Unit 1:
1) Sisir Kumar Das, ‘Why Comparative Indian Literature? (ed. Dev and Das,1989)
1) Abstract:-
2) Key Arguments:-
For a country like India which has a history of literary traditions oscillating between script and orature, new methods of teaching and reading were to be envisioned. While dealing with the formal elements that go into the making of any text in India-which shares a similarity with African situations in terms of oral, written, and indigenous sources identification of these methods as contours that aid in the reading of literature would apply. When speaking of kinds of literature in the plural, the succeeding questions point towards the direction in which these pieces of literature tend to inhabit a geopolitical location, otherwise termed a country, which is demarcated by boundaries, social, religious, and linguistic. When reading any text, the value-loaded term 'national', 'international', and 'indigenous' prop up any student pursuing literature.
Subdivisions, generic differences may occur, but identifying these differences and reading them as contours, instead of straight lines is what Comparative Literature sets out to engage with. While questioning the idea of an 'Indian literature' vis-à-vis 'Indian literature', he highlights the notions one attaches to the word 'Indian' which could in itself be a pluralistic outlook of life, wherein the concept of Indian literature as inherently comparative may be considered.
According to Das, the necessity of evolving a framework when two distinct languages/cultures are encountered is inevitable. Das states in this regard: Arabic, Japanese with Chinese, and Indians with the literature of Europe.
All these contacts have resulted in certain changes, at times marginal, and at times quite profound and pervasive, in the literary activities of the people involved, and have necessitated an enlargement of critical perspectives (S. K. Das 18).
Das states how Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India, in his introduction of Charles Wilkin's translation of Gita (1785), advocated for a comparative study of the Gita and great European literature.
I should not fear' he wrote, to place, in opposition to the best French version of the most admired passages of Iliad or Odyssey, or the 1st and 6th books of our own Milton, highly as I venerate the latter, the English translation of the Mahabharata (S. K. Das 22).
Translation brought world-renown to a number of regional writers. In -The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin argues that translation does not conceal the original, but allows it to shine through, for translation effectively ensures the survival of a text (Bassnett 180).
3) Main Analysis:-
For a country like India which has a history of literary traditions oscillating between script and orature, new methods of teaching and reading were to be envisioned. While dealing with the formal elements that go into the making of any text in India-which shares a similarity with African situations in terms of oral, written, and indigenous sources (Thiong'o 1993)- identification of these methods as contours that aid in the reading of literature would apply.
When speaking of literature in the plural, the succeeding questions point towards the direction in which this literature tends to inhabit a geopolitical location, otherwise termed a country, which is demarcated by boundaries, social, religious, and linguistic.
When reading any text, the value-loaded term 'national', 'international', and 'indigenous' prop up any student pursuing literature. Das ascertains how Indian scholars in the ancient period did not endeavor to explore such connections between the two languages. Das has a clear insight into this phenomenon that may be owing to myopic tendencies and the lack of a framework to place literature from two linguistic roots. Das forgets to mention that were no appropriate frameworks to study identity politics that went beyond the frontiers of language in a country strongly informed by caste hierarchies, the subjugation of women, and the suppression of the LGBT. And even when literature shifted from nation bases to identity bases it happened outside the discipline of comparative literature.
4) Conclusion:-
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literature thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He, therefore, argues that to speak of Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Such a characterization, he urges, either overlooks or obscures manifest interrelations and affinities.
His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparative literature in India. He surveys the current scholarly and intellectual positions on unity and diversity and looks into the post-structuralist doubt of homogenization of differences in the name of unity.
Dev also examines the search for common denominators and a possible pattern of togetherness and Dev underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of inter literariness.
It is t/here Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and inter literary process: Indian language and literature ever in the re/making.
2) Amiya Dev, "Comparative Literature in India." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.4 (2000) :-
1) Abstract:-
The essay gives an overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India, focusing primarily on the department at Jadavpur University, where it began and to some extent the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi, where it later had a new beginning in its engagement with Indian literature.
The department at Jadavpur began with the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore's speech on World Literature and with a modern poet-translator as its founder.
While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years, there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonizing process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity. Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence along with literature from the Southern part of the globe. Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to the focus on reception and transformation. In the last few years, Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.
2) Key Arguments:-
Tagore used the word 'visvasahitya" (world literature), and stated that the word was generally termed 'comparative literature". His idea of 'visvasahitya" was complex, marked by a sense of a community of artists as workers building together an edifice, that of world literature. The notion of literature again was deeply embedded on human relationships. and hence the aesthetic sense was linked with the sense of the human.
Bose, also well-known for his translations of Baudelaire, Hoelderlin, and Kalidasa, wrote in his preface to the translation of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) that his intention in turning to French poetry was to move away from the literature of the British, the colonial masters, while in his introduction to the translation of Kalidasa's Meghdutam, he wrote that it was essential to bring to life the literature of ancient times in a particular tradition in order to make it a part of the contemporary.
Comparatists dealing with Indian literature also necessarily had to look at the interplay between the mainstream and the popular, the elite and the marginalized and also to some extent foreground intermedial perspectives as different forms existed together in a composite manner, particularly in earlier periods in which textual and performative traditions existed simultaneously.
The department continues to develop teaching material on various aspects of Indian literature from a comparative perspective, beginning from language origins, manuscript cultures, performative traditions along with painting, sculpture, and architecture, the history of print culture, and questions related to modernity. That Comparative Literature studies necessarily had to be interdisciplinary was highlighted by the pedagogy practiced in the department.
T.S. Satyanath developed the theory of a script-centric, body-centric, and phono-centric study of texts in the medieval period leading a number of researchers in the department to look for continuities and interventions in the tradition that would again lead to pluralist epistemologies in the study of Indian literature and culture.
In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where the focus was on Indian literature in Western India
Also in 1999 a department of Dravidian Comparative Literature and Philosophy was established in Dravidian University, Kuppam. It must also be mentioned that comparative poetics, a core area of comparative literature studies and dissertations, particularly in the South, was taken up as a central area of research by the Visvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics in Orissa.
During this period two national associations of Comparative Literature came into being one at Jadavpur called Indian Comparative Literature Association and the other in Delhi named Comparative Indian Literature Association.
The two merged in 1992 and the Comparative Literature Association of India was formed, which today has more than a thousand members in the early years of the Association, a large number of creative writers participated in its conferences along with academics and researchers, each enriching the horizon of vision of the other.
3) Main Analysis:-
Again while Shelley and Byron were often critiqued, the former for having introduced softness and sentimentality to Bengali poetry, they were also often praised for upholding human rights and liberty in contrast to the imperialist poetry of Kipling. Contemporary political needs then were linked with literary values and this explained the contradictory tensions often found in the reception of romanticism in Bengal. It must be mentioned that Shelley, the poet of revolt, began to have a very positive reception when the independence movement gathered momentum.
In another context, a particular question that gained prominence was whether Shakespeare was imposed on Indian literature, and comparatists showed, as did Sisir Kumar Das, that there were different Shakespeares. Shakespeare's texts might have been imposed in the classroom, but the playwright had a rich and varied reception in the world of theatre.
From reception studies, the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied. For example, one tried to study the Romantic Movement from a larger perspective, to unravel its many layers as it traveled between countries, particularly between Europe and India. The translation of several texts from Sanskrit into German played a role in the emergence of the Romantic movement and then in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Romanticism came back to India, though in different shades.
Reception studies both along vertical and horizontal lines formed the next major area of focus - one studied for instance, elements of ancient and medieval literature in modern texts and also inter and intraliterary relations foregrounding impact and responses.
While one studied Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jaina elements in modern texts, one also looked at clusters of sermons by Buddha. Mahavira and Nanak, at qissas and katha ballads across the country, the early novels in different Indian literatures, and then the impact of Eastern literature and thought on Western literature and vice versa.
With the introduction of the semester system the division was abandoned and certain other courses of a more general nature such as Cross-cultural Literary Transactions, where Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Rabindranath Tagore's Gora, were taken up, or sometimes in courses entitled Literary Transactions one looked more precisely at the tradition of Reason and Rationalism in European and Indian literatures of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries
The department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Saurashtra University, Rajkot, took up the theme of Indian Renaissance and translated several Indian authors into English, studied early travelogues from Western India to England and in general published collections of theoretical discourse from the nineteenth century.
The Department of Assamese in Dibrugarh University received the grant and published a number of books related to translations, collections of rare texts and documentation of folk forms.
The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University also received assistance to pursue research in four major areas, East-West Literary Relations, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Third World Literature. Incidentally, the department had in Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, an avid translator who translated texts from many so-called "third-world countries.
From a very different perspective it was felt that stories poems, songs and performances from oral traditions that were found in most parts of the country had their own knowledge systems that could provide valuable and sustainable alternatives to contemporary urban modes of life and living and in several cases also reveal certain cultural dynamics and value systems that were constantly replenishing mainstream expressive traditions.
The second area in the Centre for Advanced Studies was the interface between literatures of India and its neighbouring countries. The first preliminary research in this area led to links that suggested continuity and a constant series of interactions between and among Asian cultures and communities since ancient times and the urgent need for work in this area in order to enter into meaningful dialogue with one another in the Asian context and to uncover different pathways of creative communications. Efforts towards this end led to an International Conference on South-South dialogues with a large number of participants from Asian and European countries. An anthology of critical essays on tracing socio-cultural and literary transactions between India and Southeast Asia was published.
Among the projects planned under the inter-Asian series was one on travelogues from Bengal to Asian countries and here an annotated bibliography that could provide an initial foundation for the study of inter-literary relations was published. A second project involved working on the image of Burma in Bengali and Oriya literature in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Travel narratives and diaries, newspaper articles from old periodicals, excerpts from literature and pictorial images of Burmese people in the Indian press were compiled.
4) Conclusion:-
It must be mentioned at this point that Comparative Literature in the country the 21st century engaged with two other related fields of study, one was Translation Studies and the other Cultural Studies.Translation Studies cover different areas of interliterary studies. Histories of translation may be used to map literary relations while analysis of acts of translation leads to the understanding of important characteristics of both the source and the target literary and cultural systems.As for Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature had always engaged with different aspects of Cultural Studies, the most prominent being literature and its relation with the different arts.
Cultural Studies may also be a key component in different kinds of interdisciplinary courses within the discipline. For instance, a course in Delhi University takes up the theme of city and village in Indian literature and goes into representations of human habitat systems and ecology in literature. looks for concepts and terms for such settlements, goes into archaeological evidences and the accounts of travellers from Greece, China, Persia and Portugal to demonstrate the differences that exist at levels of perception and ideological positions.
It is evident that Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in accordance with historical needs, both local and planetary,
As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with issues that would lead to the enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings. In doing so it is engaged in discovering new links and lines of non-hierarchical connectivity, of what Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called "co-construction", a process anchored in "subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction (Sangari 50).
And comparatists work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and that the task of the construction of literary histories, in terms of literary relations among neighbouring regions, and of larger wholes, one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has perhaps yet to begin. In all its endeavours, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.
3) Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, “Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History”, Comparative Literature & World Literature, Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2016
1) Abstract :-
Professed autonomy of national literatures, by shifting the theoretical focus towards plurality and dynamism. We imagine that the minimum requisite of a comparative study is to start with at least two literatures. But as Das has reminded us, Comparative Literature is a method, not an object of study - hence we are interested in how to study literature.In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity.
2) Key Arguments :-
Richard Pierre mentioned that In studying comparative literature, you will consider literature from different genres,locations, and time periods simultaneously. Beyond that, comparative literature thinks across different disciplines, like literature and music on literature and anthropology. Finally, comparative literature is also the de facto home of literary theory; some consider the field to be concerned with the general makeup of literature itself, or literariness.
Choudhari said, “Our culture has taught us to ask questions and our literature is a compilation of all answers thus found. It is our culture to learn by asking questions as having discussions and arguments are part of upbringing.” (the times of india , February 15 , 2019)
3) Main Analysis :-
Is Indian literature, in the singular, a valid category, or are we rather to speak of Indian literatures in the plural Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Indologists were not interested in this question, for Indian literature to them was mainly Sanskrit, extended at most to Pâli and Prakrit. For example, with all his admiration for Sakuntala, William Jones was oblivious of literatures in modern Indian languages. Non-Indian Indianists today, too, are more often than not uninterested in the question. Although they do not consider Sanskrit-Pâli- Prakrit as "the" only literature of India, these scholars are still single literature specialists. Similarly, literary histories written in India by Indian scholars also focused and still focus on a single literature.
Gurbhagat Singh who has been discussing the notion of "differential multilogue" . He does not accept the idea of Indian literature as such but opts for the designation of literatures produced in India. Further, he rejects the notion of Indian literature because the notion as such includes and promotes a nationalist identity
Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Ahmad describes the construct of a "syndicated" Indian literature that suggests an aggregate and unsatisfactory categorization of Indian literature . Ahmad also rules out the often argued analogy of Indian literature with that of European literature by arguing that the notion of "European literature" is at best an umbrella designation and at worst a pedagogical imposition while Indian literature is classifiable and categorizable.
4) Conclusion :-
Amiya Dev suggests that we should first look at ourselves and try to understand our own situations as thoroughly as possible. Let us first give full shape to our own comparative literatures and then we will formulate a comparative literature of diversity in general.
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