Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: Unit 1,  Comparative Studies

Hello everyone, i am Nidhi Dave a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is response of my Thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the articles of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. 

✳️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. 

❇️Unit:1. 2, Comparative literature and Culture:

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 diffe-rential 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. 

✴️Unit: 1, 3, Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History  

This Article is explained by Jheel Barad and Dhruvita Dhameliya, students of the English department MKBU.

🔅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 literatures 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.

♻️Comparative Literature in India:  An Overview of its History by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, Jadavpur University

☀️The Beginning:

Contemporary literature as a discipline, there were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in India. The idea of world literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal. 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 pre-text to the establishment of the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year in which the university started functioning. 

Buddhadeva Bose, one of the prime architects of modern Bangla poetry, did not fully subscribe to the idealist visions of Tagore, for he believed it was necessary to break away from Tagore to be a part of the times, of modernity, but he too directly quoted from Rabindranath’s talk on “visvasahitya” while writing about the discipline, interpreting it more in the context of establishing connections, of ‘knowing’ literatures of the world. Bose, also well-known for his translations of Baudelaire, Hoelderlin and Kalidasa, wrote in his preface to the translation of Les Fleurs du Mal that his intention in turning to French poetry was to move away from the literature of the British, the colonial masters, while in his introduction to the translation of Kalidasa’s Meghdutam, he wrote that it was essential to bring to life the literature of ancient times in a particular tradition in order to make it a part of the contemporary.

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 first syllabus offered by the department in 1956 was quite challenging. There was a considerable section of Sanskrit literature along with Greek and Latin literature and then Bengali, its relation with Sanskrit literature and its general trajectory, and then a large section of European literature from the ancient to the modern period.

☀️Indian Literature as Comparative Literature: 

It was actually in the seventies that new perspectives related to pedagogy began to enter the field of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur.Indian literature entered the syllabus in a fairly substantial manner but not from the point of view of asserting national identity. It was rather an inevitable move – if comparative literature meant studying a text within a network of relations, where else could these relations be but in contiguous spaces where one also encountered shared histories with differences? In fact the rallying point of Comparative Literature studies in the country was around this nodal component of Indian literary themes and forms, a focal point of engagement of the Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University. 

The focus on Indian Literature within the discipline of Comparative Literature led to the opening up of many areas of engagement. 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. One also had to take a more inclusive look at histories of literature in different languages of India which were discrete histories based on language and did not do justice to the overlap between social formations, histories and languages, and to the multilingualism that formed the very core of Indian literature. 

☀️Centers of Comparative Literature Studies: 

 In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where the 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. It must also be mentioned that comparative poetics, 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. 

During this period two national associations of Comparative Literature came into being, one at Jadavpur called Indian Comparative Literature Association and the other in Delhi named Comparative Indian Literature Association. 

The two merged in 1992 and the Comparative Literature Association of India was formed, which today has more than a thousand members. In the early years of the Association, a large number of creative writers participated in its conferences along with academics and researchers, each enriching the horizon of vision of the other.

☀️Reconfiguration of areas of comparison: 

The eighties again saw changes and reconfigurations of areas of comparison at Jadavpur University. 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. Questions of solidarity and a desire to understand resistance to oppression along with larger questions of epistemological shifts and strategies to bridge gaps in history resulting from colonial interventions were often the structuring components of these areas in the syllabus.

There was again a shift during this period as 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). In several articles as well, one on the reception of the novel in Bengal for instance, the receiver and not the emitter was in focus. The much talked about 'angst’ of the romantic poet was viewed negatively. The love for serenity and ‘health’ went back to the classical period and seemed an important value in the tradition. Again while Shelley and Byron were often critiqued, the former for having introduced softness and sentimentality to Bengali poetry, they were also often praised for upholding human rights and liberty in contrast to the imperialist poetry of Kipling. Contemporary political needs then were linked with literary values and this explained the contradictory tensions often found in the reception of romanticism in Bengal. It must be mentioned that Shelley, the poet of revolt, began to have a very positive reception when the independence movement gathered momentum. In another context, a particular question that gained prominence was whether Shakespeare was imposed on Indian literature, and comparatists showed, as did Sisir Kumar Das, that there were different Shakespeares. Shakespeare’s texts might have been imposed in the classroom, but the playwright had a rich and varied reception in the world of theatre. Parsi theatre was rejuvenated by the enactment of the comedies of Shakespeare, political theatre groups appropriated his plays, while critics in different periods interpreted Shakespeare in accordance with the needs of the time. From reception studies the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied. For example, one tried to study the Romantic Movement from a larger perspective, to unravel its many layers as it travelled between countries, particularly between Europe and India.

☀️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. Many single literature departments were given grants under the programme to pursue studies in a comparative perspective. 

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 of Assamese in Dibrugarh University received the grant and published a number of books related to translations, collections of rare texts and documentation of folk forms. The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University also received assistance to pursue research in four major areas, East-West Literary Relations, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Third World Literature. 

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. A one-day colloquium on Kolkata’s Chinese connections was held in collaboration with the H.P. Biswas India-China Cultural Studies Centre of Jadavpur University and a seminar on framing intercultural studies between India and China was held with the Centre and the department of International Relations, Jadavpur University. 

☀️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, which was involved in doing translation studies for a considerable period. Today the university has a full-fledged Centre for Comparative Literature offering courses, and research in Translation Studies is an important area. Almost all departments or centres of Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies. Both are seen as integral to the study of Comparative Literature. Translation Studies cover different areas of interliterary studies. Histories of translation may be used to map literary relations while analysis of acts of translation leads to the understanding of important characteristics of both the source and the target literary and cultural systems. Other dimensions of literary studies are opened up when one sees translation as rewriting.Translation practices also bring students to engage deeply with other languages and other cultures, leading to insights into the nature of the comparatist’s preoccupations. The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University today has a Centre for the Translation of Indian Literatures.

In some of the new centres of Comparative Literature that came up in the new universities established in the last Five Year Plan, diaspora studies were taken up as an important area of engagement. 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.

☀️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 literatures. 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. In doing so it is engaged in discovering new links and lines of non-hierarchical connectivity, of what Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called “co-construction”,a process anchored in “subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction." And comparatists 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. In all its endeavours, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force. 

☀️Conclusion:

It's worth noting at this point that in the twenty-first century, Comparative Literature in the United States collaborated with two other related fields of study: Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. Different topics of interliterary studies are covered by translation studies. Translation histories can be used to identify literary relationships, while examination of translation actions can reveal key characteristics of both the source and target literary and cultural systems. In terms of Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature has always been interested in several facets of the subject, the most prominent of which being literature and its relationship to various arts. Cultural Studies may also play a role in a variety of multidisciplinary courses offered by the discipline.