Comparative Literature

 Hello friends 

I am Bhavna Sosa, from department of English MK Bhavnagar University. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir. This thinking activity about  Comparative Literature.

What is comparative literature?

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature performs a role similar to that of the study of international relations but works with languages and artistic traditions, so as to understand cultures from the inside.While most frequently practised with works of different languages, comparative literature may also be performed on works of the same language if the works originate from different nations or cultures in which that language is spoken.

First article: Why Comparative  Indian Literature?

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 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.

But it is not the precision of the nomenclature alone which demands our attention. 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. Whatever  be his professed aim, he has to make compromises and to delimit his area of investigation  according  to his ability. 

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 knows that comparative literature is a method of investigation,  while world literature,  as Goethe meant,  is a  body of valuable literary works.

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. 

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.  Is not comparative Indian literature, then, a retrograde step so far as the basic premise of comparative literature is concerned?

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. There is  hardly any other society we know of where languages belonging to so many families have operated side by side and interacted with each other for so many centuries.

Conclusion:

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.

Second article:  Comparative Literature and Culture 

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 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. 

Key points 

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.

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. 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. 

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. Commonality and the ones he is suggesting here as a primary situs of the Indian theorist and theory is not exactly the cultural commonality Jaidev  had in mind in his critique of cultural pastiche.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.

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. 

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.

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.

Third  article : Comparative Literature in India: An Overview  of its History 

Abstract  : 

The essay gives an outline of the trajectory Comparative Literature in India, focusing mostly on the department at Jadavpur University, where it all began, and to a lesser extent, the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Delhi. Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies at Delhi University, where it afterwards received a new name Its connection with Indian literatures is the starting point.The tradition began with the department in Jadavpur. With a modern poet-translator as its originator, it is based on Rabindranath Tagore's lecture on World Literature. While there were early attempts to decolonize and an overall desire to enhance and foster creativity, there were also subtle efforts to decolonize and an overall endeavour to promote and nurture creativity. Indian literature, along with literature from the southern hemisphere, gradually gained significance. In comparative literary studies, paradigms of techniques evolved from impact and analogue research to cross-cultural literary interactions, with an emphasis on reception and transformation. In Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives in recent years, connecting with various areas of culture  and knowledge.

1. The beginnings
2. Indian Literature as Comparative Literature
3. Centres 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 beginnings :

There were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in India long before Comparative Literature was established as a discipline, both from the perspective of its relation to litera- tures 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 to India. between works of literature created in several languages."Relationships of joy," Satyendranath Dutta wrote in 1904. (Dutta 124).Rabindranath Tagore's address to the National Council of Education in 1907, titled "Visvasahitya" (meaning "global literature"), provided as a pretext for the formation of the Comparative Literature department at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year the university began operations.Although it is impossible to speak of the epistemology of comparison with reference to a diverse group of individuals, the emerging contours of the discipline did reveal certain prerogatives. 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 he Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, which went on to become an important journal in literary studies in the country, came out in 1961.

2) Indian Literature as Comparative Literature :

In this part,It wasn't until the 1970s that fresh pedagogical views began to enter the subject of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur. Indian literature has made a significant impact on the curriculum.However, not in terms of establishing national identity.of Comparative Literature studies in the country was around this nodal component of Indian literar themes and forms, a focal point of engagement of the 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 canon-formation. 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 :

In the 1970s and 1980s, Comparative Literature was taught in a number of South Indian universities and departments, including Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharati Dasam University, Kottayam, and Pondicherry. Despite the fact that Comparative Literature classes were conducted often, In Madurai Kamaraj University's School of Tamil Studies, a full-fledged Comparative Literary Studies department was formed alongside English literature. K. Ayappa is a well-known poet, novelist, and critic. When discussing the south, Paniker, a Kerala native, must be acknowledged for his work in the field, particularly his work on literary theory similarities and his book on India's storytelling traditions.

4) Reconfiguration of areas of comparison :

At Jadavpur University, revisions and reconfigurations of comparison areas occurred once more in the 1980s. Along with Indian literatures, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was added to the syllabus in the late 1970s, along with a few other works from Latin American literatures, and eventually African literatures were included. These aspects of the syllabus were typically structured around concerns of solidarity and a desire to understand resistance to oppression, as well as bigger problems of epistemological changes and efforts to bridge gaps in history caused by colonial interventions.In the late eighties, with Comparative Literature moving out in different directions, it was felt that more structured approach to the subject was necessary. At Jadavpur, under the guidance of Amiya Dev, who was instrumental in the spread of Comparative Literature in different parts of India in the early years and for giving a direction to the discipline, a Master’s syllabus was designed that had genres, themes and literary historiography as its core area and this model was more or l followed in many new department of comparative literature that would come up later.

5) Research directions :

 Many single literature departments were given grants under the programme to pursue studies in a comparative perspective. The English department of Calcutta University for instance, received assistance to pursue research on literary relations between Europe and India in the nineteenth century. Several books and translations emerged out of the project. 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 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.Efforts towards this end led to an International Conference on South-South dialogue with a large number of participants from Asian and European countries. An anthology of critical essays on tracing socio-cultural and literary transactions between India and Southeast Asia was published.

6)Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies :

It must be mentioned at this point that 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.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.

7) Non-hierarchical connectivity :

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 kinds of literature.

Thank you !