This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.
Article 1 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das
Article 2 Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.
Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta
Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett
Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy
Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan
Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana
Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan
The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. I, Divya Sheta, and Aamena Rangwala presented an article on 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das. Here is the presentation and presentation video.
Presentation video:
Third Article:
Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta. Presented by Jheel Barad and Dhruvuta Dhameliya on 7 December 2022. Here is the presentation video.
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 be- ginning 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 ar- eas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.
Key Points:
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.
Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy”
The talk by 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. The National Council of Education was the parent body of the University and the Council was established by 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.
Buddhadeva Bose, one of the prime architects of modern Bangla poetry, did not fully subscribe to the idealist visions of Tagore, for he believed it was necessary to break away from Tagore to be a part of the times, of modernity, but he too directly quoted from Rabindranath’s talk on “visvasahitya” while writing about the discipline, interpreting it more in the context of establishing connections, of ‘knowing’ literatures of the world.
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. Of the first five students in the department, three became well-known poets and the fourth a fine critic of Bengali poetry.
Despite certain impulses towards a decolonizing 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.
In the early stages it was a matter of recognizing new aesthetic systems, new visions of the sublime and new ethical imperatives – the Greek drama and the Indian nataka - and then it was a question of linking social and historical structures with aesthetics in order to reveal the dialectic between them.
Comparisons between the Iliad and the Ramayana, and between Sanskrit and Greek drama taking both Aristotle’s Poetics and Bharata’s Natyasastra into consideration formed the core of a section of the syllabus. While similarities were highlighted, differences led to the comprehension of core areas of cultural components. The project did not “bring into existence a new object/subject of knowledge” (Radhakrishnan)) 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:
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? The Modern Indian Languages department was established in 1962 at Delhi University. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”. A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held at Delhi University organized by Nagendra, a writer-critic who taught in the Hindi department of Delhi University, and a volume entitled Comparative Literature was published in 1977.
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.
Aijaz Ahmad, traced his voice so aptly that, “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”
Dealing with Indian literature from a comparative perspective also meant looking at the interactions taking place with literatures in regions beyond the geo-political boundaries of the nation-state.
Indian literatures were studied not as discrete units but in dialogue with one another, brought out by Sisir Kumar Das, a faculty member at the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, with support from other members of the department and the Sahitya Akademi.
T.S. Satyanath developed the theory of a scripto-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.
It must be mentioned that situated in Delhi, the department has students from different parts of India including a large section from the North-east of India, that allow multiple points of entry into 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.
Centres of Comparative Literature Studies:
During the seventies and the eighties Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centres and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharatidasam University, Kottayam and Pondicherry.
Later in the eighties and the nineties other Centres were established in different parts of the country, either as independent bodies or within a single language department as in Punjabi University, Patiala, Dibrugarh University, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Sambalpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where focus was on Indian literatures in Western India. Also in 1999 a department of Dravidian Comparative Literature and Philosophy was established in Dravidian University, Kuppam.
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.
Reconfiguration of areas of comparison:
The eighties again saw changes and reconfigurations of areas of comparison at Jadavpur University. In the last years of the seventies, along with Indian literatures, 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.
During the nineties, Area Studies papers on African, Latin American, Canadian literatures and literature of Bangladesh were introduced.
Right from the beginning of the discipline in India, cross-cultural relations between Indian literatures and European and American literatures had been in focus.
Reception studies also pointed to historical realities determining conditions of acceptability and hence to complex configurations between literature and history.
Burns and Wordsworth were very popular
and it was felt that their romanticism was marked by an inner strength and serenity. The much talked about ‘angst’ of the romantic poet was viewed negatively.
Again while Shelley and Byron were often cri-
tiqued, 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.
From reception studies the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied.
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.
With the introduction of the semester system the division was abandoned and cer-
tain 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:
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”.
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 project led to documentation and compilation of notes related to experiences of such studies and the collaboration with grassroots artists from rural areas.
A particularly important question for
Comparative Literature in this area could be linked with questions of Dalit literature’s relationship with mainstream writing, subverting, questioning and at the same time also inflecting other discourses while continuing to maintain its unique identity based to a large degree on performativity to draw the reader in as an ethical witness to the extreme limits of human suffering on which it is poised.
The second area in the Centre for Advanced Studies was the interface between literatures of India and its neighbouring countries.
Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies :
Almost all departments or centres of 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.
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.
The M Phil course on the subject at Jadavpur University highlights changing marginalities, ‘sub-cultures’ and movements in relation to contemporary nationalisms and globalization, and also sexualities, gender and the politics of identity.
In some of the 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:
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.
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 construc-
tion 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.
Concluding remarks:
The article conclude with Non-hierarchical literary relation. However, the article gives a brief overview of the history of Comparative Literature in India and how it's start from specific university like the department t Jadavpur University and the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi and grow with new techniques and it's theoretical as well practical approaches used by the scholars.
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