Indology Section, Classical East Dept.
University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria
“THE TEXT WITHIN THE TEXT”: MAPPING THE INTERTEXTUALITY IN KUNWAR NARAIN’S PROSE
It could be claimed that the literary works of Kunwar Narain (1927–2017) are marked by a noteworthy intertextual circulation of codes, allusions and symbols, taken out of the realm of Indian and World literature, art, history, philosophy etc. Composing his texts Narain, consciously or unconsciously uses the entire potential of intertextuality – through quotations and references he constructs a complicated network of related texts and proves in a perfect way that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1986: 37).
In his article Colonial Influence, Postcolonial Intertextuality: Western Literature and Indian Literature Harish Trivedi points out that “the close study” of Nirmal Varma’s and Krishna Baldev Vaid’s work, but also of many other Indian writers “may lead to a serious enrichment of our understanding of both (colonial) influence and (postcolonial) intertextuality, and possibly also a reformulation of the very meaning and definition of these terms on the evidence of their modified function in a (post)colonial context, beyond the ateliers of Western theory” (Trivedi 2007: 132).
In my view Kunwar Narain’s work is among the most challenging in this respect, therefore its study from an intertextual viewpoint could contribute significantly to better understanding of the “postcolonial intertextuality” and the role it plays in the postindependence Hindi literature. The sophisticated “heteroglossia”, distinguishing many of Narain’s compositions, is an emanation of a complicated process of deep inner hybridisation, which has an intense creative potentiality. The current paper’s primary aim is to illustrate and prove the above statement introducing an intertextual approach to Narain’s prose. My presentation is focused mainly on the narratives published in author’s second (and last) Short Stories Collection entitled बेचैन पत्तों का कोरस (2018). Examining the intertextual texture of particular short stories and the intertextual links it can activate, I try to interpret them mainly from the reader’s perspective, i.e. to reflect on the question how and to what extent the recognision of these intertextual links does affect the comprehension of Narain’s texts as well as the emotional and aesthetic response to them by his readers.