Book Review: A Cultural Poetics of Bhasha Literatures- In Theory and Practice by E. V. Ramakrishnan
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Namrata reviews A Cultural Poetics of Bhasha Literatures- In Theory and Practice by E. V. Ramakrishnan (Orient Blackswan, 2025) calling it a landmark in Indian literary criticism for its erudition, scope, and critical commitment.
E.V. Ramakrishnan’s A Cultural Poetics of Bhasha Literatures: In Theory and Practice is a compelling intervention in the field of literary studies, particularly within the South Asian context, where the complex entanglements of multilingualism, cultural memory, and historical discontinuities are central to literary production and reception. Through a series of sharply observed essays, the volume constructs an argument for a cultural poetics that resists hegemonic narratives and instead foregrounds the heterogeneity and relationality of bhasha literatures.
At its core, Ramakrishnan’s work interrogates the relationship between language, culture, and power in postcolonial India. Rather than offering a homogenized or essentialist account of Indian literary traditions, the book insists on the necessity of understanding vernacular literatures as dynamic sites of negotiation, between orality and literacy, region and nation, past and present. The emphasis on circulation, negotiation, translation, and exchange functions not merely as theoretical motifs but as methodological principles, allowing Ramakrishnan to map a constellation of literary practices that are at once embedded in specific linguistic traditions and yet always in conversation with others.
