Article 9 : comparative literature and translation studies

 This blog is about Thinking Activity on. articles presentations about comparative literature and Translation studies. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji  Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called Comparative literature and translation studies.

Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins : Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry

1

For the purpose of our discussion, it may be broadly stated that 'modernity designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production. Western models of education, assimilation of ration temper, resurgence of nationalist spirit and emergence of social political, legal, juridical and educational institutions that constituted a normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist world views. 

It has also been argued that such a modular modernity, as envisaged in Western terms, brought about a rupture in the social and cultural life of India, separating its 'modern period' from what was 'pre- modern'. Such a view may be disputed but it can be convincingly shown that the dynamics of literary expression and the apparatus of cultural transmission came to be redefined in the 'modern' period.

The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This colonial modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century. The modernist revolt in India was a response to the disruptions brought about by colonial modernity. 

💫As Dilip Chitre observes, 'what took nearly a century and a half to happen in England, happened within a hurried half century' in Indian literatures (1967, 2). The breaching of entrenched traditions resulted in a crisis which had to be tackled creatively by resorting to the resources of alien traditions. 

 💫B. S. Mardhekar, a major Marathi modernist, Chitre says. The poet B. S. Mardhekar was the most remarkable product of the crow pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and contemporary world culture'.

💫D. R. Nagaraj  adds When ideologies like nationalism and spirituality become apparatuses of the state, a section of die intelligentsia has no option other than seek refuge in bunkers of individualism'.

 2. The term 'modernism' implies a literary/artistic movement 

That characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the national Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individual Cosmopolitan and insular world view In the European context signified a set of tendencies in artistic expression and writing style the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a new aesth that was iconoclastic, insular and elitist. 

The aesthetics of modernism the West had a transnational, metropolitan world view that excl the claims of the local and the national and made no concession to popular taste. While the modernism that emerged in Indian litera shared many of these defining features, its political affiliations ideological orientations were markedly different. 

Due to its postcolonial location, the Indian modernism did not share the imperi metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested h in regional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and  questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse. It was and formalistic and deeply distrustful of the popular domain.

Chronologically in  Indian languages, modernism manifests itself in the second ha Twentieth century. dimension to the aesthetic of Indian modernism. How ar The postcolonial context adds a complex evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laur and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued.

Western modernisms are not mere derivative versions of a European hegemonic practice. The emergence of modernism in societies in Asia, Africa or Latin America cannot be seen in terms of a European centre and non-European peripheries. The Eurocentric nature of the discourse on modernism can be laid bare only by documenting the 'modernisms that emerged in non-Western societies. 

The emerging problematic will have to contend with issues of ideological differences between the Western modernism and the Indian one, the different trajectories they traversed as a result of the difference in socio- political terrains and the dynamics of the relations between the the present in the subcontinent, which has a documented history of more past and than five thousand years. The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of Eurocentric accounts of modernism by Gikandi, Friedman, Doyle and Winkiel, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz in different ways.

3. The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated

 In the context of Bengal as Amiya Des has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the ad [modernist) Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; ou the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it

Commenting on the role of Kannada modernists. R. Sasidhar writes 

If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the  Brahminical and the non-Brahminical, Just as the cuphone and the reactive modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of modernism aselt, so also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a modernism that came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment. (in Satchidanandan 2001, 34)

Issues of caste, ethnicity, progress, freedom, individualism, region and nation figure variously in different modernist traditions in India. The presence of a father-figure, like that of Tagore in Bengali, is a fact that is not relevant to the development of Kannada or Malayalam modernism.

4

Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literatures. To discuss this, we will look at three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions Sudhindranath Dutta. (1901-60) from Bengali, B. S. Mardhekar (1909-56) from Marathi and Ayyappa Paniker (1936-2004) from Malayalam. These authors help us see the chronological trajectory of modernism across Indian literatures. While the modernist shift in Bengali emerged in the 1930s and continued into the 40s and 50s, it manifested itself in Marathi from the 1950s to the 60s. It was in the 1960s that the Malayalam literary sensibility was transformed into the modernist mould, its influence slowly waning by the late 70s, though by that time, it had redefined the relations between content and form in all literary forms.

Translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new poetic, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes. Their essay elaborated the basic features of a new aesthetic against the prevailing Romantic-nationalist or Romantic-mystical traditions. Sudhindranat Dutta translated Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry into Bengali.

Buddhadeh Bose, another (Bengali modernist, rendered 112 poms of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil into Bengal, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Era Pound. ee cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam) while B. S. Mardhekar's Aru and the Man (which was published in England in 1937) was a treatise in formalist aesthetic that legitimated modernist practice. 

 Their profound understanding of Western philosophy and artistic/literary traditions equipped these three writers with the critical capacity to see the significance and limitations of the West. 

5

One of the recurring themes in Sudhindranath Dutta's critical essays is the primacy of the word. In 'The Necessity of Poetry', he argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity. His discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and Yeats prove his mastery over Western thought. Though he claims himself to be a pragmatist, Dutta believes that 'only the poetic mind. whatever its norm, can intuit associations where reason faces a void.

 Thus, the case for the modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the context of the everyday world and its needs. In another essay. The Highbrow he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much maligned Ivory Tower. This does not mean that Dutra was a formalist committed to a hermetic aesthetic. He constantly invokes the progressive role of the writer in a society, and underlines the role played by the masses in the creation of a literary tradition. He observes in 'Whiggism. Radicalism and Treason in Bengal': 'Not the introspecting intellectuals, but the enduring masses are the guardians of tradition and directors of progress; and whatever be the calibre of the experimenter, unless he passes the pragmatic test of his people, the facts he would establish are febrile dreams, and the truths he would loudly proclaim are a maniac's fancies'.

Here, we can see one of the complex contradictions that beset Indian modernists: their pursuit of cosmopolitan and universal values could not be at the cost of a complete disjunction from tradition. In his radio talk on Eliot, delivered on the occasion of the latter winning the Nobel Prize in 1948, Dutta highlights Eliot's commitment to tradition as 'revolutionary in the fullest sense of the term. He adds, 'But I am convinced that if civilization is to survive the atomic war, Mr. Eliot's ideal must become widely accepted, so that in the oases that may escape destruction it may be cherished through the interregnum. 

Modernism in India was part of a larger decolonising project. It was not a mindless celebration of Western values and the European avant-garde.

In Dutta's well-known poem, 'The Camel-Bird', one may glimpse this critical spirit and desire to reinvent tradition from a cosmopolitan perspective. The poem is about the crisis of perception that can only be remedied by reinventing oneself completely. In the poem, the bird is presented as vulnerable and incapable of defending itself against the hunter. The poem ends with this stanza:

This quin is our inheritance: A line of spendthrifts went before;

They picked the pounds, and left no pence: Now both of us must pay their score

And so your self-absorption seems Inept: Can blindness cheat a curse?

The present is no time for dreams By shunning me you make had worse

Let each of us then seal a bond To serve the other's interest

6

B. S. Mardhekar transformed Marathi poetry and its direction and dynamics in terms of its vision, form and content. Like Dutta, he was deeply aware of the entire 'tradition' of Marathi poetry from its beginnings. He published a treatise on aesthetics, Arts and the Man in London in 1937, and Two Lectures on the Aesthetic of Literature in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1944. Together, they make a strong case for a modernist aesthetic in Marathi. P. S. Rege, another major modernise Marathi poet, also had spent time in London in the 1930s and was profoundly influenced by modernist poets like Eliot. Both Rege and Mardhekar went back to the roots of Marathi poetic traditions to reinvent the saint-poets such as Tukaram and Ramdas for a modern audience. One may locate a parallel movement in what Eliot and Pound did with reference to the reinterpretation of the Provencal poets, guido, Cavalcanti, Dante and the Metaphysical poets, in their own time. But the parallel cannot be forced beyond a point. poets. 

In Mardhekar, both irony and self-reflexivity are ways of constituting a new reader by freeing him or her from his or her habits of viewing the world. These are strategies to re-inscribe a self-critical attitude towards the material content of art and life. In 'Mice in the Wet Barrel Died, which became the iconic modernist poem of Marathi, Mardhekar goes to the very limits of language to capture an acute state of anguish that is closer to the saint-poet's suffering than the existential crisis of the modern man or woman. The opening lines of the poem capture the wretched nature of their existence:

mice in the wet barrel died;

their necks dropped, untwisted;

their lips closed with lips;

their necks fell, undesiring. 

The modernist poet has to reject the allegorical and the didactic, to articulate his or her complex awareness of the relation between form and content The Romantic poets had made a shift from Sanskritic traditions to folk merres, which was a movement towards forms The experimental open poetry of the modernists, on the other hand, opened up poetic forms further, by using imagist, suggestive free verse that affirmed that each poem has its authentic form which cannot be approximated to a metre which functions independent of content. Here, one may also recall the contribution of M. Govindan, a poet-critic who was closely associated with the modernist movement in Malayalam from its very beginning, particularly through his patronage of young writers such as Paniker, through his avant-garde journal, Sameeksha Govindan advocated a return to the Dravidian sources of Malayalam poetry, which he thought could rejuvenate its syntax and rhythm through a robust earthliness that had been curbed by the scholastic Sanskritic tradition.

Kurkshetram is a poem of 294 lines in five sections. The opening lines of the Bhagavad Gita are cited as the epigraph of the poem, thus setting a high moral and critical tone in relation to contemporary life and society. As in Eliot's The Waste Land, Kurukshetram's opening lines communicate a pervasive decline of moral values and a disruption of the organic rhythms of society:

The eyes suck and sip The tears that spurt,

The nerves drink up the coursing blood;

And it is the bones that

Eat the marrow here

While the skin preys on the bones The roots turn carnivore

As they prey on the flowers

While the earth in bloom

Clutches and tears at the roots. (Paniker 1985, 14-15)

The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur through the metaphor of the dream. 

8

 It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity. In other words, they had access to the intellectual resources of alternative traditions of modernity that were bred in the native context. This enables them to selectively assimilate resources of a Western modernity on their own terms. They `translate modernity/modernism through the optics of postcolonial 'modernities. There is an internal dialectic and an external dialogic involved here.

Their relations with Western modernism need to be seen in terms of a dialogism that allows them to negotiate its modes of representation without surrendering to its ideological baggage. At the same time, what allows them to enter into this dialogic relationship is a dialectic that operates in their own culture. They can relate to their language and culture only as critical outsiders. They are critical of the provincial nature of their own culture, even as they relate to its cosmopolitan world views They value the internal critique of Western modernity, which thei cultures had developed over a period of time, but they distrust the grand narratives bred by the same powers of resistance. The act of translatio answers something deep within their ambivalent existence, as it embodi their complex relation with a fragmented society. Translation allow them to be 'within' their speech community and 'without it, at th same time. Their bilingual sensibility demanded a mode of expressio that could transit between native and alien traditions.

The modernist subject was fragmented and fractured in the Indi context, but not for reasons that constituted fragmented selves in t Western context. Colonial modernity operated within the Indian conte as a realm of desire which brought into being a new social imagina The formalist poetic of modernist poetry corresponded to an in world of desire that produced a language bristling with disquiet a angst. Translation enabled the displaced self of modernity to locate it in a language that was intimately private and, also, outspokenly pub The idiom of their expression afforded the possibility of self-knowl through epiphanies that brought 'momentary stays against confus (Ramanan 1996, 56). Thus, language became, for the modernists only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of re-cogni enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism, was postcolon its essence. The self-reflexive mo(ve)ment was also made possible b carrying across of not content or form, but an interior mode of that questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.

sem4 comparative study.pptx from Khushbumakwana3

The joys of mother

 This book is titled The Joys of Motherhood, but almost immediately Emecheta begins tracing how motherhood and suffering are inextricably linked. More importantly, the author explores how women are culturally conditioned to believe they are valuable only in conjunction with their children, in turn placing these women in a servant position from which they will not willfully leave because of their biological commitment to their own children. For Nnu Ego and Ona motherhood is anything but joyful. It's a constant reminder of their own seeming powerlessness and inferiority within the system.

Plagiarism and Academic Integrity

 This blog is about Thinking Activity on. Plagiarism and Academic Integrity. This task is assigned by  Megha ma'am of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji  Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called Research Methodology.

Plagiarism 

1. What is Plagiarism and what are its consequences?

👉DEFINITION OF PLAGIARISM

Derived from the Latin word plagiarius ("kidnapper"), to plagiarize means "to commit literary theft" and to "present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Plagiarism involves two kinds of wrongs, using another person's ideas, informat on, or expressions without acknowledging that person's work constitutes intellectual theft. Passing off another person's ideas, information, or expressions as your own to get a better grade or gain some other advantage Constitutes fraud Plagiarism is sometimes a moral and ethical offense rather than a legal one since some instances of plagiarism fall outside the scope of copyright infringement, a legal offense.

CONSEQUENCES OF PLAGIARISM

A complex society that depends on well-informed citizens strives to maintain high standards of quality and reliability for documents that are publicly circulated and used in government, business, industry. the professions, higher education, and the media. Because research has the power to affect opinions and actions, responsible writers compose their work with great care. They specify when they refer to another author's ideas, facts, and words, whether they want to agree with, object to, or analyze the source. This kind of documentation not only recognizes the work writers do, it also tends to discourage the circulation of error, by inviting readers to determine for themselves whether a reference to another text presents a reasonable account of what that text says Plagiarists undermine these important public values. Once detected, plagiarism in a work provokes skepticism and ave outrage among readers, whose trust in the author has been broken.

 The charge of plagiarism is a serious one for all writers. Plagiarists are often seen as incompetent-incapable of developing and expressing their own thoughts-or, worse, dishonest, willing to deceive others for personal gain. When professional writers, such as journalists, are exposed as plagiarists, they are likely to lose their jobs, and they are certain to suffer public embarrassment and loss of prestige. Almost always, the course of a writer's career is permanently affected by a single act of plagiarism. The serious consequences of plagiarism reflect the value the public places on trustworthy information.

Students exposed as plagiarists may suffer severe penalties, ranging from failure in the assignment or in the course to expulsion from school. This is because student plagiarism does considerable harm For one thing, it damages teachers' relationships with students, turn- ing teachers into detectives instead of mentors and fostering suspicion instead of trust. By undermining institutional standards for assigning grades and awarding degrees, student plagiarism also becomes a mat- ter of significance to the public. When graduates' skills and knowl- edge fail to match their grades, an institution's reputation is damaged. For example, no one would choose to be treated by a physician who obtained a medical degree by fraud. Finally, students who plagiarize harm themselves. They lose an important opportunity to learn how to write a research paper. Knowing how to collect and analyze infor mation and reshape it in essay form is essential to academic success This knowledge is also required in a wide range of careers in law, journalism, engineering, public policy, teaching, business, govern- mont, and not -for-profit organizations.

Plagiarism betrays the personal element in writing as well. Discussing the history of copyright. Mark Rose notes the tie between our writing and our sense of self-a tie that. he believes, influenced the idea that a piece of writing could belong to the person who wrote it. Rose says that our sense of ownership of the words we write "is deeply rooted in our conception of ourselves as individuals with at least a modest grade of singularity, some degree of personality" Gaining skill as a writer opens the door to learning more about yourself and to developing a personal voice and approach in your writing. It is essential for all student writers to understand how to avoid committing plagiarism.

2. Forms of Plagiarism ?

The most blatant form of plagiarism is to obtain and submit as your own a paper written by someone else. Other, less conspicuous forms of plagiarism include the failure to give appropriate acknowledgment when repeating or paraphrasing another's wording, when taking a particularly apt phrase, and when paraphrasing another's argument or presenting another's line of thinking.

Repeating or Paraphrasing Wording

Suppose, for example, that you want to use the material in the following passage, which appears on page 625 of an essay by Wendy Martin in the book Columbia Literary History of the United States.

ORIGINAL SOURCE

Some of Dickinson's most powerful poems express her firmly held conviction that life cannot be fully comprehended without an understanding of death.

If you write the following sentence without documentation, you have plagiarized because you borrowed another's wording without acknowledgment, even though you changed its form:

PLAGIARISM

Emily Dickinson firmly believed that we cannot fully comprehend life unless we also understand death.

But you may present the material if you cite your source: 

As Wendy Martin has suggested, Emily Dickinson firmly believed that we cannot fully comprehend life unless we also understand death.

The source is indicated, in accordance with MLA style, by the name of the and by a page reference in parentheses, preferably at the end of the sentence. The name refers the reader to the corresponding entry in the works-cited list, which appears at the end of the paper

Martin, Wendy "Emily Dickinson Columbia Literary History of the United Stores Emory Elliott, gen. ed. New York, Columbia UP 1988. 609-26 Print

Taking a Particularly Apt Phrase

ORIGINAL SOURCE

Everyone uses the word language and everybody these days talks about culture... "Languaculture" is a reminder. I hope, of the necessary connection between its two parts. (Michael Agar, Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation.

 If you write the following sentence without documentation, you have committed plagiarism because you borrowed without acknowledgment a term ("langusculture") invented by another writer

PLACIARISM

At the intersection of language and culture lies a concept that we might call" languaculture."

But you may present the material if you cite your source:

At the intersection of language and culture lies a concept that Michael Agar has called "languaculture".

In this revision, the author's name refers the reader to the full description of the work in the works-cited list at the end of the paper, and the parenthetical documentation identifies the location of the borrowed material in the work

Agar, Michael Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation, New York: Morrow, 1994. Print.

Paraphrasing an Argument or Presenting a Line of Thinking

ORIGINAL SOURCE

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest so- cial upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave Until now the human race has undergone two great waves of change, each one largely obliterating earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing them with the ways of life inconceivable to those who came before. The First Wave of change-the agricultural revolution-took thousands of years to play itself out. The Second Wave-the rise of industrial civilization-took a mere hundred years Today history is even more accelerative, and it is likely that the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades. If you write the following sentence without documentation, you have committed plagiarism because you borrowed another writer's line of thinking without acknowledgment:

PLAGIARISM

There have been two revolutionary periods of change in history: the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. The agricultural revolution determined the course of history for thousands of years; the industrial civilization lasted about a century. We are now on the threshold of a new period of revolutionary change, but this one may last for only a few decades.

But you may present the material if you cite your source:

According to Alvin Toffler, there have been two revolutionary periods of change in history: the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. The agricultural revolution determined the course of history for thousands of years; the industrial civilization lasted about a century. We are now on the threshold of a new period of revolutionary change, but this one may last for only a few decades.

In this revision, the author's name refers the reader to the full description of the work in the works-cited list at the end of the paper, and the parenthetical documentation identifies the location of the borrowed material in the work.

Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. 1980. New York Bantam, 1981. Print

Unit : 4 comparative Literature

This blog is about Thinking Activity on. articles presentations about comparative literature and Translation studies. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji  Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called Comparative literature and translation studies.

Article : 8 SITING TRANSLATION

HISTORY, POST - STRUCTURAL, AND  THE COLONIAL CONTEXT

TEJSWINI NIRNJANA

Abstract 

 Introduction:

 History in Translation

 The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, are boarded by native boys, begging, not for money, but for books.... Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were as tonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed for books by a troop of boys, who boarded the steamer from an obscure place, called Comercolly. A Plato was lying on the table, and one of the party asked a boy whether that would serve his purpose. "Oh yes," he exclaimed, "give me any book; all I want is a book." The gentleman at last hit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Re- view, and distributing the articles among them.

 Charles Trevelyan, (1807-1886) On the Education of the People of India

 SITUATING TRANSLATION

 In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation be- comes a significant site for raising questions of representa tion, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples races, languages. Since the practices of subjection/subjectif cation implicit in the colonial enterprise operate not merel through the coercive machinery of the imperial state but als through the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropolog philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colon "subject constructed through technologies or practices power/knowledge is brought into being within multipdiscourses and on multiple sites. One such site is translation. Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism.

Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Realty is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this real- ity; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.

Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philoso- phy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual net- work in which philosophy itself has been constituted.

By employing certain modes of representing the other-which it thereby also brings into being-translation reinforces hege- monic versions of the colonized, helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said calls representations, or objects without history.

Thomas Babington Macaulay's 183 dismissal of indigenous Indian learning as outdated and in relevant, which prepared the way for the introduction of E glish education.

Niranjana concern here is to explore the place of translat contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of i lated readings. I argue that the deployment of "trans in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a questioning some of the theoretical emphases of pos turalism.

into being hegemonic versions of the non-Western other. Be- cause they are underpinned by the powerful metaphysics of translation, these versions are seen even in the post-colonial context as faithful pictures of the decadence or depravity of "us natives." Through English education, which still legiti- mizes ruling-class power in formerly colonized countries, the dominant representations put into circulation by translation come to be seen as "natural" and "real." In order to challenge these representations, one must also examine the historicist tenets that endorse them. I will, therefore, discuss the perti- nence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing de- colonization, Given the enduring nature of Hegelian presen- tations of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could un- derwrite a new practice of translation.

In chapter 2, examine how "translation" works in the tra- ditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat mar- ginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and be- trayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representa- tion, translation studies fail to ask questions about the histor- icity of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representa- tion and the long-standing asymmetries of translation.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, my main focus is the work of Paul de Man Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). My analysis shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or as- sociated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or lit- erature in de Man, the problematics of representation and in- entionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist istoriography in Benjamin. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, I describe the ind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benja- nin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." My ar- ument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on translation.

tion are troped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a troping that goes unrecognized by both de Man and Derrida. (I use trope to indicate a metaphorizing that includes a displacement as well as a re-figuring.) The re- fusal of these major proponents of deconstruction to address the question of history in Benjamin suggests a critical draw- back in their theory and perhaps indicates why deconstruc tion has never addressed the problem of colonialism

In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Through- out the book, my discussion functions in all the registers philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose.

This work belongs to the larger context of the "crisis" in "English" and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decol- orizing world. The liberal humanist ideology that endorsed and was perpetuated by the civilizing mission of colonialism is still propagated by discourses of "literature" and "criti- cism" in the tradition of Arnold, Leavis, and Eliot. These dis- ciplines repress what Derrida, in the words of Heidegger, calls the logocentric or ontotheological metaphysics by which they are constituted, which involves all the traditional conceptions of representation, translation, reality, unity, and knowledge."

There have been few systematic attempts to question "En- glish," or literature, or criticism from a post-colonial perspective, let alone such a perspective that also incorporates in- sights from contemporary theory. In order to help challengethe complicity of these discourses with colonial and neo- colonial domination, I propose to make a modest beginning by examining the "uses" of translation. The rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where it has been used since the European Enlightenment to under- write practices of subjectification, especially for colonized peoples. Such a rethinking-a task of great urgency for a post- colonial theory attempting to make sense of "subjects" al- ready living "in translation," imaged and re-imaged by colonial ways of seeing-seeks to reclaim the notion of translation by deconstructing it and reinscribing its potential as a strat- egy of resistance.

Michel Foucault's no- tion; as the rest of this chapter will show, however, my use of the term is not exclusively dependent on the Foucauldian framework. Colonial relations of power have often been re- produced in conditions that can only be called neocolonial, and ex-colonials sometimes hunger for the "English book" as avidly as their ancestors.

By now it should be apparent that I use the word translation just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field." charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate_translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) at once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. So does Übersetzung (German). The French traducteur exists between interprète and truchement, an indication that we might fashion a translative practice between interpretation and reading, carrying a disruptive force much greater than the other two. The thrust of displacement is seen also in other Latin terms such as transponere, transferre, reddere, vertere. In my writing, trans- lation refers to 

(a) the problematic of translation that author- izes and is authorized by certain classical notions of represen- tation and reality; 

 (b) the problematic opened up by the post-structuralist critique of the earlier one, and that makes translation always the "more," or the supplement, in Derrida's sense. 

My study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap, this difference, to explore the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. My concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity in several kinds of writing on translation. Although Euro- American literary modernists such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett persistently foregrounded the question of translation, I have not discussed their work, since it has, in any case, been extensively dealt with by mainstream literary critics, and since the focus of my interrogation is not poetics but the discourses of what is today called "theory."

The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has ob- vious affinities with post-structuralism." Derrida's critique of representation, for example, allows us to question the notion of re-presentation and therefore the very notion of an origin or an original that needs to be re-presented. Derrida would argue that the "origin" is itself dispersed, its "identity" un- decidable. A representation thus does not re-present an "original"; rather, it re-presents that which is always already represented. The notion can be employed to undo hegemonic " representation" of "the Hindu", like , for example, those put forward by G.W.F. Hegel and James Mill.

 

 

I am sharing 'I am sharing 'Introduction _ History in Translation ' with you' with you.pptx from HinabaSarvaiya

https://janvinakum.blogspot.com/2022/12/sem4-comparative-study.html

Literature review

What is a literature review?

A literature review is a piece of academic writing demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on a specific topic placed in context. A literature review also includes a critical evaluation of the material; this is why it is called a literature review rather than a literature report. 

A literature review is a search and evaluation of the available literature in your given subject or chosen topic area. It documents the state of the art with respect to the subject or topic you are writing about.A literature review shows your readers that you have an in-depth grasp of your subject; and that you understand where your own research fits into and adds to an existing body of agreed knowledge.   

Unit 3 : Translation Studies

This blog is about Thinking Activity on. articles presentations about comparative literature and Translation studies. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji  Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper.

Unit 2 : Article 6 present and explain by Nilay Rathod and Emisha Ravni. Complete the article put presentation YouTube Video link and SlideShare link also. 

Translation and Literary History : An Indian View" 

- Ganesh Devy

💥ABSTRACT

•  'Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile' -J. Hillis Miller 
• Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin
•  Mythical exile - metaphorical translation
•  Translations are not accorded the same status as original work.
• Guilt of translation
• Strong sense of individuality Systematic philosophy & logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of 'the other'.
• The intrusion is desirable to the extent that it helps define one's own identity.
• Philosophy of individualism & Metaphysics of guilt, renders European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.

However, since translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. Most of the primary issues relating to form and meaning too have not been settled in relation to translation. 

No critic has taken any well-defined position alon the exact placement of translations in literary history.

 Do they belong to the history of the "T languages or do they belong to the history of the 'S' languages? Or do they form an independent tradition all by themselves? This ontological uncertainty which haunte translations has rendered translation study a haphazard activity which devotes too much energy discussing problems of conveying the original meaning in the altered structure.

Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations:

 (a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language system, (b) those from one language system to another language system, 

 (c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs. As he considers, theoretically, a complete semantic equivalence as the final objective of a translation act which is not possible-he asserts that poetry is untranslatable. He maintains that only a "creative translation is possible.

• Structural linguistic consider language as a system of signs, arbitrarily developed, that tries cover the entire range of significance available to the culture of that language.
• This theory naturally looks askance at translation which is an attempt to rescue / abstract significance from one system of signs and to wed it with another such system.

The concept of a translating consciousness and communities of people possessing are no mere notions to most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities do exist In India several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a continuous spectrum of signs and significance.

In Chomsky's linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Suuren linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL. and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: 

Translation is an operation performed on languages, a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another, clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language- general linguistic theory (Catford, 1965, p. vii). 

The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy :

1.comparative studies for Europe, 

2 Orientalism for the Orient, and anthropology for the rest of the world. 

3In its various phases of development modern Western linguistics has connections with all these .

After the discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism.

Translation can be seen as an attempt to bring a given language system in its entirety as close as possible to the areas of significance that it shares with another given language or languages. All translations operate within this shared area of significance. Such a notion may help us distinguish synonymy within one language and the shared significance between two related languages.

Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. It is a replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given language in another corresponding ordered sub-system of signs within a related language.

The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. And as in translation study so in literary history, the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily. The point that needs to be made is that probably the question of origins of literary traditions will have to be viewed differently by literary communities with 'translating consciousness. The fact that Indian literary communities do possess this translating consciousness can be brought home effectively by reminding ourselves that the very foundation of modern Indian literatures was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

conclusion

 Indian metaphysics believes in an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another. Repeated birth is the very substance of all animate creations. When the soul

passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian

philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. The soul, or significance, is not subject to the laws of temporality; and therefore significance, even literary significance, is ahistorical in Indian

view. Elements of plot, stories, characters, can be used again and again by new generations of writers because Indian literary theory does not lay undue emphasis on originality. If

originality were made a criterion of literary excellence, a majority of Indian classics would

fail the test. The true test is the writer's capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to

revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of

translation.

Translation and literary History An Indian View by Ganesh Devi.pptx from Nilay Rathod

On Translating a Tamil Poem

Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a corner of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. Of the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries Over two thousand Tamil poems of different lengths, by over four hundred poets , arranged in nine anthologies, have survived the vagaries of politics and wars: changes of taste and reli- gion; the crumbling of palm leaves; the errors and poverty of scribes, the ravages of insects, heat, cold, water, and fire.

The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport.of poems from classical Tamil to modern English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.

How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of translation? We may begin with the sounds. We find at once that the Sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n. ñ, n, n--three of which are not distinctive in English. How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n)? Tamil has long and short vowels, but English (or most English dialects) have diphthongs and glides. Tamil has double consonants that occur in English only across phrases like 'hottin' and `sir night. Such features are well illustrated by the above poem in Tamil. Tamil has no initial consonant clusters, but English abounds in them: 'school, scratch, splash, strike', etc. English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not. When we add up these myriad systemic differences, we cannot escape the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, semantic systems too are, as we shall see). Any unit we pick is defined by its relations to other units. So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another even in a related, culturally neighbour- ing language.

One can see right away that Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense as in English, eg., "Tom is a teacher po degrees of comparison in adjectives as in English, e.g., 'sweet, sweeter, sweetest, no articles, like 'a, an, the and so on Tamil expresses the semantic equivalents of these grammatical devices by various other means.

When we attend to syntax, we see that Tamil syntax is mostly left branching English syntax is, by and large, nightward Even a date like the 19th of June, 1988, when translated into Tamil, would look like 1988, June, 19. A phrase like

A  B  C  D  E

The man who came from Michigan 

would be 'Michigan from come-[past tense]-who man'

E  D  C  B  A

micigan ilirundu vand a manidan

The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one what is ABCDE in the one would be (by and large) EDCBA in Tamil.

If poetry is made out of, among other things, ' the best words in the best orders of the two languages are the mirror images of each other, what is a what is a translator to do ? 

Now, the classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy, a classification of reality, as part of its stock-in-trade. The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterised by hills seashores, agricultural areas. wastelands, and pastoral fields, each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural, trees, animals, tribes, customs, arts and instruments all these become part of the symbolic code for the poetry. 

Every landscape. with all its contents, is associated with a mood or phase of love or war The landscapes provide the signifiers. The five real landscapes of the Tamil country become. through this system, the interior landscapes of Tamil poetry, And each landscape or mood is also associated with a time of day and a season. Each landscape, along with its mood and the genre of poetry built around it, is usually named after a tree or flower of that region. For instance, the first poem we cited is a kurinci poem-kurindiss a plant that grows six thousand to eight thousand feet above sea level- representing the mountains, the might. the season of dew, the mood of first love, and the lovers' first secret sexual union. In the war poems the same landscape is the scene for another kind of clandestine action: a night attack on a fort set in the hills. The love poems and war poems are somewhat similarly classified.

would now like to take a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem. Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and my translation, quoted earlier in this essay.

The word annay (in spoken Tamil, amma), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I have translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girl friend.

English tries to preserve the order and syntax of theme, not single words:

 1) his land's water, followed by    

2) Leaf covered waterholes' 

3) Muddied by animals

If attempting a translation means attempting such an impossibly antricate task foredoomed to failure, what makes it possible at all? At least four things, maybe even four articles of faith, help the translator.

1. Universals. 

If there were no universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meagre kind would be possible I such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. They are at least the basic explanatory fictions of both linguistics and the study of literature Universals of Structure in both signifiers (eg. sound systems. grammar, semantics. rhetoric and poetics)and the signifieds (e.g..what poems are about, such as love or war, and what they mean within and across cultures), are necessary fictions the indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise.                                                

2 Interiorised contexts. 

However culture-specific the details of a poem are. poems like the ones I have been discussing interiorise the entire culture indeed, we know about the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems. Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the pos xt, using them to make lexicons and charming the

3. Systematicity 

The systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures. genres personae. etc. intermesh in a master-code, is a grea thelp. in entering this intricate yet lucid world of words. One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world Even if one chooses not to translate all the poems, one chooses poems that cluster together, that illuminate one another, so that allusions, contrasts, and collective designs are suggested . One's selection then be- -comes a metonymy for their world, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution. One learns one's lessons here not only from the Tamil arrangements but from Yeats, Blake, and Baudelaire. who all used arrangement as a poetic device.

 4. Structural mimicry. 

Yet, against all this background, the work of translating single poems in their particularity is the chief work of the translator. In this task, I believe, the structures of individual poems, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language.. rhetoric, and poetics, become the points of entry. The poetry and the significance reside in these figures and structures as much as in the untranslatable verbal textures. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items-not single words but phrases, sequences. sentences; not metrical units but rhythms, not morphology but syntactic patterns.

conclusion 

A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements were precise enough, the two tunnels would meet in the middle, making a single one. 'But what happens if they don't meet?' asked the emperor. The counsellors, in their wisdom, answered, 'If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one.' So too, if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in 'carrying the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.

On Translating a Tamil Poem - A. K. Ramanujan.pptx from Nirav Amreliya

Comparative Literature unit 1 : Article 3

Article : 3 Comparative Literature in India:  An Overview of its History by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, Jadavpur University

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN INDIA: overview of its history by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta from Jheel Barad

 

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 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 Beginning:

Contemporary literature as a discipline, there were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in India. The idea of world literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal. 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” (Dutta 124).

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. 

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. Bose, also well-known for his translations of Baudelaire, Hoelderlin and Kalidasa, wrote in his preface to 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, 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.

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. The first syllabus offered by the department in 1956 was quite challenging. There was a considerable section of Sanskrit literature along with Greek and Latin literature and then Bengali, its relation with Sanskrit literature and its general trajectory, and then a large section of European literature from the ancient to the modern period.

Indian Literature as Comparative Literature: 

It was actually 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? In fact the rallying point of Comparative Literature studies in the country was around this nodal component of Indian literary themes and forms, a focal point of engagement of the Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University. 

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. One also had to take a more inclusive look at histories of literature in different languages of India which were discrete histories based on language and did not do justice to the overlap between social formations, histories and languages, and to the multilingualism that formed the very core of Indian literature. 

Centers of Comparative Literature Studies: 

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 literatures 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.

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. 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.

There was again a shift during this period as the term “influence” began to be questioned by several scholars and particularly so in colonised countries where there was a tendency to look for influences even when they were non-existent. The focus therefore shifted to reception in books like the one by the present author entitled Bibliography of Reception of World Literature in Bengali Periodicals (1890 – 1990). In several articles as well, one on the reception of the novel in Bengal for instance, the receiver and not the emitter was in focus. The much talked about 'angst’ of the romantic poet was viewed negatively. The love for serenity and ‘health’ went back to the classical period and seemed an important value in the tradition. 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. Parsi theatre was rejuvenated by the enactment of the comedies of Shakespeare, political theatre groups appropriated his plays, while critics in different periods interpreted Shakespeare in accordance with the needs of the time. 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 travelled between countries, particularly between Europe and India.

Research directions:

The late nineties and the early twenties were a period of great expansion for Comparative Literature research in different parts of the country with the University Grants Commission opening its Special Assistance Programme for research in university departments. Many single literature departments were given grants under the programme to pursue studies in a comparative perspective. 

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. The need to foreground the relevance of studying literature was becoming more and more urgent in the face of a society that was all in favour of technology and the sciences and with decision makers in the realm of funding for higher education turning away from the humanities in general. A one-day colloquium on Kolkata’s Chinese connections was held in collaboration with the H.P. Biswas India-China Cultural Studies Centre of Jadavpur University and a seminar on framing intercultural studies between India and China was held with the Centre and the department of International Relations, Jadavpur University. 

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’s relationship with Translation Studies was not a new phenomenon for one or two departments or centres, such as the one in Hyderabad University, which was involved in doing translation studies for a considerable period. Today the university has a full-fledged Centre for Comparative Literature offering courses, and research in Translation Studies is an important area. 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. Other dimensions of literary studies are opened up when one sees translation as rewriting. Translation practices also bring students to engage deeply with other languages and other cultures, leading to insights into the nature of the comparatist’s preoccupations. The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University today has a Centre for the Translation of Indian Literatures.

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.

It is evident that Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in accordance with historical needs, both local and planetary. Several University departments today offer Comparative Literature separately at the M Phil level, while many others have courses in the discipline along with single literatures. 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." 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.

It's worth noting at this point that in the twenty-first century, Comparative Literature in the United States collaborated with two other related fields of study: Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. Different topics of interliterary studies are covered by translation studies. Translation histories can be used to identify literary relationships, while examination of translation actions can reveal key characteristics of both the source and target literary and cultural systems. In terms of Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature has always been interested in several facets of the subject, the most prominent of which being literature and its relationship to various arts. Cultural Studies may also play a role in a variety of multidisciplinary courses offered by the discipline.