Displaced Peripheries, Geopolitical Allegories: Roberto Schwarz, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and Colonial Legacies in India

By extending Schwarz’s signature approaches to reading literary and social forms together, this chapter breaks from the hegemonic protocols and processes that have defined world literatureWorld literature and critical theoryCritical theory in the North Atlantic zone. Instead, it offers ways of connecting former colonial worlds—those of IndiaIndia and BrazilBrazil in particular—by gleaning from their divergent historical trajectories indices for a critical theoryCritical theory that responds adequately to the social predicaments and concomitant cultural forms stemming from modern imperial rule. The author reconstructs Schwarz’s deft integration of the critical insights of Antonio Candido and Theodor AdornoAdorno, Theodor W. for his notions of “generality” and “objective form”Objective form which together serve as a model for reading peripheral aestheticsPeripheral aestheticsAesthetics against the grain of metropolitan impositions. To demonstrate the rich versatility and translatability of Schwarz’s critical paradigms beyond his Brazilian milieu, the author turns to the internally complex and multivalent short story “Garhan” (“Eclipse,” 1942) by the Urdu writer Rajinder Singh BediBedi, Rajinder Singh. This story interweaves historical and mythological details in an allegoricalAllegory fashion that entrap the main character Holi, the haplessly pregnant and oppressed wife of a traditional Hindu family, in ways that encode the social binds produced by British colonial reification of Punjabi customary norms as well as the effective foreclosure of liberalLiberal freedom.