Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss briefly about Three articles, 1) Sisir Kumar Das, ‘Why Comparative Indian Literature? (ed. Dev and Das,1989), 2) Amiya Dev, "Comparative Literature in India.", 3) Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, “Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History”, Comparative Literature & World Literature, Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2016.
Article - 1
1) ‘Why Comparative Indian Literature? (ed. Dev and Das,1989) by Sisir Kumar Das
Article - 2
2) Amiya Dev, "Comparative Literature in India."
Watch video explanation of this essay here,
About Amiya Dev
Amiya Dev was Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and has written widely in Bengali and English including biographies of two major Bengali poets after Tagore, and edited and co-edited a number of volumes, including Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice with Sisir Kumar Das, The Renewal of Song: Renovation in Lyric Conception and Practice with Earl Roy Miner, and Epic and Other Higher Narratives: Essays in Intercultural Studies with Steven Shankman for International Comparative Literature Association of which he is a former Vice-President. He retired as Vice-Chancellor of Vidyasagar University.
Abstract
The article 'Comparative Literature in India' is based on discussion that India has various languages and it's literature. Dev wrote that in India we find diversity but and unity at same time. He also wrote that to call Indian literature singular is problematic and to consider Indian literature Plural is equally problematic. Amiya Dev's Article compares the Unity and diversity thesis, and identify the relationship between Indian Commonality and Difference as the prime site of Comparative literature in India. Along with this Dev also examin The search of common denominator and a possible pattern of togetherness. He further underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of inter-literariness. Indian literature is not fixed but it is on going and changeable.
Detailed points from article
In his article amiya dev discuss about comparative literature along with diversity and unity in India. India is a country of immense linguistic diversity and a country of many literature. Amiya Dev notes that previous censues in 1961 and 1971 recorded a total of 1,652 languages while in the last census of 1981 some 221 spoken language were recorded excluding languages of speakers totalling less than 10,000. According to census and Sahitya Academy total 22 major languages exists in India and literature in all these languages. Main moto of Sahitya Akademi is :
"Indian Literature is one though written in many Languages". (Radhakrishnan)
But the argument was opposed by scholars because they thought a country should be understood as a country with literature (in the plural). Presently, a different kind of resistance has emerged to the unity thesis in the form of what may be called "hegemonic apprehensions." In other words, a cultural relativist analogy is implied here, difference is underlined and corroborated by the fact that both writers and readers of particular and individual literatures are overwhelmingly concerned with their own literature and own literature only.It is from this perspective the Academy's motto "Indian literature is one though written in many languages," the retort is "Indian literature is one because it is written in many languages."
Further Amiya Dev mentioned Gurbhagat Singh who has been discussing the notion of "differential multilogue". Further he rejects the notion of Indian Literature because it promots 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. For signh, comparative literature is thus an exercise in differential multilogue. Singh's notion of differential multilogue reflects a poststructuralist trend in Indian discourse. He consider Indian Literature as one. Thus it cannot accept the single - Focus category "Indian" without Deconstructing its accompanying politics.
Ironically, Indian poststructuralism inflicts upon itself a sameness with difference- speakers elsewhere and does not seem to recognize that difference-speaking in India may be different from difference-speaking elsewhere. At the same time, this poststructuralism does not seem to recognize that given all the differences pertaining to the Indian experience, underlying it and tying together the different entities, there may be a commonality, a sensus communis of a broadly cultural kind. Further in essay we find reference of Javed talk about cultural differential approach. He criticising the fad of existentialist aestheticism in some contemporary Indian Fiction. Jaidev's notion of an Indian sensus communis is instances of "national" and racial image formations which suggest homogeneity and result in cultural stereotyping. Singh's Differential multilogue or Javed's differential approach bring the question of situs and theory in the mind of Amiya Dev. Further Amiya Dev says that situs is as important as theorization.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, Jaidev suggests these characteristics of Indian cultural commonalities are rooted in a situs of the premodern age of Indian literatures.
Javed's structure is considered as a applicable, instead, is our contemporary literature in India because it is here that the danger of oneness construction.
Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures describes the construct of a "syndicated" Indian literature that suggests an aggregate and unsatisfactory categorization of Indian literature. Ahmad argues 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 literature comprising each of the twenty-two literatures recognized by the Sahitya Akademi.An "Indian" archive of literature as represented by an "English" archive -- while non-hegemonic 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.
Further V. K. Gokak and Sujit Mukherjee who were speaking of an Indo-English corpus of literature that was created out of English translations of major texts from major Indian languages.Ahmad's concern is with the hegemony of English, although he does not suggest its abolition in a way which would be close to Ngugi's arguments. 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.
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. He suggests that Indian literature is neither "one" nor "many" but rather a systemic whole where many subsystems interact towards one in a continuous and never-ending dialectic.such a systematic view of Indian literature predicates that we take all Indian literatures together.
Same 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. The approach Das has taken is methodologically pragmatic. 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.
Das does not call himself a Comparaist and does not locate the project in that discipline, his work is comparatist. In many ways, Das's work is similar to K. M. George's two volume comparative Indian Literature of 1984-85 that was not as comprehensive as Das's : it is only dealt with fifteen literatures and that too in limited way.George's two volumes was that although they were titled Comparative Indian Literature, there was no comparison built into the findings and the fifteen individual literatures were placed simply side by side.
The Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi -- a supporter of the unity approach -- was the first president of the Indian National Comparative Literature Association, and 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.Comparatists reflect the binary approach to the question of Indian literature as explained above. However, the Association also reflects a move toward a dialectic. Comparative literature allows for a view of Indian literature in the context of unity and diversity in a dialectical interliterary process and situation.
At last Amya Dev end his essay with the lines that,
'Comparative literature has taught us not to take comparison literary and it also taught us that theory formation in literary history is not universally tenable.'
Article - 3
'Comparative literature in India : An overview of its history.' By Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta
I hope this blog will be useful to you, Thank you.
References
thanks for such an informative blog.
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