Thinking Activity
Article by Sisir kumar Das
Why comparative Indian Literature?
This task assigned was by Prof . Dilip Barad sir first to read the article and then give an Introductory Presentation on a particular topic with our group members. I,Aamena Rangwala and Divya Sheta presented on this article .
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Article2 by Amiya Dev
Comparative Indian Literature
His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis, and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparativeliterature 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 interliterariness. Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and interliterary process: Indian language and literature ever in the re/making.
Key points
In this article, dev discuss an apriori location of comparative literature with regard to aspects of diversity and unity in India, a country of immense linguistic diversity and, thus, a country of many literatures.
The eighteen languages listed in the Constitution, four more are recognized by the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) for reasons of their significance in literature (Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Indian English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kankani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu).
India as a hegemonious language and literature area is ubiquitous. We are all aware that the so-called major Indian literatures are ancient two of them Sansjrit and Tamil.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Indologists were not interested in this question, for Indian literature to them was mainly Sanskrit, extended at most to Pali and Prakrit.
The motto of the Sahitya Akademi: "Indian literature is one though written in many languages" (Radhakrishnan).
Different kind of resistance has emerged to the unity thesis in the form of what may be called "hegemonic apprehensions."
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. As a relativist, Singh accords literatures not only linguistic but also cultural singularities.For Singh, comparative literature is thus an
exercise in differential multilogue.
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."European literature" is at best an umbrella designation and at worst a pedagogical imposition .
while Indian literature is classifiable and categorizable.Further, he argues that while European and African literatures have some historical signifiers in addition to their geographical designation, these are recent concepts whereas Indian homogeneity has the weight of tradition behind it.
V.K. Gokak and Sujit Mukherjee who were speaking of an Indo-English corpus of literature that was created out of English translations of major texts from major Indian languages.
Ahmad's concern is with the hegemony of English, although he does not suggest its abolition in a way which would be close to Ngugi's arguments. On the other hand, Gokak, Mukherjee, and Motilal Jotwani who was a committee member for drafting the above circular suggested to implement English as a function, owing to the ever-growing corpus of translations from the various Indian literatures into English, thus making this new corpus of Indo-English literature available to all.
Swapan Majumdar takes this systemic approach in his 1985 book, Comparative Literature: Indian Dimensions, where Indian literature is neither a simple unity as hegemonists of the nation-state persuasion would like it to be, nor a simple diversity as relativists or poststructuralists would like it to be. That is, Majumdar suggests that Indian literature is neither "one" nor "many" but rather a systemic whole where many sub-systems interact towards one in a continuous and never-ending
dialectic.
Das has taken is methodologically pragmatic .Das's method and results to date show that Indian literature is neither a unity nor is it a total differential.
K.M. George's two-volume Comparative Indian Literature of 1984-85 that was researched and published under the auspices of Kerala Sahitya Akademi.
Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi a supporter of the unity approach was the first president of the Indian National Comparative Literature Association, while the Kannada writer U.R. Anantha Murthy is the current president of the Comparative Literature Association of India in addition to being the president of Sahitya Akademi.
Conclusion
Comparative Literature has taught us not to take comparison literally and it also taught us that theory formation in literary history is not universally tenable. Dev suggesting 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.
Article 3 by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta
Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History
Abstract
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 literatures. 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 literatures 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.
The beginnings
The idea of world literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal, for instance, translation activities began to be taken up on a large scale and poets talked of establishing relations with literatures of the world to promote, as the eminent poet-translator Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy”.
Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Visvasahitya” (meaning “world literature”), given at the National Council of Education in 1907, served as a pre-text to the establishment of the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year in which the university started functioning. A group of intellectuals in order to bring about a system of education that would be indigenous, catering to the needs of the people and therefore different from the British system of education prevalent at the time.
The 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. Buddhadeva Bose, one of the prime
architects of modern Bangla poetry, did not fully subscribe to the idealist visions of Tagore, for he be-
lieved it was necessary to break away from Tagore to be a part of the times, of modernity.
The translation of Les Fleurs du Mal that his intention in turning to French poetry was to move away from the literature of the British, the colonial masters.Buddhadeva Bose brought in a very significant modern poet, Sudhindranath Dutta, also well-known for his translation of Mallarmé and his erudition both in the Indian and the Western context, to teach in the department of Comparative Literature.
Despite certain impulses towards a decolonising process, the colonial framework was also evident in the pedagogic structure, in the large space given to English literature and the organization of the courses around the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic and the Modern period. Of course, there were several other courses devoted to Sanskrit and Bengali literature. The epistemology of comparison emerged within this framework.
The project did not “bring into existence a new object/subject of knowledge” (Radhakrishnan 458 ) as such, but by laying out the terms of comparison it did start a chain of reflections that would constitute the materiality of comparison, an ongoing series of engagements with the multi-dimensional reality of questions related to the self and the other, to arrive at networks of relationships on various levels. The Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, which went on to become an important journal in literary studies in the country, came out in 1961.
Indian Literature as Comparative Literature
In the seventies that new perspectives related to pedagogy began to enter the field of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur.
Indian literature entered the syllabus in a fairly substantial manner but not from the point of view of asserting national identity. It was rather an inevitable move if comparative literature meant studying a text within a network of relations, where else could these relations be but in contiguous spaces where one also encountered shared histories with differences?
Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”.
The juxtaposition of different canons had led to the questioning of universalist canons right from the beginning of comparative studies in India and now with the focus shifting to Indian literature, and in some instances to literatures from the Southern part of the globe, one moved further away from subscribing to a priori questions related to canon formation.
The focus on Indian Literature within the discipline of Comparative Literature led to the opening up of many areas of engagement. Older definitions of Indian literature often with only Sanskrit at the centre, with the focus on a few canonical texts to the neglect of others, particularly oral and performative traditions, had to be abandoned.
The task, comparatists realized was, as so aptly voiced by Aijaz Ahmad, to trace “the dialectic of unity and difference – through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print”.
Indian literary systems along with diverse inter-cultural relations that communities in different parts of India have with different communities outside the borders of the nation state.
Reconfiguration of areas of comparison
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude became a part of the syllabus with a few other texts from Latin American Literatures and then Literatures from African countries were included.
Questions of solidarity and a desire to understand resistance to oppression along with larger questions of epistemological shifts and strategies to bridge gaps in history resulting from colonial interventions were often the structuring components of these areas in the syllabus.
Area Studies papers on African, Latin American, Canadian literatures and literature of Bangladesh were introduced. The introduction of Canadian Studies was linked with a grant in the area, but gradually a field of studies focusing on oral traditions emerged within the space of comparison.
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.
Research directions
Several books and translations emerged out of the project. 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.
The department at Jadavpur University was upgraded under the programme to the status of Centre of Advanced Studies in 2005, and research in Comparative Literature took a completely new turn. A large focus, therefore, in this area was on oral texts and research on methods of engaging with such texts.
The second area in the Centre for Advanced Studies was the interface between literatures of India and
its neighbouring countries. This happened to be a completely untouched area as far as literature was concerned, apart from the study of certain well-known points of contact.
Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies
Comparative Literature in the country in the 21st century engaged with two other related fields of study, one was Translation Studies and the other Cultural Studies.
Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies. Both are seen
as integral to the study of Comparative Literature.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.
Comparative Cultural Studies where key texts in the global field are juxtaposed with related texts from the Indian context.
New centres of Comparative Literature that came up in the new universities established in the last Five Year Plan, diaspora studies were taken up as an important area of engagement. It must be mentioned though that despite tendencies towards greater interdisciplinary approaches, literature continues to occupy the central space in Comparative Literature and it is believed that intermedial studies may be integrated into the literary space.
Non-hierarchical connectivity
Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in ac-cordance with historical needs, both local and planetary.
The enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings.
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”.
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 to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.
Conclusion
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.
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