramas in verse, with their minimal scenic divisions, romantic motifs and adherence to classical unities, were disseminated and praised by philologists and literary critics alike, the fields of orientalism and literature here evincing their consanguineous pedigree. As the French writer Jean Dornis (alias Elena Goldschmidt-Franchetti) notes, the count's dramatic works could not be isolated from his other scholarly endeavours and, as a consequence, ‘existed parallel to the theatre rather than being written directly for the stage’.Footnote ²³ Accordingly, de Gubernatis's plays, indistinguishable from his oriental scholarship, were literary artefacts more suited for recitation, reading and circulation than for the ephemeral, aerobic mandates of a dramatic performance. This disembodied homogenizing force of a hybrid orientalist–romanticist salon culture, which considered religious syncreticism and ritual enactments to be fundamental falsehoods, allowed for the creation of a taxonomy of religions, languages, literatures and peoples, a plane of equivalence through which material from diverse, protean sources could be considered and compared to uncover universal truths.Footnote ²⁴ Hence de Gubernatis's claims that, for instance, ‘Sanskrit, by its very nature . . . draws us close to the source of language, and consequently and necessarily to the origins of our race’, ‘the birthplace of universal history’.Footnote ²⁵ Furthermore, the count believed that the incontrovertible links between Hellenic Greece and Sanskrit India ‘could liberate Indian art from Brahmanical enslavement and pedanticism’.Footnote ²⁶ Through the mediating influence of oriental scholarship, an arcadic ancient Sanskrit past, the birthplace of civilization, would not only unearth the origins of the European race, but also save India from her degraded present of ‘caste-based order that rendered life monotonous due to the observance of a thousand rituals’.Footnote ²⁷ Such were likewise the professed objectives of the count's most famous work, a ‘dramatic idyll’ by the name of Savitri.

The story of the Princess Sāvitrī, who follows after and retrieves her husband from death, is one of the numerous embedded narratives in the third book (Vana-Parva) of the Mahābhārata. Composed in fragments from 9 BC onward and transmitted orally, the Mahābhārata is known to be entrenched in a polygenous, performative matrix due to a complex pattern of accretions and amendments during its transmission between ‘reciters, their learned versions of the tradition and their many and varied audiences. Only secondarily, and at a later date, was the Mahābhārata a textual tradition to which alterations could be made as a result of the comparison of manuscripts’.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless, even after the advent of a textual tradition that may itself be considered as a series of performative utterances due to the consubstantiality of its verbalization with the divine, it persisted in diverse media, both ceremonial and popular, in numerous languages across South and South East Asia. Consequently, Sāvitrī, variously denoting the sun or solar dynasty, a famous verse of the Ṛgveda or the Hindu investiture ceremony of the sacred thread, embodied several meanings for religious reverence, not least that of the ideal of conjugal fidelity.Footnote ²⁹

The Pāṇḍava prince Yudhiṣṭhira, grieving due to his wife Draupadī’s abduction, asks the sage Mārkaṇḍeya whether he has ever seen or heard of a woman as pious as Draupadī. Thus begins the story, narrated by Mārkaṇḍeya, of Sāvitrī. After a long period of penance, a childless king named Aṣvapati is finally granted a daughter by the deity Sāvitra. In due course the child reaches marriageable age and is sent by her father to find her own husband. Sāvitrī, returning from her journey, meets her father and the sage Nārada, who chastises her for having chosen Satyavān, the son of the blind, exiled king, Dyumatsena, as her future husband, as Satyavān was to die in a year's time. Refusing to choose another man, Sāvitrī marries Satyavān and lives in the latter's rural abode. A year soon passes and on the day before her husband's death, Sāvitrī accompanies him in the forest. As Satyavān begins to feel ill after felling several tree branches, Sāvitrī lays his head on her lap and subsequently sees the god of death, Yama, who pulls the life out of Satyavān's body. Yama then proceeds southward, followed by a grief-striken Sāvitrī, who expounds on her duty to accompany her husband in life and death, and on religious merit. Pleased with her words, Yama grants her a boon – excepting of the life of her husband. Sāvitrī asks for the sight of her father-in-law. This occurs three more times: each time Sāvitrī follows Yama, he offers her a boon, in response to which she requests, respectively, her father-in-law's kingdom, the perpetuation of her father's lineage through a hundred sons, and finally a hundred sons for herself. Incapable of providing this last request without Satyavān's life, the latter is returned. Yama disappears and Satyavān wakes. In the meantime, Dyumatsena, having recovered his sight, searches with his wife for his lost son and daughter-in-law. Eventually they are comforted by Brahmins, including Suvarcas, Gautama and Bhāradvāja, Dālbhya and Dhaumya, who describe Sāvitrī’s virtues and Satyavān's immunity from death. In due course, the family is reunited, Sāvitrī narrates the true story to the Brahmins, Dyumatsena is restored to the throne and Sāvitrī obtains a hundred brothers and sons. Thus ends Mārkaṇḍeya's story, which forms the basis of blessings, fasts and sacrificial rituals such as the Sāvitrī Brata, Vaṭapūrṇimā, Vaṭa-sāvitrī-vrata and Karadaiyan Nonbu, which are observed by married women across South Asia to this day, in order to ensure the longevity of their husbands.

Published in 1877, de Gubernatis's Savitri, subtitled Idillio Drammatico Indiano in due atti (An Indian Dramatic Idyl in Two Acts), was commended following its recitals, first in Rome on 24 May 1877 in the presence of Queen Margherita and subsequently on 14 September 1878 at the Fourth International Congress of Orientalists at Florence. Of the earlier event, a reviewer wrote, ‘Savitri's . . . recitation was deemed immensely successful, consecrated by the applause of the wise Queen Margherita. It is to be regretted, nevertheless, that the extreme simplicity of the plot does not allow for this touching idyll to be transposed to the stage’.Footnote ³⁰ With his inclusion of footnotes clarifying Sanskrit terms and characters, a dearth of stage directions and scenic divisions, the replacement of most nouns with adjectives and a liberal use of arcadic and Renaissance motifs that evoked a series of static postures rather than action, de Gubernatis was indifferent toward the corporeal agency of choreographed actors and the indeterminate, performative injunctions of a staged play. For example, Savitri, ‘adorned with every virtue and beauty’, appears in Act I, holding a golden apple in her left hand and a garland in her right, a stage direction evoking inertia rather than movement.Footnote ³¹ Similarly, the many Greek allusions, embedded in soliloquy, were descriptive rather than action-driven, as, for example, when Narada describes how the ‘august Indra’, the king of Indian gods, commands him to leave the blessed abode of Olympus in order to guide Savitri to the earthly palaces.Footnote ³² Consequently, Savitri, as a Greek idyll, suggested a pictorial immobility of space and time, inspiring a Piemontese artist, Professor Andrea Gastaldi, to render Savitri, ‘the sublime impersonation of the ideal Indian female beauty’, in an oil painting not unlike her Greek analogue Alcestis, ‘who inspired an anonymous ancient statuary, a bas-relief in marble’.Footnote ³³

Through this process of literary reification, de Gubernatis's text negated pre-existing religious connotations embedded in a living, self-reflexive, Hindu caste-based ethos and relatedly a performative ritual dimension. Consequently, the many figures of Brahmin sages who play a more than peripheral role in the story within the story as well as in the narrative's climax in the Sanskrit are relegated to de Gubernatis's prologue, which condemns their ‘religious fanaticism’ and ‘barbaric laws’, such as sati, the ritual in which a widowed woman immolates herself on her husband's funeral pyre. Similarly, the count omits Savitri's lengthy spiritual addresses to Yama on religious merit. Instead, he contrasts his vision of ideal matrimonial love with the barbaric rituals performed contemporaneously by Hindus.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, in order to locate the tale, cleaved from its original coherence, in a narrative logic sensible to his decorous European readers or listeners, de Gubernatis attributes Dhumatsen's blindness to his past wickedness. De Gubernatis also omits seemingly superfluous characters, such as Savitri's mother-in-law, and desexualizes the chronicle through the removal of Savitri's requests for a hundred brothers and sons.

Consequently, with his rendering of Savitri as an exposition of ‘universal’ ideals of feminine virtue, the absolutism of de Gubernatis's translation as an authentic, internally coherent, edifying yet anaerobic moral treatise left no place for the realm of the unknowable or untranslatable, the place where cultural difference is staged. The ‘universality’ of world literature thus precluded its own impossibility. At the same time, the translation's political mission as a specimen of literary imperialism is thrown into further relief by a closer examination of the context of the play's first recital. Subsequent to Italy's unification in 1871, Queen Margherita, in her attempt to safeguard the monarchy and soften aristocratic opposition to the Risorgimento, assembled a number of conservative artists and scholars in her celebrated literary salon, Giovedì della Regina (Queen's Thursdays), in Rome.Footnote ³⁵ De Gubernatis's Savitri was recited before ‘the august spouse and mother of the future kings of Italy’ on a Thursday, very likely as part of her salon. Savitri promulgated, as the prologue professed, the virtues embodied by the queen herself, who in turn reflected the potential virtues of the wives and mothers of Italy. Within the meta-theatre of a fraught Italian nation-building project, Savitri, recited in the confines of the loyal Circolo della Regina (Circle of the Queen), was reified as a literary object.Footnote ³⁶ As a patrimonial artefact or imperial commodity of exchange, the idyll had been transmitted to the queen within a reciprocal gift economy for the vital purpose of professing the count's unwavering loyalty to the House of Savoy.Footnote ³⁷

This normative object-making capacity of literature was once again evinced when de Gubernatis's idyll journeyed beyond Italy's borders. Within the cosmopolitan optic of a unified world in which literature transcends the narrow bonds of nationality and kinship, Savitri, with its claims to universal truths, was not only popular across Europe in its English, French and German avatars, but also an exceptional artefact for extending diplomatic ties across nation states.Footnote ³⁸ Hence Julien Lugol, the translator of the French edition entitled Savitri, idylle dramatique hindoue en deux actes, ardently professed his translation's objective over several pages as that of ‘mutual understanding and unity’ between the two then-hostile Latin nations.Footnote ³⁹ Savitri, located in a universally shared, utopian antiquity, thus served once again as a diplomatic object of exchange, this time between Italy and France. Nevertheless, this agreeable political function would be turned on its head when the count's work eventually reached Bombay's shores.

Savitri in Bombay

Dr José Gerson da Cunha (1844–1900), a popular Goan physician practising in Bombay, was ‘essentially’, as his obituary in the Times of India noted, ‘a man of letters’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a practising doctor catering to a wide cross-section of the city's multi-ethnic population, da Cunha mastered, in addition to Konkani and Portuguese, English, Latin, French, German and Italian. To this composite repertoire he eventually added the ‘classical’ languages, Persian, Pahlavi and Sanskrit, the latter opening a door for him into oriental studies.Footnote ⁴¹ Between 1874 and 1875, da Cunha made his first foray into academic publishing with the articles ‘Words and Places in and around Bombay’ and ‘On the Shrine of Śrī Sapta-Koṭīśvara’.Footnote ⁴² By 1879 he had achieved his longed-for international standing as an orientalist: he was a member of the managing committee of the Asiatic Society of Bombay, the Asiatic Society of London and the Geographic Society of Rome, London and Lisbon; he had written Notes on the History and Antiquity of Chaul and Bassein (1876); and he had won a prize of five hundred lire for an account of the history of the Aryan civilization in India at the Fourth Congress of Orientalists in Florence, where de Gubernatis's Savitri was recited, and where he discussed translating it into English.Footnote ⁴³ Immediately after his meeting with de Gubernatis in Florence, da Cunha began working on the text, promising to have it translated into the ‘vernacular’ languages and staged in India, as it was the count's lifelong dream to see his work performed in ‘the land of Savitri’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Accordingly, with the exception of the change from verse to prose, da Cunha faithfully rendered de Gubernatis's idillio with its moral objective, due to his translation's function as a ‘mere stepping-stone to the Gujaráti’.Footnote ⁴⁵ On his homecoming, da Cunha happened to attend an Urdu performance of the revived Pārsī Nāṭak Maṇḍalī (Parsi Theatrical Company) at the Framjee Cawasjee Institute, which greatly impressed him. Consequently, he implored the troupe's then owner, Nahānābhāi Rūstamjī Rāṇīnā, to work on his Savitri, come what may.Footnote ⁴⁶

In contrast with de Gubernatis and da Cunha, who achieved international renown as orientalists for their canonical work in European languages, it is challenging to piece together the career of the Gujarati playwright Nahānābhāi Rāṇīnā (1832–1900). Although he was a Justice of Peace, a fellow of the University of Bombay and an auditor of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, he was primarily known for his achievements as a distinguished lexicographer, journalist and translator.Footnote ⁴⁷ His Gujarati–English dictionary, despite causing him great pecuniary loss, would be lauded as one of the first of its kind, setting a benchmark for the standardization of Gujarati.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, it was his integral role in the development and expansion of Parsi theatre into South Asia's pre-eminent commercial theatre that was to bring distinction to his name.

Beginning as amateur theatricals, the Parsi theatre that emerged in 1853 was initially an integral component of the religious and social reform movement of the Parsi community of Bombay. Following the lead of European orientalists, Parsi reformists sought to ‘purify’ the Zoroastrian religion of external influence, undermine traditional priestly authority and advocate for the abolition of immoral, irrational socio-religious customs and rituals. Nevertheless, within thirty years the Parsi theatre grew into a pan-Asian, profit-making enterprise. This growth was due to the change instituted in language from Gujarati to Hindustani, the introduction of mechanical scenery and spectacular effects, and a shift in audience demographics. The resulting decline and subsequent disappearance of the reformatory role of the theatre, the conveying of wider mythological fare, and the introduction of professional actors between 1860 and 1870 facilitated the theatre's emergence as the subcontinent's primary form of visual entertainment. Theatrical representations of deities, prophets and mythological episodes facilitated the invention of new modes of worship and forms of religious consumption. The theatre's proscenium, spellbinding mechanical devices and embodied practices of song and dance enabled what was conceived as an intimate, physical encounter with the gods, Parsi actors being deemed by audiences as consubstantial with the deities they represented. For example, Hindu women would fall to their feet on seeing actors playing Harīścandra, Lavkuś or Indra, as the actor in their eyes was indistinguishable from divinity.

It was in such circumstances that efforts were instituted for the amelioration of the drama. University-educated playwrights began to deploy an essentialized śudh (pure), Sanskritized Gujarati to convey moral themes in mythological settings. As the lexicographer who had standardized this language, Nahānābhāi Rāṇīnā was pre-eminent among them. However, it was still imperative that plays garner profit and hence appeal to the masses. Consequently, even as Rāṇīnā and his ilk attempted to ameliorate the drama and its audiences, they retained its popular basis in multi-narrative spectacle, mechanical contraptions and sensorial performances of faith.Footnote ⁴⁹

These competing agendas were amply on display in the staging of Savitri. According to da Cunha, ‘the date 27 January 1883 should remain in the annals of this country’, for it was the night on which the Gujarati Sāvitrī Nāṭak was performed during a private rehearsal at Bombay's Victoria Theatre to ‘great and enthusiastic public demand’.Footnote ⁵⁰ A month later, on 28 February, Rāṇīnā’s translation was performed again under the patronage of Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy Baronet at the Gaiety Theatre ‘before a crowded house of respectable native families’.Footnote ⁵¹ Due to Rāṇīnā’s professed interest in ‘the upliftment of the native drama’, the Parsī Nāṭak Maṇḍalī’s rendition in ‘classic Guzerati’ was praised by the Times of India, even as it noted that ‘the translator also added a few lyric interludes, well knowing the taste of the Indian patrons of plays, who like to hear declamations intermingled with songs’.Footnote ⁵² However, the newspaper further remarked that it was ‘questionable whether the audience were sufficiently educated to understand some of the high-flown sentiments which are put into the mouths of some of the characters in the piece’.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, the Gujarati newspaper Rāst Goftār tathā Satya Prakāś congratulated Rāṇīnā on the eve of the performance for ‘spreading de Gubernatis’ story amongst native audiences in rasīlā and caḍhtā bhāśā [lively and improved language] at a time when there was a severe lack of high-quality, moral dramas for families’.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, the newspaper was tight-lipped with regard to the public reception of the play, possibly on account of the close friendship between its editor, Kekhuśro Kābrājī, and Rāṇīnā, choosing to focus instead on the high calibre of the published version's ‘pure’ language.Footnote ⁵⁵

In Rāṇīnā’s hands, then, the romantic idyll would be popularized: high culture was to meet the low, Sanskritized Aryan India was to meet a melting pot of castes and creeds, and de Gubernatis's distant, utopian Indo-Grecian world was to connect with the lived experiences of the average theatre-patronizing citizen of Bombay. Consequently, Rāṇīnā took, to a degree, the middle ground between da Cunha's translation and the prevailing demands of Bombay's theatre-going public. While retaining de Gubernatis's plot and the moral character of the story, Rāṇīnā subverted, on the suggestion of the famous theatre manager Khurśedjī Mervānjī Bālīvālā, the immutability of the text by pandering to the popular demand for song, spectacular scenery and dance.

Faithful yet un-worlded, written in a mix of Gujarati verse and prose and set to popular tunes, Rāṇīnā’s version borders on unintentional mockery of da Cunha's English translation. The tunes comprised not only classical Indian rāgs but also such popular jingles as the Parsi hit ‘Gāmḍenī Gorī’ and the English ‘Glory Glory Abyssinia’. Significantly, the two-act structure with no scenic divisions gave way to numerous farcical elements, scenes and interludes, and characters such as villagers, fairies and Dhumatsen's wife, so that the play would not become, in Rāṇīnā’s words, ‘too boring’.Footnote ⁵⁶ For example, in scene iii, two thieves enter, one of them bearing the name of the author of the Rāmāyaṇa, Vālmik (Valmiki). They attempt to steal from Sāvitrī and the sage Nārada, who uses his magic powers to punish Vālmik by turning him into a statue. In so doing, Vālmik is brought onto the right path of dharma, and on parting, Nārada announces that he will gain much renown for writing one of the world's greatest epics. In so doing, Rāṇīnā subverted de Gubernatis's simple idyll into the convoluted form of a story-within-a-story in a manner more reminiscent of the original tale. The high meets the low when Sāvitrī, holding de Gubernatis's golden apple in her hand, is rebuked by a comic, low-class daughter of a forester, Mālvī, who mistakes Sāvitrī’s innocent inquiries about Satyavān's whereabouts for abuse. Additionally, the play introduces sensual elements when two vagabonds, Kāro and Makno Paṭel, sing of the grotesqueness of their wives, as well as when Sāvitrī makes her demand from Yama for sons. Significantly, while de Gubernatis's extended love scene was entirely omitted, numerous Hindu references, symbols and benedictions were added, along with mechanical stage effects such as the descent of Yama, the god of death, and subsequently of fairies, from the ceiling.

Thus an ancient Indian episode of the Mahābhārata, in da Cunha's words, ‘having gone the round of Europe comes back to us in a style certainly conducive to the improvement of dramatic taste amongst the natives of this country’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This dramatic taste was, however, not to be improved. Mary Fenton, the British actress playing the role of Sāvitrī, who had gained notoriety in the Parsi press in 1880 for eloping with a married actor by the name of Kāvasjī Pālanjī Khaṭāu, was nine months pregnant with her first son, Jahāṅgīr. Her pregnancy caused a delay in the play's enactment and explains the lack of substantial reviews within the conservative Gujarati press, which had castigated her for adultery a few months earlier.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, despite the replacement of popular Gujarati and Urdu songs with poems written in ‘pure’ Sanskritized Gujarati in the play's second rendition, and despite the change of location from the Victoria Theatre in the salubrious Grant Road area to the honourable Gaiety Theatre opposite the Victoria Terminus, efforts by da Cunha and Rāṇīnā to ‘improve’ popular taste failed.Footnote ⁵⁹ South Asia's metropolitan audiences patronized the theatre not due to purity of language or the moral and refined character of plays, but for their semi-religious character, and spectacular staging effects such as the pre-cinematic diorama and the cyclorama. The practice of high culture was marginal to the popular and the spiritual, reform and refinement having long given way to profit in the Parsi theatre. An adaptation of a desacralized Savitri, essentialized as literature through claims to a normative Indo-Grecian universality, was destined to disappoint in a theatre where the life of performed creed was paramount. Consequently, when de Gubernatis conveyed his wish to view a performance of the Gujarati version of his play in person on his tour of India, da Cunha retorted,

Within a matrix of international literary prestige, differential responses to dramatic literature and the imperative of theatrical profits, the Gujarati Sāvitrī, which introduced ‘old Indian subjects, assuming the garb of Western nations’,Footnote ⁶¹ had not only soured a close friendship but also suggested performance's capacity to transgress a worlded literature.

Interrogating literariness

While much has been said of the uneven and untranslatable ‘world’ in world literature by way of the asymmetrical nature of the literary system, it is striking that the ‘literature’ in world literature has as yet been of little critical note.Footnote ⁶² Where Savitri met with success in European high society through its engagement in the normative worlding of literature via its claim to a remote, universal past, it was doomed to fail in a Bombay whose theatre audiences demanded the contrary: an experiential, locally rooted, popular, religious benediction. As with orientalism, world literature's vanishing mediator, the reification of diverse embodied modes of ritual performance through a rose-tinted cosmopolitan optic of one-world, one-literature, rather than the English language, arguably partakes of an absolutist function. Rāṇīnā’s Gujarati theatre production lays bare the violent orphaning of ritual performance through its provincialization as text by orientalism (and its successor, global capitalism). Relatedly, the production exposes the loss of the worlding of literature. The reading of culture as literature, along with its ability to circulate through translation, cannot, therefore, be discounted as apolitical. World literature's fundamental translatable and comparative basis presupposes a global remit and hence an orientalist purview. Performance in this regard functions as a barometer of the relative successes and failures of literary production, and as a site where the problematics of the homogenizing force of world literature unfold. But, crucially, performance also functions as a heuristic tool for overcoming the immutability of the text, the untranslatable, unsayable (unsagbare) and illogical (sinnlos) perforce lying outside the realm of language.

However, the narrative of de Gubernatis's Savitri as a consideration of the slippery semantics of alternate, ephemeral, canonically invisible histories had not come full circle just yet. In 1923, Madan Theatres Ltd produced India's first international cinematic co-production, the ‘much touted’ Savitri. Shot in Rome with an all-Italian cast, the original story was attributed to ‘the indologist A. De Gubernatis whose narrative was first translated into Gujarati by Nanabhai Ranina, and thence into Hindi’.Footnote ⁶³ Described by a reviewer as ‘botched up into something sloppy . . . licentious and shocking’, it was ‘the most daring Italian silent film to date’, conceivably because its protagonist, Rina De Liguoro, was discinta (undressed) for the most part.Footnote ⁶⁴ Consequently, like Rāṇīnā’s Indian translation, the film, a further iteration keeping up with new technologies of representation, would fail in India, where consumption of mythological subjects was increasingly embedded within a Hindu nationalist framework.Footnote ⁶⁵ Once again, a peripheral population would assert its claim to culture, unsettling an otherwise unqueried yet unethical field of ‘global’ literary circulation. Translation, according to Judith Butler, ‘cannot be a simple assimilation of what is foreign into what is familiar; it must be an opening to the unfamiliar, a dispossession from prior ground, and even a willingness to cede ground to what is not immediately knowable within established epistemological fields’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Such, as the global literary dystopia of de Gubernatis's transcreated Savitri demonstrates, is a space beyond rhetorical limits, the lived, illegible space of performance.