Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Studies on aging and old age by literary scholars began in the west in the 1970s with the emergence of a theoretical approach that combined literary criticism with issues emerging in gerontology, an area of which scholars from biological sciences and social sciences were still sole custodians. In its early days, literary gerontology, as this new trend in modern gerontology was referred to, laid emphasis on the problems of attitudes of literary authors, towards becoming old and the stereotypes related to old age. The growth of more critical readings of aging within literary texts led to the trend of relating aging in literary texts to history, religion, ethics, philosophy, and the arts. Another strategy that developed in literary gerontology was to combine literature with psychoanalysis, which is to use the ideas of Jung, Erikson, Winnicott, and Lacan in order to analyze old characters. An approach of literary gerontology also focuses on how theories of gerontology confront novels, short stories, autobiography, and life-reviews. An important point about literary gerontology is that it prominently deals with subjective aspects of old age, drawn from literatures. Literatures focus on people and their psychological states, and contours of human relationships brought gerontologists in contact with “subjective” truths of life. Such truths could hardly make a place in the discussions of the initial phases of modern gerontology when scholars solely depended on medico-scientific approaches to observe old age. A danger within literary gerontology was that the scholar might resort to prioritizing literary narratives over gerontological concerns. Literary gerontology’s acknowledgement of fictions as a major source of knowledge about growing old, allowed scholars to think beyond referring to literary pieces as mere confirmations of gerontological theories. In the second half of twentieth century, inquiries within gerontology undertook a cultural turn as a result of the widening recognition of theorizing that has its roots within the stretches of post-structuralism and the recent developments in feminism, queer studies, postmodernism, postcolonialism, body studies, and disability studies. Scholars began giving importance to culture-specific subjectivities in the studies of old age and aging. A cultural way of looking at old age questioned “general” understanding about old age, which was basically a product of the medico-scientific approaches emerged in Europe, and therefore, tacitly euro-centric. A recent development called narrative gerontology employs instances from life-narratives as tools for understanding the dimensions of older people’s lives. The cultural turn, along with the development of narrative strategies in gerontology, has created a recognizable space for indigenous cultural narratives to prove their potential as rich sources of information about old age. Studying these narratives can help understand how the structures of power interact with the lives of the elderly in different cultural communities. Such studies can also yield deeper insights about how meanings associated with aged people are constructed, communicated, and understood in an open-ended system of interactions between body, self and other within a specific culture. Three powerful motifs that constantly participate in the making of aging narratives in Indian literatures are “memory,” “home,” and “death” (often associated with the attainment of moksha). Modernization and religion are two other vital presences that contribute to the framing of such narratives. Two binaries which are at the core of these narratives are tradition/modernity and young/old. The narratives also consist of certain fault lines on account of the way the local concerns of old age have been downplayed by the uniformity that has been taken for granted with the growing recognition of aging as “a single universal problem.” This paper deals with indigenous short narratives from Indian literatures in order to understand how the local narratives of old age are affected by the politics inherent in the interplay of nation, religion, and colonial modernities, which often fed the euro-centric interests underlying enlightenment humanism. The paper focuses on following stories taken from “Grey Areas: An Anthology of Indian Fictions on Ageing,” edited by Ira Raja and published by OUP in 2010, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s “Drabomoyee Goes to Kashi,” Chaman Nahal’s “The Womb,” and T. Janakiraman’s “The Puppet.”