What Is a ‘Classic’?

The classic is memorably defined by Matthew Arnold when he refuses to define it (Arnold: 1446). For him it is the timeless universal against which all else may be measured. But as T.S. Eliot goes on to point out in ‘What is a Classic?’, a classic assumes its value as it rises in some combination of historical and cultural moments that leave it perched ark-like on a summit of achievement from which the waters of that literary tradition have receded: Virgil at the close of the Roman Empire. However, if such a work is not to moulder away, admired but untouchable in the museum of Great Works, it must be part of an ongoing culture and must be revisited, emulated, reshaped, changed, challenged. Whether we think of Harold Bloom's ‘influence’ or Edward Said's ‘iteration’, the universal timeless classic or the great literary career is only good in so far as it is also made local and part of cultural practice in history (Said: 256-257).

Constant Rehearsal of Hindu Classics in the Indian Tradition

Indian tradition shows this in its constant rehearsal of the Hindu classics in the literary retranslations across millennia, in folk dramas, song, painting, sculpture, film and television serials. Indian writing in English sought to authenticate itself within the post-colonial nation by reworking the traditional archive, from Toru Dutt's poems to Raja Rao's fictionalising of Puranic style and content. As it grew in self-confidence, it became less subservient to this material, putting it to use in order to make points about modern society and even showing some irreverence towards it. Thus we find Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things both critiquing the masculinist vengeance of Mahabharata stories in contemporary Kathakali and lamenting their reduction to touristic entertainments (Roy 1997: 228-236), and Shashi Tharoor satirising the political history of modern India by parodying a wide swathe of the Mahabharata in The Great Indian Novel. Salman Rushdie likewise pays tribute to Persian Sufism in Grimus and to the Kathasaritsagara in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the latter an allegorical critique of dictatorships in the contemporary world.