Hello everyone,
This blog is a response to the task assigned by Professor Dilip Barad sir as part of thinking activity. In which I am going to share my understanding of the article which was discussed in the classroom.
What is comparative Literature?
Comparative Literature is traditionally known as the study of two or more literatures in comparison -English and German, and their multi-dimensional components which may encompass aspects such as the historical, gender, economic, cultural, social, philosophical, religious, and linguistic factors of the distinct cultures being analysed.
First Article:-
Abstract:-
Since the beginning of this century a group of scholars have been trying to project the idea of Indian literature, empha- sizing the underlying unity of themes and forms and attitudes among the various literatures produced in different Indian languages during the last three thousand years or so. This is partly a manifestation of the Indian intellectual's anxiousness to dis- cover the essential threads of unity in our multilingual and multi religious culture. Its impact on our literary studies, still fragmented into smaller linguistic units, is extremely limited, and certainly the idea of an Indian literature as conceived by Sri Aurobindo and others has failed to provide us with a criti- cal framework to study Indian literatures together, except in viewing Indian literatures as expressions of a common heritage. Nevertheless, it has encouraged some of our scholars to identify certain themes and ideas and to see their ramifications in differ- ent literatures of India. Though these attempts are in discovering the basic unity of the Indian creative mind, they are made at the risk of ignoring the plurality of expressions in our creative life.
Key points:-
The word 'comparative', however, has created some confusion and one wonders whether it is being used to lend some respectability to the study of Indian languages by linking it up with comparative literature, still a Western discipline, or indeed to indicate the proper framework within which Indian literatures can be studied. 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. If Indian literature means the sum total of literature written in Indian languages, then it can hardly serve as a significant literary category. In order to make it a significant category, Indian literature must be taken as a complex of literary relations and any study of Indian literature must reflect that. It is not an inquiry into their unity alone, but also a study in their diversity which enables one to understand the nature of literary facts.
We must try to find out the exact nature of the relation between comparative literature and comparative Indian literature. We must also try to see if there is an express necessity to study Indian literary relations within a comparative framework. Or, in other words, can an area of enquiry clearly demarcated by linguistic and political boundaries serve the basic demands of comparative literature? One can further ask, does not the area identified as Indian literature impose certain restrictions on the investigator and precondition him? Does it not, for example, make it obligatory for him to look for certain things because of an imposed expectancy of parallels and analogies? And, finally, why should a scholar of literature prefer Indian literature to comparative literature, which promises a greater scope and a wider perspective?
Comparative literature emerged as a new discipline to counteract the notion of the autonomy of national literatures. The minimum requisite of a comparative study is to start with at least two literatures, but this binary concern is hardly sufficient to meet the full demands of
comparative literature, which views literatures produced in all languages and in all countries as an indivisible whole. A comparator has to extend the area of investigation not only beyond one language and literature, but to as many as possible. The main dilemma of the comparatist, then, is to reconcile his idea of literature as a single universe of verbal expression with his ability to study it in its totality.
A comparatist is hardly in a position to exercise any aesthetic judgement in choosing the best works in all the languages of the world. He is concerned mainly with the relationships, the resemblances and differences between national literatures; with their convergences and divergences.But at the same time he wants to arrive at a certain general understanding of literary activities of man and to help create a universal poetics. Goethe wanted the common reader to come out of the narrow confines of his language and geography and to enjoy the finest achievements of man.
The comparatist also wants to come out of the confines of language and geography, but not so much to identify the best in all literatures as to understand the relationships between literatures in their totality. His goal too is "world literature', not in the sense that Goethe or Rabindranath Tagore had used it, but in the sense of all literary traditions. The comparatist knows that comparative literature is a method of investigation, while world literature, as Goethe meant, is a body of valuable literary works.
Comparative literature differs from the study of single literatures not in method, but in matter, attitude and perspective. One can argue that comparative Western literature is the study of different national literatures, while comparative Indian literature is the study of literatures of one nation, or, according to some, of one national literature written in many languages.
The and the Americans use the same language but they have different national literatures. Yet no comparatist would regard a study of British literature and American literature as comparative literature proper. Do French writings in Belgium, Switzerland and Canada form a part of French literature? Are Indian English writings a part of English literature? What will be our criterion, language or nationality? There is hardly any dependable criterion.
The binary dimensions of comparative literature will be determined at times in terms of nationality and culture, and at other times in terms of linguistic history. Political boundaries are flexible and are redrawn quite often.Multilingualism is a fact of Indian society and of Indian literature. This multilingualism appears bewildering to the foreign students of India, and certainly occasions a grave concern in our politicians. But the literary history of India is a history of multilingual literary activity. Not only have different languages interacted with each other, giving rise to new literary styles, such as manipravalam, but they have also given birth to a new language and literature, such as Urdu.
In a recent article, 'Towards Comparative Indian Literature', Amiya Dev said, 'Comparison is the right reason for us be- cause, one, we are multilingual, and two, we are Third World.'s The fact of multilingualism is now more or less appreciated by Indian scholars. The Third World situation that lends Indian comparative literature a greater validity may need further comments. Professor Dev points out in this paper that the tools of Western comparison are hardly adequate to deal with our literary situation. For example, the categories 'influence' and 'imitation' and 'reception' and 'survival' need serious modification to suit the Third World literary situation. 'Influence' in our case is not confined to two authors or two texts, but is of entire literature upon each other, and involves larger questions of socio-political implications. In order to make literary studies free from these psychological restrictions, we need to look at our literature from within, so that we can also respond to the literature of other parts of the world without any inhibition or prejudice. Our idea of comparative literature will emerge only when we take into account the historical situation in which we are placed. Our journey is not from comparative literature to comparative Indian literature, but from comparative Indian literature to comparative literature.
Video recording of this article:-
Second Article:-
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 inter literariness. It is there 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.
In this article, he discussed an a priori location of comparative literature with regard to aspects of diversity and unity in India, a country of immense linguistic diversity and, thus, a country of many literatures. Based on history, ideology, and often on politics, scholars of literature argue either for a unity of Indian literature or for a diversity and distinctness of the literatures of India. Instead of this binary approach, his proposal involves a particular view of the discipline of comparative literature, because he argues that in the case of India the study of literature should involve the notion of the interliterary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction.
He starts with a brief account of linguistic diversity. We are all aware that the so-called major Indian literatures are ancient - two of them - Sanskrit and Tamil ancient in the sense of Antiquity while the rest of an average age of eight to nine hundred years except one recent arrival in the nineteenth century as an outcome of the colonial Western impact Indian English. We also know that although some of these literatures are more substantial than others and contain greater complexities, no further gradation into major and minor major ones is usually made.
This single-focus perspective is a result of both a colonial and a post-colonial perspective, the latter found in the motto of the Sahitya Akademi: "Indian literature is one thought written in many languages" - Radhakrishnan.
Gurbhagat Singh who has been discussing the notion of "differential multilogue". He does not accept the idea of Indian literature as such but opts for the designation of literatures produced in India. 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. That is, the "site" or "location" of theory and of the theorist are important factors here.
Jaidev's concept of oneness provides an ambience for particular concerns with regard to cultural and artistic expression such as the case of language overlaps, the bi- and multilinguality of authors and their readership, openness to different genres, the sharing of themes based in similar social and historical experiences, emphasis on the oral and performing modes of cultural and artistic transmission, and the ease of inter-translatability. On the other hand, these characteristics of Indian cultural commonalities Jaidev suggests in turn are rooted in a situs of the premodern age of Indian literatures that is, in periods prior to the advent of print. Where Jaidev's structure is applicable, instead, is our contemporary literature in India because it is here that the danger of a oneness construction -- the process of nation-state construction -- looms.
Another example where nation-state orientation and nation-state cultural and literary identity construction is discussed in detail is 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 comprising each of the twenty-two literatures recognized by the Sahitya Akademi.
The notion of an "English" archive of Indian literature came about two decades ago by the suggestion of V.K. Gokak and Sujit Mukherjee who were speaking of an Indo-English corpus of literature that was created out of English translations of major texts from major Indian languages. Gokak and Mukherjee suggested the canonization of their proposal by inserting the Indo-English corpus into university curricula. It was along these lines of ideology and political economy that a decade ago recommendations were made by a government committee to institute a Master's program in Indian literature following an undergraduate degree in any single Indian literature.
Ahmad's concern is with the hegemony of English, although he does not suggest its abolition in a way which would be close to Ngugi's arguments. On the other hand, Gokak, Mukherjee, and Motilal Jotwani who was a committee member for drafting, the above circular suggested to implement English as a function, owing to the ever-growing corpus of translations from the various Indian literatures into English, thus making this new corpus of Indo-English literature available to all. In turn, this new corpus would suggest an Indian community resulting in a more or less homogeneous Indian literature. In addition to the argument against this construction of a national literature advanced by Ahmad, there are other problems with the notion and its implementation. It is true that the ideal of one language in India has been made real by now by ideological and political mechanisms. The official national language is Hindi and if literary texts from the other languages could be translated into Hindi, we could possibly arrive at a national Indian literature. However, in this case we would again arrive at a hegemonizing situation. On the other hand, it is clear that in the realm of education, English is the largest single language program in our colleges and universities.
The intern literary condition of India, we should remember, reaches back much further than its manuscript or print culture. For instance, bhakti - a popular religious movement as both theme and social issue stretching from the eighth to the eighteenth century had a variety of textual manifestations in various Indian languages. There are many other similar literary and cultural textualities in India whose nature, while manifest in different other systems of a similar nature, are based primarily on themes or genres, forms and structures observable in historiography. It is possible, in other words, to think of a series of such sub-systems in which the individual literatures of India have been interrelated with one another over the ages. For example, 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.
With regard to the inherently and implicitly advantageous discipline of comparative literature it is interesting that the Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi - a supporter of the unity approach was the first president of the Indian National Comparative Literature Association, while the Kannada writer U.R. Anantha Murthy is the current president of the Comparative Literature Association of India in addition to being the president of Sahitya Akademi. 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. However, today, with a focus on reception and the theoretical premises offered by the notion of the interliterary process, Dev understands Indian literature as ever in the making.
Conclusion:-
Finally, Obviously, the problems of unity and diversity are not unique to India. However, in keeping with Dev's proposal that the status of both theorist and theory is an important issue, he demonstrates here the application of the proposal. If he had discussed, for instance, Canadian diversity, it would have been from the outside, that is, from an Indian situs. He is 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. He is suggesting that we should first look at ourselves and try to understand our own situations as thoroughly as possible. Let us first give full shape to our own comparative literature and then we will formulate a comparative literature of diversity in general.
Video recording of this Article:-
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