The notion of self-critical individuality is distinct from the dominant social structure. The article “alternative modernities and medieval Indian literature” refers to a patriarchal social structure and a caste-based value system. It also provides a feminist critique of and defends the values of work done by women. This literary-critical analysis addresses alternative modernities in an Indian context. Modernity, in this regard, is infinitely expandable. This presentation focuses distinctly “modern” values in women and gender studies.
In the overview of “new” modernist studies, Gaonkar (26) characterize modernities field in three major axes i.e. vertical, horizontal and temporal, by which they expound the growing geographical and historical scope of modernist studies and ending of divisions of low and high art and culture. The notion of “alternative modernities” affirms that modernity constantly unfolds within certain cultures or civilizations and has varying starting point of the transition to modernity that lead to many outcomes. Using gender as a methodical group to expound the dichotomies in nationalist discourse, Mukti defines the spiritual/material, inner and outer world as feminine/ masculine correspondingly. Mukti demonstrates how an Indian woman represents the inner and spiritual world of he household and how she was fraught with an authentic nationalized identity.
The “nationalist mind” was masculine and colonized “self identity” was basically a crisis of male reduces the relationship of women to the cultural processes as just reactive (Mohanty 10). Gaonkar (24) constructs an alternative modernity that is fairer to women. In keeping with Gaonkar (24) “modernity” is a complicated term and even a cursory survey about modernity reveals a dissonance of incongruent, dissenting voices: “modernity” is coherence, discipline, stability and “a sporadic experience of space, time and culture as fleeting, transitory and unexpected.” Mukti argues that it can also be observed as an “absolutist unitary outset of truth although concurrently disorder despair and anarchy.” The term modernities, despite semantic confusion are problematic since it is predominantly established in a western discourse that included Foucault and Marx. As such, thinking in terms of “alternative modernities” at the same time part with the western perspective on “modernity,” as indicated by Gaonkar (26) we must emulate Western “modernity”. Notably, this entails thinking in the line of and against “modernity’s” regular conception in Universalist terms, and therefore historicizes and pluralizes understanding of modernity. Thinking in the line of alternative modernities, then mean to provisionally privilege a particular angle of interrogation and at the same time acknowledge others.
Cultural theory as defined by Mukti in the article is one where modernity always unfolds within a particular cultural context and where dissimilar starting points for the alteration to modernity can result to different outcomes instead of following unavoidable paths. Perhaps, this negates the overriding discourse of “Western modernity” that moves unalterably towards establishing a particular type of mental outlook and institutional arrangement irrespective of political and cultural specificities. Cultural modernities unlike the western modernities invariably take the form of adversary culture that privileges individual’s necessity for self-realization over the assertions of the community.
Referring to Mukti, western feminine’s stress on individualism while Indian feminism is communal. The discoursed modernity is gendered as essentially masculine. In the article by Mohanty (5) Indian women are symbols of non-modern identity and allow men to maintain a comfortable experience in the highly masculinized public sphere. The masculine conception of “modernity” edges women out of history and ignores their varied negotiations with society.
Works Cited
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. "On Alternative Modernities." Alternative Modernities. Ed. Dilip Gaonkar, And Dilip Parameshwar. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 1-24.
Mohanty S“Alternative Modernities in Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana As. Radical Pedagogy.” Diacritics 38, No. 3 (2008): 3-21
Mukti Lakhi. An Alternative Feminist Modernity: Fantastic Utopia and the Quest for Home in Sultana’s Dream. University of Cambridge retrieved from: http://www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/MuktiLakhiArticleIssue14.htm
