SUMMARY:

Harsha Ram begins responding to his colleagues by addressing Harriet Murav’s concerns with the Rabelaisian carnival experience and hence temporary nature of the supra’s power discourse, using it to reiterate his point about the facile binarism of repression and resistance. Ram comments on his colleagues’ interpretations of the multivalence of the supra (the mode of acculturation and civilizing; the imposition of form and hence a set of rules onto the innately disruptive experience of inebriation; “unruly” material practice, etc.). He agrees that his literary-centered history of the supra should be supplemented with the spatial history and ethnography of the Georgian feast, mapping its transitions from the Safavid-inspired gardens and taverns of old Tiflis to the aristocratic, military and vice-regal milieus of imperial Russia, to the familial and professional networks of the Soviet era. While embracing similar suggestions, Ram rejects a view that the supra evolved from nativism to nationalism, with the latter understood as a political anti-imperial project.
The last half of Ram’s response deals with the main disagreement between his commentators and him, pertaining to Partha Chatterjee’s methodological model adapted by Ram. Some of his critics suggest that the rootedness of Chatterjee’s argument in the specifics of British India and Hindu nationalism makes his model impertinent to the very material Georgian case, whereas Gyan Prakash claims that Chatterjee falls into the trap of identifying with nationalism’s metaphysical oppositions instead of exposing their historicity as by-products of a colonial rule that is as modern and hybrid as any other imperial formation. Ram rejects these criticisms of both Chatterjee’s and his own attempts to overcome the binarism of nation and empire and explains how his approach parallels Chatterjee’s. He does this by reconstituting the nativizing Georgian elite discourse that elevated the supra to the status of a national tradition, while also pointing to the feast’s culturally heterogeneous constitutive elements that cannot readily be inscribed into the narrative of the nation. Finally, Ram calls for a renewed methodological synergy between literary history and literary theory on the one hand, and history and the social sciences on the other.