history deeply marked by multiple modalities of diaspora. She inds this complex diasporic his- tory igured in the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Interpreter of Maladies. Gajarawala, on the other hand, notes that the Dalit texts she examines refer to the Partition rarely and that when they do they challenge its centrality in the conventional narrations of South Asian history. Because of this “unreading” of nationalist his- toriography, she says, the Dalit texts complicate historicist strategies of literary analysis. Koshy and Gajarawala, then, read the Parti- tion in contrary ways and to contrary ends. he diferences between their readings are instruc- tive for my purpose, which is to suggest exten- sions and emendations of their arguments. My inclination, emerging out of an attention to the vernacular, is to refuse—like the Dalit texts ex- amined by Gajarawala—what may be called the exceptionalism of a Partition- oriented account of South Asian history. It cannot be denied that the Partition, sometimes described as the larg- est displacement of humanity in the shortest pe- riod of time, is one of a handful of pivotal events in the twentieth- century history of South Asia. It is also true that vast segments of South Asia remained relatively untouched by it and that in parts of the region (e.g., South India) the Parti- tion is more an abstract and bureaucratic than an experienced or viscerally felt reality. A ver- nacularized approach to South Asian history— attentive to the difering experiences of diferent regions—is one way to expose Partition excep- tionalism: the view of the Partition as a singular event set apart from and above others. A critical approach routed through the vernacular might also throw useful light on Gajarawala’s reading of Dalit texts. Is it really true that Dalit texts are mainly characterized by a rejection of “the overwhelming weight of the historical in our systems of interpretation” (587)? Or might it rather be that alongside an unreading these texts advance an alternative history sometimes hard to recognize without a sensitivity to vernacular forms of knowledge? he Buddhism recovered and constituted as a version of history by Dr. Ambedkar and, before him, by the Tamil Dalit intellectual Pandit Iyo- thee hass suggests the latter possibility. As, in a diferent way, does P. Sivakami’s Tamil Dalit novel he Grip of Change. his alternative his- tory, I would suggest, is more easily recogniz- able when we attend to the vernacular, for it is in vernacular forms of knowledge above all that such a history has persisted, oten for centuries. Can a similar argument be made about the texts that Gajarawala reads? I cannot say, because I have not yet read them, but the question is worth asking. In any event, her particular read- ing should not be generalized into an argument about Dalit texts as such. I hope it is clear that my aim is to suggest, in a spirit of commendation and dialogue, how a robust notion of the vernacular might extend intriguing aspects of the arguments initiated by Koshy and Gajarawala, or else resolve vexatious conundrums in them. While I have focused on these two critics, my remarks are made possible by a form of comparison across languages and cultural contexts. I thank Koshy and Gajarawala as well as Friedman for their contributions. S . S h a n k a r University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa R e p l y : Like S. Shankar, I wanted to read some of the essays in PMLA’s May 2011 issue immedi- ately. I would add that I thoroughly approve of the changes that Marianne Hirsch and Pa- tricia Yaeger brought to the journal as its edi- tors. PMLA now regularly highlights new ields (witness the essays on oceanic studies in the May 2010 issue and on animal studies in that of March 2009) and includes special sections ad- dressing issues shared across many subspecial- ties in these ields. Shankar’s letter performs the kind of juxta- positional comparative reading that I advocated as one fruitful method of comparison—that is, the setting of two (or more) texts side by side, paratactically rather than hierarchically, to see what new general insights such a juxtapo- sition might enable. Susan Koshy’s argument 644 Forum [ P M L A about “minorit y cosmopolitanism” arising out of South Asian diasporas assumes a histo- ricity for which the Partition of India in 1947 is foundational, Shankar argues; conversely, Toral Gajarawala’s analysis of Dalit writing, Shankar maintains, exhibits a diferent histo- ricity, for which Partition is peripheral. That Partition could carry two such radically difer- ent meanings raises the issue of how history is represented and to what extent its representa- tion operates within an epistemology produced through nineteenth- century European realism (based in the bourgeois subject and the nation- state) or within what Shankar calls “vernacular forms of knowledge” (in Dalit literature, based in a collective identity excluded from full citi- zenship within the nation- state). What new insights emerge from the juxta- position of Koshy’s and Gajarawala’s arguments? For Shankar, the comparison is productive be- cause it fosters an interest in the vernacular, the subject of his forthcoming book. In his letter, the term vernacular refers at diferent points to language, region, and “forms of knowledge.” I eagerly await the book for more- sustained dis- cussion of the term’s meanings. But in the let- ter, its spectrum of meanings parallels current notions of translation that range from linguistic to cultural. In this broader sense, comparisons of all kinds are a form of translation—a put- ting of one term into the context of another, a form of cognitive crossing over from one to the other. However, I wonder how vernacular as a geographic marker signifying diferent regions of South Asia (regions deined by their language group but geographic nonetheless) relates to the term as a “form of knowledge.” he vernacular mode of knowledge Shankar invokes seems akin to what many in native studies are calling indig- enous knowledge, an epistemology contrasting sharply with the hegemonic ways of knowing imposed by conquering peoples. Since many people in India speaking or writing what are known as vernacular languages are not Dalits and are in fact associated with elites or more- privileged castes, I worry about the imprecision of the term vernacular as Shankar uses it in his letter. I also wonder how his use of the term re- lates to Sheldon Pollock’s fascinating argument that vernacular writing and culture have para- doxically been inspired and enabled by the exis- tence of such lingua francas as Sanskrit, Latin, and En glish (“Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History”; Cosmopolitanism; ed. Carol A. Breck- enridge et al.; Durham: Duke UP, 2002; 15–53). Aside from the question of the vernacular, I see other insights emerging from Shankar’s interesting juxtaposition of Koshy’s and Gaja- rawala’s arguments. First, Shankar’s observa- tion about the diferent meanings of Partition in each essay highlights the luidity of centers and peripheries, whose meanings depend heav- ily on shiting perspectives and epistemologies. What is central to one group is peripheral to another—an insight that I believe ought to in- form more postcolonial, diasporic, global, and minority literary studies. Second, both vertical and horizontal scales in the relation between the global and the local are signiicant. No his- torical phenomenon is purely local or purely global; the narratives about such phenomena are “glocal,” with traces of the global in the lo- cal and vice versa, a logic I irst learned from Edward Said ’s seminal chapter “Jane Austen and Empire” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993; 80–96). The particulari- ties of Dalit history in Dalit narratives are af- fected by global historical forces (like Partition) whether or not such large- scale events drive the Dalit narratives; similarly, the global cannot exist separate from its situated articulation in time and space, as is evident in narratives by di- asporic South Asian writers like Jhumpa Lahiri. hird, the juxtaposition of the two essays brings into focus the dialogic relation between the “minority” and the “cosmopolitan” (to pick up the terms that Koshy conjoins) and, through this relation, the tension at the heart of all com- parison between commensurability and incom- mensurability. By “minority cosmopolitanism,” Koshy means the “translocal” identifications that diasporic people maintain as they experi- ence their status as minorities (594), forever for- eign, in their new countries. But as Garajawala’s 1 2 7 . 3 ] Forum 645 essay brings vividly to life, Dalit writers are also minorities within the caste society of India. As citizens of India, they too feel or are treated as forever foreign, though as a result of caste, not national origin. What then is the meaning of minority in these two essays? How is the purely local and particular related to the cosmopoli- tan? Is the affirmation of the local nature of Dalit knowledge different in epistemological terms from the airmation of the uniqueness of Partition? Historically and politically, they are different. But in epistemological terms, each depends on a notion of pure particular- ity or exceptionalism. Entirely local or unique knowledge inherently resists comparison. But the insight that comparing Koshy’s cosmopoli- tan minority with Gajarawala’s Dalit minority brings is that phenomena so diferent in kind nonetheless share a related epistemological logic. hey are “in/commensurable,” the slash signifying the connection of similarity and the disconnection of diference. Susan Stanford Friedman University of Wisconsin, Madison Reply: I appreciated S. Shankar’s comments re- garding the recent issue of PMLA on Asian writing and, in particular, regarding my essay “Some Time between Revisionist and Revo- lutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Litera- ture.” Shankar leshes out how attention to the vernacular—linguistic and contextual—is a crucial part of any demand for new theoretical practices and new models of reading. he ques- tions that guide my own work have also been determined by this attention. In the case of Dalit literature, reading not only Hindi but also the many “hindis” within Hindi has worked in concert with the global anglophone to pro- duce a comparatist project of all my intellectual endeavors. The project of “unreading,” then, is particular to the relational work I see these texts doing vis- à- vis Indian historiography and the challenge they pose to hegemonic tropes of historical agency. Attention to the vernacular also demands, I would suggest, a careful at- tention to the various aesthetic forms in which South Asian histories might be embedded, of- ten made legible only by new methodologies. I would like to take a moment to address Shankar’s other concern, which, I believe, of- fers an opportunity to have a dialogue on the production of theoretical knowledge. Shankar questions whether it is possible for all Dalit texts to be read in the way I suggest: as compli- cating or challenging outright a historicist lit- erary discourse. My reading of Dalit literature, he writes, “should not be generalized into an argument about Dalit texts as such.” Shankar seeks to remind us here of the self- diference of the Dalit—indeed, any subaltern—project, the treelike lineages that vary regionally, linguisti- cally, and politically. But it seems that Shankar’s argument is less about what some or all Dalit forms of textuality do or do not do than about the kinds of claims that can be made about subaltern literatures. In some sense, then, his question is about what can only be termed, in our postmodern times, the politics of general- ization alongside the will to particularize. Not only is the Dalit text read as the social location of a particularized and nontransferable eth- nographic speciicity; it is also only it to com- ment on its own self or selves. I argue that we should challenge this critical impulse. In a mo- ment that has generated a discourse of “world literature,” for the Dalit text to move beyond its particularity it must demonstrate its own worldliness for the sake of its legibility. While particularism is to some degree the water in which Dalit literature swims (particularism of caste, of history, of language), its critical imper- ative (my own, as well) is to surpass it. I read the Dalit text not simply as self- relective but also as productive of a certain metanarrative—in other words, “iction as theory.” It is when we read the Dalit text relationally—in dialogue with, or as a dialectic response to, its many others (the novel, uppercaste culture, a hegemonic “Indian” his- tory)—that we can speak of the Dalit text as such. The “Dalit text as such” refers as much to the individual text as to the larger ideologi- 646 Forum [ P M L A