Cultural Determination of Literary Theory

A theory being expression of a community's understanding (and expectation) of object, it is inevitably determined by the intellectual culture of that community and shares in its wider assumptions about life and matters. One can show this cultural determination in respect of several major issues of literary theory in India. Because India has been, and is, culture, our conceptual categories of literary theory are rooted in compositions, renditions and performances and therefore many key concepts and issues of Western literary theory are not pertinent for Indian literary experience. Examples that prominently come to mind are the twin concepts of writer and reader, the name itself, and the issue for example of authorial The notion of implicit in the word writer renders inappropriate this conception of author in a tradition of compositions. One would rather talk neutrally of a composer, just as the Greeks talked of a maker (vate). The word composer, apart from denoting only a mental process of putting together ideas/words, has the advantage of suggesting a certain relationship with musical composition, which is a valid association in that literary composition is, besides other things, a structure of sounds (speech-sounds', and is therefore, assumed to have in Indian literary theory an appeal for the ear, aural-interest, sravya, which is one of the two major attributes of any literary composition, preksa or visual interest, being the other. In the same way reader is a term that does not apply to the body of Indians for whom literary compositions are intended. We cannot talk of reading as the only or dominant mode of processing a literary text. In fact the dominant modes are hearing and watching. So we have a complex processor of literary texts-hearer--viewer --reader. No one term would suffice to describe this complex function. We may appropriate the term auditor that Shelley uses in A Defence of Poetry, to express this complex of functions. The term itself, on account of its derivation from the root that means letters is inappropriate to describe the vast body of compositions, and the designation oral is really a contradiction in terms. We have in our tradition of literary thought a very apt term vanmaya which literally means (that which is) permeated by/ has existence in speech vak, that is, language and designates all verbal discourse including literary discourse. The other term, sahitya, made popular by the title of the 14th century theorist Viswanatha's book on literary theory, Sahitya-darpana has its origin in Bhamaha's definition of literary discourse--sabda, word; artha, meaning; sahitau indivisibility together; kavyam literary discourse; i.e. word and meaning together constitute literary discourse, which is a remarkable semiotic definition of literature by this seventh century literary theorist. All this shows that theory specific constructs are also culturally specific. Take the question of authorial intention, which is a major issue in the Western debate about literary meaning. At one time it was believed that the meaning of a text is the meaning intended by the writer--so the exegetical task is to reconstruct the author's by taking recourse to biography, i.e., history of the writer, the work and the age. With the death of the author, which followed upon the death of God in the Christian World in the 19th century, this concept acquired new dimensions. It led to investigation of the very process of composition and it was postulated that the author perhaps exercised no control on his writing and that the texts virtually wrote themselves. Also that the author, individual, has no existence as individual, but is in fact a product of conglomerate social factors and circumstances. These are very significant ideas, and of value to all. However, the core concept of authorial intention does not apply in the Indian literary compositions which are more often than not characterized by anonymity of authorship and this is so even when we know that Kalidasa is the author of Meghdoot. …