Autobiographical Narratives and Indian Literary Canon

Practice and Praxis

Abstract

It is established that since Athanasius’s Vita Antonii written between 356 and 362, several terms are attributed to the different forms of writing which account a person’s life. Terms such as ‘hypomnemata,’ ‘commentarii,’ ‘vita,’ ‘confessions,’ or ‘memoirs’ found their name as ‘biography’ with the Oxford English Dictionary attributing its first English usage to Southey in an article on Portuguese literature from the year 1809. A text in the auto-fiction mode of writing demands an author’s extensive knowledge, keen observation, genuine understanding and presentation of all these in writing. The writer becomes both the signifier and the signified, and the process of writing becomes an interface between their objective knowledge gained from events occurred at some point of time and subjective experiences drawn from it. (Auto)biography as a genre of literature is placed at the lower stratum in the literary canon, a structure that considers ‘literariness’ of the work to differentiate literatures. (Auto)biographical fiction is self-reflexive and reflects history in the making, subconsciously producing a historical book, but stays at a negligible place in the literary canon. Autobiographies narratives constitute the genre that is always categorized as ‘low’ literature, at least in the Indian context. Yet some of them are certainly popular among the reading public. This article questions Indian literary canon that has sidelined the genre of (auto)biography to a significant extent. Taking autobiographical records—life sketches, autobiographies, letters and memoirs—of the political prisoners incarcerated at the Andaman penal settlement, this paper argues that autobiographical narratives tend to be historical and informative, but are less acknowledged in the literary canon owing to political motives of canon formation. In short, this article explores the politics of canon formation in India, and explores the alternative positioning of autobiographical accounts in reading circle.