Study of “Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History” by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta.
Name - Himanshi Parmar
Semester - 4 (Four)
Roll Number - 8
Email. Id. - himanshiparmar3004@gmail.com
Enrollment number - 4069206420210025
Paper number - 208
Paper name - Comparative Literature & Translation Studies
Subject Code - 22415
What is Comparative Studies?
The studies which reveal similarities or differences between different markets, countries, aspects of companies, etc. They help to illustrate links and dissimilarities between these different elements. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary,
"Comparative Literature is the study of the interrelationship of the literature of two or more national cultures, usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other."
In another words Comparative Literature is traditionally known as the study of two or more literatures in comparison (English and German, for example) 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 analyzed.
Comparative Literature focuses on the study of literature from different cultures, nations, and genres, and explores relationships between literature and other forms of cultural expression. Comparative Literature poses such questions as, What is the place of literature in society? How does literature as a form change over time, and in relation to other forms of making art? How does literature shape and respond to values, social movements, or political contexts?
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 literature 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.
Entire article was divided into seven parts.
1) The Beginning
2) Indian literature as a comparative literature.
3) Centers of comparative literature studies.
4) Reconfiguration of areas of comparison.
5) Research Directions
6) Interface with translation studies and cultural studies.
7) Non - Hierarchical Connectivity.
1) The Beginning
There were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in India, both from the point of view of its relation with literatures from other parts of the world particularly Persian, Arabic and English and from the perspective of inter-Indian literary studies, the multilingual context facilitating a seamless journey from and between literatures written in different languages. 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 pretext to the establishment of the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year in which the university started functioning.
Tagore used the word “visvasahitya” (world literature), and stated that the word was generally termed “comparative literature”. His idea of “visvasahitya” was complex, marked by a sense of a community of artists as workers building together an edifice, that of world literature. 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 pretext to the establishment of the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year in which the university started functioning.
Tagore (639) used the word “visvasahitya” (world literature), and stated that the word was generally termed “comparative literature”. Buddhadeva Bose brought in a very significant modern poet, Sudhindranath Dutta, also well-known for his translation of Mallarmé and his erudition both in the Indian and the Western context, to teach in the department of Comparative Literature. Bose was again a poet, Naresh Guha, who remained as Chairperson of the department for two decades. In an interview given to us in his last years he emphasized the role of the department in fostering an intensely creative environment.
2) Indian Literature as Comparative Literature
Indian literature entered the syllabus in a fairly substantial manner but not from the point of view of asserting national identity.Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”. A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held in Delhi University organized by Nagendra, a writer-critic who taught in the Hindi department of Delhi University and a volume entitled Comparative Literature was published in 1977. However, it was only in 1994 that an MA course in Comparative Indian Literature began in the department. As stated earlier the juxtaposition of different canons had led to the questioning of universalist canons right from the beginning of comparative studies in India and now with the focus shifting to Indian literature, and in some instances to literatures from the Southern part of the globe, one moved further away from subscribing to a priori questions related to canon formation.
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. Aijaz Ahmad,says that “the dialectic of unity and difference through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print” (Ahmad 265).
Sisir Kumar Das, a faculty member at the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, with support from other members of the department and the Sahitya Akademi. The department continues to develop teaching material on various aspects of Indian literature from a comparative perspective, beginning from language origins, manuscript cultures,performative traditions along with painting, sculpture and
architecture, the history of print culture and questions related to modernity. T.S. Satyanath developed the theory of a scripto-centric, body-centric and phono-centric study of texts in the medieval period leading a number of researchers in the department to look for continuities and interventions in the tradition that would again lead to pluralist epistemologies in the study of Indian literature and culture.
3) Centres of Comparative Literature Studies
Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centres and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharati dasam University, Kottayam and Pondicherry. The Comparative Literary Studies department was established in the School of Tamil Studies in Madurai Kamaraj University.In Tamil, apart from studies related to the comparison of texts from two different cultures, Classical Tamil texts were compared with texts from the Greek, Latin and Japanese counterpart traditions. Punjabi University, Patiala, Dibrugarh University, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Sambalpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. In 1986 a new full fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where focus was on Indian literatures in Western India. Also in 1999 a department of Dravidian Comparative Literature and Philosophy was established in Dravidian University, Kuppam.
The two merged in 1992 and the Comparative Literature Association of India was formed, which today has more than a thousand members. 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.
4)Reconfiguration of areas of comparison
In the last years of the seventies, along with Indian literatures, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude became a part of the syllabus with a few other texts from Latin American Literatures and then Literatures from African countries were included. During the nineties, Area Studies papers on African, Latin American, Canadian literatures and literature of Bangladesh were introduced.Area studies components in Chinese and Japanese literatures were also framed, but it was not possible to offer the courses in the absence of specialized faculty members.Components from the diverse Area Studies could possibly have been included as integrated parts of the main curriculum.Right from the beginning of the discipline in India, cross-cultural relations between Indian literatures and European and American literatures had been in focus.
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). Reception studies also pointed to historical realities determining conditions of acceptability and hence to complex configurations between literature and history. To give an instance, it seemed that romanticism of a particular kind had an easy access into the realm of Bengali literature, but it was a romanticism that did not accept many of the European elements. The translation of several texts from Sanskrit into German played a role in the emergence of the Romantic movement and then in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Romanticism came back to India, though in different shades.
At Jadavpur, under the guidance of Amiya Dev, Master’s syllabus was designed that had genres, themes and literary historiography as its core area and this model was more or less followed in many new departments of comparative literature that would come up later. Two groups of papers were offered, one with components from Indian literature at the centre and the other with Western literature.The division was not a happy one as students wanted to engage with both in order to have nuanced understandings of the interplay between local, national and transnational forces. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, were taken up, or sometimes in courses entitled Literary Transactions one looked more precisely at the tradition of Reason and Rationalism in European and Indian literatures of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
5)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. The English department of Calcutta University for instance, received assistance to pursue research on literary relations between Europe and India in the nineteenth century. 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 notion of derived categories for instance, was quite often charged with a host of other significations, as for example, in the case of Romanticism as a term for periodization. Romanticism had very different dimensions in the Indian context and necessitated a different reading within a continuum that situated it often at the source of modernity.
Under the Special Assistance programme the department also conducted eight inter-literary translation workshops translating texts from one Indian language to another without the mediation of English, a process not very common in the field of translation at the time. Among the projects planned under the inter-Asian series was one on travelogues from Bengal to Asian countries and here an annotated bibliography that could provide an initial foundation for the study of inter literary relations was published. A second project involved working on the image of Burma in Bengali and Oriya literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Under a different grant, the tradition of Bhakti and Sufi were studied together and a volume was published.
6)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.Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies.The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University today has a Centre for the Translation of Indian Literatures.Comparative Literature also offer modules on Comparative Cultural Studies where key texts in the global field are juxtaposed with related texts from the Indian context. MPhil course on the subject at Jadavpur University highlights changing marginalities, ‘subcultures’ and movements in relation to contemporary nationalisms and globalization, and also sexualities, gender and the politics of identity. Cultural Studies may also be a key component in different kinds of interdisciplinary courses within the discipline.
Delhi University takes up the theme of city and village in Indian literature and goes into representations of human habitat systems and ecology in literature, looks for concepts and terms for such settlements, goes into archaeological evidences and the accounts of travellers from Greece, China, Persia and Portugal to demonstrate the differences that exist at levels of perception and ideological positions.
7)Non-hierarchical connectivity
Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in accordance with historical needs, both local and planetary. As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with issues that would lead to the enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings. Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called “co-construction”,a process anchored in “subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction” (Sangari 50). comparators 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.
Work Cited
“Comparative.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam Webster,https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/comparative.
Subha Dasgupta, Chakraborty. “Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of Its History.” cwliterature.org, Google , May 2016,http://cwliterature.org/uploadfile/2016/0711/20160711020042997.pdf.
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