Replacing the old Gods

“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge,” writes George R.R. Martin, the author of Ice and Fire Series that inspired the show Game of Thrones. And indeed to maintain an edge, the series will be now be taught at Harvard University.

Professor Sean Gilsdorf, a medieval historian, and Racha Kirakosian, assistant professor of German and religion are all set to teach the interdisciplinary 100-level course — The Real Game of Thrones: From Modern Myths to Medieval Models at Harvard. Similarly, closer home, the Council of School Certificate Examination (CISCE) has included the Harry Potter series in the syllabus. But some content will have to be removed from the syllabus if one has to study this course.

Author Anand Neelakantan sees this as a welcome change, “Literature has to move with time. It cannot always teach the old classics. There is some popular appeal to Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. And they are popular because they have somehow connected with the audience. So there is nothing wrong with this move. Plus, these are decisions of few people, and are not chosen by a wider group of people. So one cannot stop the change being made. In fact, in my view, some film-scripts should also be included in a curriculum. And novels are a recent form of literature compared to poetry and short stories. So, I guess it is just another way of evolution in literature.”

Vasant Sharma, who was an associate professor at Delhi College of Arts and Commerce, agrees, “We have to acknowledge that these novels are being liked by everybody. It is important to analyse what appeals to the younger generation. In fact, many serious writers have tried their hands at lighter forms of fiction. Garaham Greene did it. Christopher Marlowe had some comic scenes in his plays, which were not even written by him but were added later. Chronicles of Narnia is another example by C.S. Lewis. So, it all depends on how we see it. You cannot have watertight compartments about what can or cannot be called literature. But of course, there has to be some merit and an art of story telling to it. One needs to study what technique is being used to hold the attention of the readers.” Calling such literature as ‘dessert’, he further says, “We cannot be serious all the time, right? While one cannot advocate junk but such reading different things add to one's pleasure. And sometimes even the lightest of literature strikes you like none other.  While I, myself, don’t read a lot of it, there is a line from one of Jeffory Archer’s novels which read: ‘If you allow a man to come close to you, before you know it, he is using your thigh as an armchair’. I’ll never forget that line. So one does learn many things from everywhere and from every source. Also, there is a difference between really bad literature and light literature.”

Books from the Harry Potter series

Echoing similar sentiments, Rahul K. Gairola, assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee shares, “Popular literature can be most productive and exhilarating when it challenges the established conventions of the classics. Whether this is through various genres, forms, and media — filmic texts or hypertexts, etc. we’ll have to wait and watch. We have also very well seen graphic novels gaining immense traction in literary studies.”   

“In my Indian Novel in English class at IIT Roorkee, I teach the novel and film of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. This is to stretch the very boundaries of what we consider ‘the Indian novel in English’ even as we survey the elisions and additions in the filmic adaptation of the novel. While Martel’s novel is certainly not a canonical Indian novel, the film compels us to further interrogate why some kernels of the plot have been left out, and others put in by director Ang Lee. I, thus, believe that popular texts can help us challenge and re-think conventional texts through forms, like the filmic and the digital, as well as transhistorical themes that ‘travel’ across historical periods and textual evolution,” Rahul explains.

Anand Neelakantan

While the literary aspect of these books is debatable, author Ravinder Singh says, “I think that these books are not being taught because they are literary works of fiction but because they fall in the mass-market category. So students will understand what is selling and why. These books generate a lot of money and readership. So one may debate that classics are more important but popular literature is one of the  branches of English writing.”  

A still from Games of Thrones

So what happens to the good old classics? “The ‘classics’ themselves are remnants of a body of canonical literature that itself has been institutionalised by very violent histories of domination and colonialism. Thomas Babington Macauley espoused such a view in his 1835 treatise on the institutionalisation of English in India. So, in my view, any literary or cultural text that displaces that canon has the potential for innovation,” explains Rahul, adding, “The problem, however, is that with Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, the subjects represented and celebrated are again white and European — just as before.  So not much has changed then.”