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: 1.
1,Why Comparative Indian Literature?
This Article is explained by Divya Sheta and Amena, students of the English department MKBU.
Abstract:
Comparative Literature is an interdisciplinary field; it studies literature across national borders, across time period, across language, across genes, across boundaries. It provides geographically and chronologically a broader perspective on the literary and cultural achievement of human kind than is possible from within a single literature alone. Comparative Literature provides readers a serious, sustained understanding of cultures beyond their own and helps them to become better global citizens.
Key Arguments:
- Can an area of enquiry clearly demarcated by linguistic and political boundaries serve the basic demands of comparative literature?
- Does not the area identified as Indian literature impose certain restrictions on the investigator and precondition him?
- Why should a scholar of literature prefer Indian literature to comparative literature, which promises a greater scope and a wider perspective?
Why Comparative Literature? by Sisir Kumar Das
Das states that "Indian Literature or Literary studies still fragment into smaller linguistic units as we know the reason is multilinguality and multi religion or multicultural_nation which are extremely limited.
Indo-Anglian writers such as Sri Aurobindo and others have failed to provide us with a certain critical framework to study Indian literature together.
The study of the Indian languages by linking it with comparative literature still indeed to indicate the proper framework within which Indian literature can be studied.
The term 'Comparative Indian Literature' is not self-explanatory and not only to define the term Indian literature but also to define the necessity of the qualifier.
Das marked that we must try to find out the exact nature of relation between comparative Literature and Indian comparative literature and also try to see it as an express necessity to study literary relation within a comparative framework.
The term Comparative Indian literature, like comparative literature, is not self explanatory, and it is necessary not only to define the term ' Indian literature' but also to defend the necessity of the qualifier. Comparative literature emerged as a new discipline to counterct the notion of the autonomy of national literature. This is one of the reasons why every comparatist is so anxious to make a serious distinction between comparative literature and world literature.
The need for an academic enquiry into this condition of ‘comparitivism’ emerged in French and the Russian academic circles during the 1900s, wherein debates between General and Comparative Literature surfaced along with engagements related to ‘form’ and ‘content’. During the 19th century the need to construct national identities was felt across America, Greece, Poland, France and Italy, and ‘World Literature’ emerged as an expression and means of identifying with other national identities, spearheaded by Goethe who called it ‘Weltliteratur’. However, it must be noted that World Literature refers to a taxonomical category, whereby the collection of the finest specimens of literary productions across the world were being assimilated according to European sensibilities. Various ways in which Shakespeare was made available to British India and Africa would lead one to explore the ways in which his plays have been adapted or translated by the readers, which forms an important illustration of Reception Studies. Comparative Literature as a discipline was formed to provide its practitioners the opportunity to move beyond the boundaries of English and engage with the variety of literatures found in other European languages. The course was designed in such a manner that students gained an understanding of one regional language, Bangla and one classical language, Sanskrit, and later Tamil, the primary idea being to first situate other Englishes across the globe, and the second to have access to two distinct language families within India, via which other languages could also be approached.
Comparative Indian literature as a valid area of Comparative literature, I do so not because comparative parative literature in the West is exclusively a study of Western literature. The lesson we must learn from the Western comparatist is the lesson of vigilance against dilettantism.
In a recent article, "Towards Comparative Indian Literature', Amiya Dev said, 'Comparison is right reason for us because, one, we are multilingual and two, we are Third World. The fact of multilingualism is now more or less appreciated by Indian scholars.
In order to make literaty studies free from these psychological restrictions, we need to look at our literatures from whithin, so that we can also respond to the literature of other parts of the world without any inhibition or prejudice. Our journey is not from comparative literature to Comparative Indian literature, but from comparative Indian literature to Comparative literature.
Conclusion:
After concluding this article we examine that 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. It is here 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.
This Article is explained by Divya Parmar and Mayuri Pandya, students of the English department MKBU.
Abstract:
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Such a characterization, he urges, either overlooks or obscures manifest interrelations and affinities. His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis, and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparative literature in India. He surveys the current scholarly and intellectual positions on unity and diversity and looks into the post-structuralist doubt of homogenization of differences in the name of unity. Dev also examines the search for common denominators and a possible pattern of togetherness and Dev underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of interliterariness. It is t/here 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 argument:
A priori location of comparative literature with regard to aspects of diversity and unity in India.
Interliterary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction Linguistic diversity.
Is Indian literature, in singular, a valid category, or are we rather to speak of Indian literature in the plural?
Comparative Literature in India By Aniya Dev
In this article, he discuss an apriori placement of comparative literature in terms of features of diversity and unity in India, a country with enormous language diversity and consequently various literatures. Because I believe that in the case of India, the study of literature should include the notion of the interliterary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction, my proposal entails a special view of the discipline of comparative literature. Let me start with a quick overview of linguistic diversity: prior censuses in 1961 and 1971 reported a total of 1,652 languages, while the most recent census in 1981 documented 221 spoken languages (excluding languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers).Of course, many of the 221 language groups are small, and only the eighteen major languages named in the Indian Constitution account for the majority of the population's speakers. In addition to the eighteen languages listed in the Constitution, the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) has recognised four additional languages for their literary significance (Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Indian English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kankani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, This number of twenty-two major languages and literatures, however, is misleading because secondary school and university curriculum sometimes incorporate additional languages spoken in the vicinity of the educational institution.
Gurbhagat Singh who has been discussing the notion of "differential multilogue" (see Singh). 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. With regard to the history of comparative literature as a discipline, he rejects both the French and the American schools as well as the idea of Goethe's Weltliteratur. Instead, he argues for a celebration of difference and has anticipated Charles Bernheimer's much discussed Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. For Singh, comparative literature is thus an exercise in differential multilogue. His insistence on the plurality of logoi is particularly interesting because it takes us beyond the notion of dialogue, a notion that comparative literature is still confined to. Singh's proposal of differential multilogue as a program will perhaps enable us to understand Indian diversity without sacrificing the individualities of the particulars. Singh's notion of differential multilogue reflects a poststructuralist trend in Indian discourse today, a trend that manifests itself among others by a suspicion of the designation of Indian literatures as one. One of the reasons for this suspicion is that the key to the notion is held centrally, whether by an institution or a synod of experts leading to an accumulation of power. Poststructuralism is by no means purist; what matters more than anything else is the historical perspective that upholds difference.
Jaidev, criticising the fad of existentialist aestheticism in some contemporary Indian fiction, develops an argument for this cultural differential approach. However, and importantly, Jaidev's notion of an Indian sensus communis is not that routine Indianness which we often encounter from our cultural ambassadors or in the West, that is, those instances of "national" and racial image formations which suggest homogeneity and result in cultural stereotyping. The concept of an Indian sensus communis in the context of Singh's differential multilogue or Jaidev's differential approach brings me to the question of situs and theory.
Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Ahmad describes the construct of a "syndicated" Indian literature that suggests an aggregate and unsatisfactory categorization of Indian literature. Ahmad also rules out the often argued analogy of Indian literature with that of European literature by arguing that the notion of "European literature" is at best an umbrella designation and at worst a pedagogical imposition while Indian literature is classifiable and categorizable. 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. In Ahmad's argumentation, the problem is that in the "Indian" archive of literature, Indianness ultimately proves limited when compared with the differential litera-ture comprised in each of the twenty-two literatures recognized by the Sahitya Akademi.
Rather, they constitute twenty-two different archives. An "Indian" archive of literature as represented by an "English" archive -- while non-hegemonious on the one hand by
removal from a differential archive but hegemonizing by a latent colonial attitude on the other also reflects the official language policy of the government: English, while not included in the Indian Constitution, is still recognized as a lingua franca of government, education, etc. For example, until recently the government sponsored the National Book Trust, an entity entrusted with the task of inter-Indian translation by a process of a first translation into English followed by translation from that into the other languages. Goethe's original idea of Weltliteratur and its use by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.
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. Such a systemic view of Indian literature predicates that we take all Indian literatures together, age by age, and view them comparatively. And this is the route of literary history Sisir Kumar Das has taken with his planned ten-volume project, A History of Indian Literature, whose first volume, 1800-1910: Western Impact / Indian Response, appeared in 1991.
However, the underlying and most important finding is a pattern of commonality in nineteenth-century Indian literatures. Das's work on the literatures of the nineteenth century in India does not designate this Indian literature a category by itself. Rather, the work suggests a rationale for the proposed research, the objective being to establish whether a pattern can be found through the ages. One age's pattern may not be the same as another age's and this obviously preempts any given unity of Indian literature. Thus, Das's method and results to date show that Indian literature is neither a unity nor is it a total differential.
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.
The discipline of comparative literature, that is, its institutional manifestation as in the national association of comparatists reflects the binary approach to the question of Indian literature as I explained above. However, the Association also reflects a move toward a dialectic. This is manifest in the fact that Murthy's approach concerns a subtle move away from the routine unity approach and towards aspects of inter-Indian reading. In other words, the method of Comparative Literature allows for a view of Indian literature in the context of unity and diversity in a dialectical interliterary process and situation. There was a time when I spoke in terms of an extra consciousness on the part of individual langua-ge writers: for Bengali literature, for instance, I saw a Bengali+, for Hindi literature a Hindi+, for Tamil literature a Tamil+, etc.
Conclusion:
Thus, inter-Indian reception presupposes that our situs is in our first text, that is, first language literature. This is crucial for there is no no-man'sland or neutral territory between Indian literatures. Finally, let me assure you that, obviously, the problematics of unity and diversity are not unique to India. However, in keeping with my proposal that the situs of both theorist and theory is an important issue, I demonstrate here the application of the proposal. If I had discussed, for instance, Canadian diversity, it would have been from the outside, that is, from an Indian situs. I am not suggesting extreme relativism, but 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.
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