Assignment

Assignment writing: Paper 208: Comparative Literature & Translation Studies.

This blog is Assignment writing onPaper 208: Comparative Literature & Translation Studies  assigned by Professor, Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

• Name: Nidhi Dave

• Roll no: 16

• Enrollment no: 4069206420210005

• Email ID: davenidhi05@gmail.com

• Batch: 2021- 23( MA Semester 4)

• Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

🌟Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History:

Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, Jadavpur University

About author: 

Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta is Professor of Comparative Literature and Joint Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. She has a book entitled Reception of World Literature in Bengali Periodicals (1890-1900), a monograph focussing on orature, and several edited volumes on themes related to Comparative Literature. A recent volume that she edited is an annotated bibliography of travel narratives entitled Of Asian Lands: A View from Bengal. At present she is working on a translation project on the compilation of discourses in Bengali. She is the current editor of Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature. 

Introduction: 

It is important to go into the history of Comparative Literature in India a little before talking about its present state. Comparative Literature in India began in 1956 with the establishment of Jadavpur University in Calcutta, a university that had as its parent body the National Council of Education. The National Council had come into being in 1906 at an important moment in the history of the nationalist movement and in an effort to establish a system of education by the people that would best serve their interests. This was also the body where Rabindranath Tagore made his speech on world literature – or visva sahitya – that he called Comparative Literature in 1907.carving out a pedagogy. There were larger goals and visions. English literature had an important place in the syllabus and in the first phase Jesuit priests and Sanskrit scholars were part of the faculty. I should mention here that my citation of events related to the department at Jadavpur University stems from the fact that it was the single full-fledged department of Comparative Literature in the country for a long period.

Therefore, questions such as the one framed by R. Radhakrishnan in his thought-provoking essay in New Literary History – “When was the last time comparisons were made between ‘cosmopolitan realisms’ and ‘third-world realisms’?” (454) and his answer: “never” (454) – come as a surprise to comparatists from a place like India where the discipline itself is premised on such questions. Translation Studies in its interface with Comparative Literature provided some stimulating work in this area at Hyderabad University.

The state of the discipline is also necessarily linked with the degree of interconnections that it establishes with institutions and individuals engaging with Comparative Literature in different places in the world, and I have to state that there has been very little significant dialogue between Indian comparatists and the rest of the world. In the international forum, that is the International Comparative Literature Association, there has been a nominal representation and some members have also participated in collaborative projects, but more is required as it is eminently possible in today’s world. That Inquire has come forward to initiate such networks is proof enough that the discipline is well and thriving.

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.

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 beginnings:

Long before the establishment of Comparative Literature as a discipline, 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 “Visva Sahitya” (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. The National Council of Education was the parent body of the University and the Council was established by a group of intellectuals in order to bring about a system of education that would be indigenous, catering to the needs of the people and therefore different from the British system of education prevalent at the time. Tagore (639) used the word “visva sahitya” (world literature), and stated that the word was generally termed “comparative literature”.

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. Greek and Sanskrit scholars were a part of the faculty and the ancient period did receive a lot of importance, as it still does today, for it is there that a field is offered to work out comparisons on quite a large scale, outside the domain of contact or relation. Comparisons between the Iliad and the Ramayana, and between Sanskrit and Greek drama taking both Aristotle’s Poetics and Bharata’s Natyasastra into consideration formed the core of a section of the syllabus. While similarities were highlighted, differences led to the comprehension of core areas of cultural components. The project did not “bring into existence a new object/subject of knowledge” (Radhakrishnan 458 ) as such, but by laying out the terms of comparison it did start a chain of reflections that would constitute the materiality of comparison, an ongoing series of engagements with the multi-dimensional reality of questions related to the self and the other, to arrive at networks of relationships on various levels. The 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:

 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. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature.

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 center, 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. 

3, Centres of Comparative Literature Studies:

During the seventies and the eighties Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centers and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharathidasan University, Kottayam and Pondicherry. Although often Comparative Literature courses were held along with English literature, a full-fledged Comparative Literary Studies department was established in the School of Tamil Studies in Madurai Kamaraj University. A reputed poet, author and critic, K. Ayappa Paniker, from Kerala, must also be mentioned while talking about the south for his work in the area, particularly that related to comparisons of literary theory, and for his book on the narrative traditions of India. 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. Later in the eighties and the nineties other Centres were established in different parts of the country, either as independent bodies or within a single language department as in 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. 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.

4, 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. 

European and American literature had been in focus. There was again a shift during this period as the term “influence” began to be questioned by several scholars and particularly so in colonized 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). 

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. 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 from 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 travelogs 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. Incidentally, the department had in Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, an avid translator who translated texts from many so-called “third-world countries”. Conferences were held and research material published in all four areas. In the next phase support was given for publishing text-books in the area and for preparing an infrastructure for the study of Indian literature. 

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 favor of technology and the sciences and with decision makers in the realm of funding for higher education turning away from the humanities in general. The task for departments of humanities and literature was to demonstrate that they were looking into and working with a knowledge system just as any other discipline, only literature’s ways of knowing were different. Literature as a knowledge system, therefore, became a thrust area for again it was felt that comparative literature with its interdisciplinary formation would be the right place to demonstrate the same. A series of workshops were conducted by communities. 

The national association held two major conferences on the subject during the period. A particular project in this area taken up by the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur was called Vanishing Seeds of Culture based on a study in Bankura district of West Bengal. The objective of this project was to identify the folk cultural forms associated with folk varieties of rice found in Bankura District, document such forms and analyze them to show how they were related to folk varieties of rice and make policy recommendations for the preservation of such varieties and the associated cultural forms. A checklist of different folk varieties of rice still extant in Bankura was prepared, local respondents interviewed and several cultural forms documented. It must be mentioned that Dalit literature was also taken up in courses in some parts of the country, but a lot remains to be done in the area as far as pedagogical practices are concerned. A particularly important question for Comparative Literature in this area could be linked with questions of Dalit literature’s relationship with mainstream writing, subverting, questioning and at the same time also inflecting other discourses while continuing to maintain its unique identity based to a large degree on performativity to draw the reader in as an ethical witness to the extreme limits of human suffering on which it is poised.

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 centers, 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 travelers from Greece, China, Persia and Portugal to demonstrate the differences that exist at levels of perception and ideological positions.

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 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” (Sangari 50). 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 neighboring regions, and of larger wholes, one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has perhaps yet to begin. In all its endeavors, However, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.

Work Cited:

Bassnett, Susan. “Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford; Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. 1-11. Print.

Dasgupta , Subha Chakraborty. “Journal of Comparative Literature.” Inquire, http://inquire.streetmag.org/articles/63. 

Radhakrishnan, R. “Why Compare?” New Literary History 40.3 (Summer 2009): 453-71. Print. 

Subha Dasgupta, Chakraborty. “Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of Its History.” cw literature.org, Google , May 2016,http://cwliterature.org/uploadfile/2016/0711/20160711020042997.pdf. 

Thank you....