Communist literary internationalism and worldmaking in the twentieth century: Kerala and the Soviet Union

Abstract

My paper explores the dynamics of twentieth-century literary manifestations of communist internationalism in the southern Indian region of Kerala vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Drawing from Allan Pasco's notion of the literature-archive, I illustrate how communist internationalism in Kerala was expressed in terms of worldmaking in three chronological periods in response to political and literary shifts at the local, national and global levels. The first period deals with early engagements of the literature-archive from the 1910s till the 1930s, marked by a yearning for an amorphously defined new world characterised by individualised political canonical engagements with individuals associated with Marxism as well as situational identification with the worlds of Tsarist Russia and Soviet Union. The prominence of the progressive literature movement from the late-1930s until the late 1940s resulted in the emergence of multiple literary-political circles that wrought various imaginations of a socialist realist egalitarian internationalist world, producing and contesting various visions of Soviet Union. Finally, in the third period, I deal with how the Cold War context enabled the perpetuation of these literary contestations as well as the diffusion of a new mode of the cultural internationalism of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union from the 1950s till the 1980s making and contesting Soviet utopias in travelogs and children's literature.