New COMPARISON

A Journal of Comparative and

General Literary Studies

Number 23

Spring 1997

Comparative Literature in India

 New Comparison is published twice yearly (Spring and Autumn)
by the BRITISH COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION. Members
of the BCLA receive New Comparison as part of their membership of the Association
(see last page for details). The Journal is also available by subscription:
Individuals: £ 14.00 p.a.; UK Institutions: £ 27.00 p.a.

EDITORS
Leon Burnett
(Department of Literature, University of Essex)
Howard Gaskill
(Department of German, University of Edinburgh)
Maurice Slawinski
(Department of Italian Studies, University of Lancaster)

Editorial Assistant
Mary Mills
(Department of Literature, University of Essex)

EDITORIAL BOARD
Susan Bassnett, (Comparative Cultural Studies, Warwick)
Theo Hermans (Dutch, University College, London)
Philip Mosley (Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State)
Robert Pynsent (Slavonic and East European Studies, London)
Brigitte Schultze (Slavonic Studies, Mainz)
Alison Sharrock (Classics, Keele)
Christopher Smith (Mod. Lang. and European History, East Anglia)
Arthur Terry (Literature, Essex)
Shirley Vinall (Italian, Reading)
Peter Zima (Comparative Literature, Klagenfurt)

ADDRESSES FOR CORRESPONDENCE

Editorial and Administrative: Dr Leon Burnett, Department of Literature, University of
Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. Email Burne@essex.ac.uk
Diary: Mr Maurice Slawinski, Department of Italian Studies, Lonsdale College, Lancaster
University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK. Email M.Slawinski@lancaster.ac.uk
Production: Dr Howard Gaskill, Department of German, University of Edinburgh, David
Hume Tower, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JX, UK. Email H.Gaskill@ed.ac.uk
Reviews: (as of Issue 25) Dr. Duncan Large, Deartment of German, University of Wales
College, Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. Email d.a.g.large@swan.ac.uk.

Copyright: the authors ISSN 0950-5814 Printed at the University of Essex

The British Comparative Literature Association:

New COMPARISON
A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies

Number 23: Spring 1997

CONTENTS

Comparative Literature in India

Edited by HARISH TRNEDI

HARISHTRTVEDI
Comparative Literature in India: Formation and Formulation

SISIRKUMARDAS
Constructions of "Indim Literature''

G. N.DEVY
Comparative Literature East and West

B. RAJAN
Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on Milton's India

SUBHACHAKRABORTYDASGUPTA
Issues in Reception: A Case Study of the Early Bengali Novel

S. BALURAO
English Romantic Poetry and Kannada Poetry

E. V. RAMAKRISHNAN
Reading Modernist Indian Poetry Backwards

M. S. PATI
Sanskrit Poetics and Western Texts: An Application
K. AYYAPPA PANIKER
Negative Capability and "Emptinessn: Keats and Nagajuna

JANCYJAMES
VaRroRti and Foregrounding

BHARATI PURI AND KANIKABATRA

Indian Contributionsto Comparative L i r e
and Translation Studies: A Select Annotated Bibliography

Reviews
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPNAK, l%e Spivak Readec Selected Works of Gayatri
ChaRrmrty Spiwk Eds. Donna Landry and Gerald Mackan (Jyoti Arora), p. 132;
HARlsH m t , Colonial Tramactions: English Literature and I d a (Peter
Hulme), p. 134; DR JA~DEV. The Culture of Pastiche: Existential Aesiheticism in the
Coniemporary H M Novel (Terry Hale), p. 136; E.V R-SHNAN, MaAing it
New: Modernim in M a h p h , Mmalhi and Hindi Pwby (Leon Burnett), p. 138;
JOHN FROW,CulItaal Studies h Cultural V i e (Gentil de Faria), p. 141; Poetim:
An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Shrdes, 44 (Special Issue) (Terence
Dawson), p. 142; New Perspectives: A Compmatiw Literature Yearbook,Vol. 1
(Terence Dawson), p. 143; SOPHIATOTLEVA, Da% theubmlische Potenlial des
drmatischen Texres: Ein Beitrag zur i%ononew n Drmna und Drmeniibersethng
(Maike Oergel), p. 145; ULRIKEJEKUTSC~ FWrZ PAUL,BRIGITIESCHULTZE,HORST
TURK,Hrsg.: Komckfie und Trag&iie - irbersetzt ursd bembeitet (Maike Oergel), p.
147; WOLFGANGZACH and KEN L. GooDm, eds. Nationalim vs.
IntenrotiopmIism: (lnter)Natid Dimensiom of Literatures in English @ouwe
Fokkema), p 148; DORO'IHEAKULLMANN,ed. Erlebte Rede und
impressionistischer Stil: EuropUische L h d h I ' m im Vergleich mil ihren dartschen
Obersetzungen (Gerald GiUespie), p. 150; PIERRE BRUNEL, Le Mythe d 'Electre
(Mary Bryden), p. 152; BENITA VON HEYN~~Z, Literarische Kontexte w n K&
Chopins Ilie Awatening (Matio Klarer), p. 154; THEODORSTORM, l%e Dykemczster,
Ed and transl. Denis Jackson and THEODORF O ~ A N E Effi , Briest, Ed. Helen
Chambers; transl. Hugh Ronison and Helen Chambers (John Coombes), p. 155.

Diary

Forthcoming BCLA Activities

BCLA Publications

Other Events of Interest to Comparatists

Harish Trivedi

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN INDIA:

FORMATION AND FORMULATION

India would appear to be an eminently suitable field for the study of

Comparative Literature or (as it is more accurately but less popularly called)
Comparative Literary Studies. As Gerald Gillespie, the then President of the
International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) said in his message on
the occasion of the last Comparative Literature Association of India (CLAI)
conference held in 19%, "The cultural complexity of India - with her many
languages, religions, philosophic traditions, and long history - rightly fascinates
comparatists around the globe." India has twenty-two modern languages, in
each of which the Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Letters) awards a
prize for the best book every year. It has not only Sanskrit, an ancient pan-
Indian language, in which literature spans at least three millennia and fonns the
cultural matrix of India, but several other languages of comparable antiquity
including Pali (in which all the Buddhist teachings are), Prakrif and in South
India, Tamil, which has its own epics and poetics. The "father-tonguen status
of Sauskrit (as A.K. Ramanujan called it), or its elite, courtly fimction, was in
time taken over by Persia which the Mughal rulers brought with them, and
subsequently by Enash, which the British inducted in their turn. In tenns of
religion, too, India offers both continuity and variety, with the ancient Hindu
religion splintering off over time into Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, yielding
ground to both lslam and Christianity, and yet comprising even today over
eighty per cent of the population. In terms of political history, similarly, India
has been both one and many, for while it has had periods of balkanisation and
internecine disarmy, the more expansionist of our ancient and medieval
emperors have ruled over a larger part of India than even the British did
directly.
Thus, in terms of language, religion and political history, each of which is
a key determinant of literary sensibility and identity, India offers repeated
I New Comparison23: p.4 Trivedi: Inh.&ction ]
instances of continuity and change, of impact and resistance, of collectivity and
plurality, which together comtitute the characteristic rhythm of any
comparative study ofliterature and culture. And yet, the institutional study of
Comparative Literature in India began suiprismgly recently, perhaps quite as
late as it did in the notoriously monolrngual insular and homogenous Britain -
for the reason that our academic agenda in modem times had been set
pemnptorily by the British. Anyhow, the first Department of Comparative
Litmature in India was set up in 1956, in the newly established Jadavpu
University, meant to be the radically innovative second university in Calcutta in
contrast to the venerably conservative University of Calcutta which was one of
the first three "western" universities to be founded in India a century before, in
1857. In effect, Jadavpur still has the only full-fledged Department of
Comparative Literature in the country, though initiatives have been taken,
similarly, to establish Departments or Centres of Comparative Literature in
some others of the newer universities set up in India, for example the
University of Hyderabad, the Madurai Kamaraj University, and the Telugu
University at Hyderabad, all founded within the last decade or two. None of
these universities, other than Jadavpur, however, offers an u u k g d m k
course in Comparative Litemme; an M.A. or an M.Phil. with a handful of
students is usually what's possible. A few of the relatively older universities,
such as the University of Rajasthan at Jaipur, offer one course (out of eight or
ten or at places sixteen) in Comparative Literalme, just as many more
universities offer one course in American Literature or Commonwealth
Literature or Indian Writing in English.
The Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur had for its founder
chair Buddhadeva Bose, who like his colleague Sudhindranatb Datta was a
modernist Bengali poet. Part of their modedty lay in their acquaintance with
the various European influences which had gone into the making of Western
modernity, and a study of Ewopean Literature, therefore, formed the staple of
their new Department. At least three of their younger colleagues happened to
have worked for their Ph.D.s at the Indiana University and were by their
training no less Westemised or Eurocmtric in their orientation. Of all the
Indian literatures, only Bengali was studied at the Jadavpur; all the rest of the
syllabus was Western. Comparative Literature in India at this stage was pretty
much the same as in the West; the moment of decolonisation was yet to come
in Comparative Literature as in the study of E@h Litemure in India.
The Indiauisation of Comparative Literature in India began at another
centre, the University of Dehi, where the Department of Modem Indian
Languages (now renamed the Department of Modern Indian Literature and
Language Studies) had in the 1970s an Oxford-trained Milton scholar for its
Professor of Bengal~and its chair, Dr. R.K.DasGupta. He was succeeded by
Dr. Sisir Kumar Das, who had always been a student and teacher of an Indian
Literature, Ben& unlike most earlier comparatists who had come to
I Trivedi: Zntr&iion New C v . s a n 23:p. 5 1
Comparative Literature via E u s h . But the moment of epiphany for him,
which led to his efforts to reorient Comparative Literature in India, seems to
have come when he met at the ICLA conference at Ottawa/Monlreal in 1973
Professor R e d Wellek, a foundmg figure of Comparative Literature in the
U.S.A. During their conversation, Das asked him why Western wmparatists
paid little attention in their work to "Japanese Literatwe, or Chinese, or Persian
...". Wellek interrupted to complete Das's question, " ... and Sanslait?", put a
hand on his shoulder, and in response explained, ''One should do what one
can".
The realisation that what one could do in Iudia was Indian Comparative
Literature rather than Western Comparative Literature came to a head in the
1970s and the early 1980s. In 1974, Professor RK. DasGupta started an
M.Litt. (later renamed M.Phi1.) hgramme in Comparative Indian Literature at
the University of DeIhi. In 1976, Rofessor Nagendra, Chair of the merit
of Hindi at the University of Dehi, orgauised a conference on Comparative
Indian Literature, conducted in Hindi, and a book of the conference was
published the following year. In 1977, the G.D. Mwan College of the
University of Delhi convened a conftrence on Cornparalive Literatwe, at the
end of which a proposal was put forward to form an association of scholars of
Comparative Literatme in M a This came about in August 1980 with the
formation of the Comparative Indian Literatun Association at Delhi; it held its
first national congress in Janurny 1984. Meanwhile, an Academy of
Comparative Literature was set up in Madras in 1979, which published a series
of lectures it had arranged under the title ConyMmtive Literam (1980).
In 1983, at Jadavpur University, the Indian National Co-tive
Literature Association (INCLA) was formed, and it held its first convention that
year. There were thus two associations born wi* a year of each other, the
one at Calcutta and the other at Delhi. Prominent members of both participated
together in a week-long conference on Comparative Litaaaue held at the
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla in 1987; a selection of papers
published from this conference the following year jointly edited by Amiya Dev
of Jadavpur University and Sisir Kumar Das of Delhi University under the title
CompamflveLiterature: Theory and Practice remains perhaps the outstandmg
Indian publication on the subject so far. In 1988, at a conference jointly
convened by both the Calcutta and the Delhi associations at the newly founded
Department of Comparative Studies at the Telugu University at Hyderabad, the
two associations, INCLA and CILA, merged together to form CLAI:
Comparative Literalure Association of India. The new association has held
three congresses so far, at the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam (19901
at the University of D e b (1993) and at the Telugu University, Hyderabad
(1996). At each of these congresses, about a hundred papers have been
presented in parallel sessions, and the degree of enthusiasm has been high if
still a little unfocused.
INew CoPnpcoison23: p.6 Trivedi: Intrhction I

This sketchy narrative of the progress of Comparative Literature in uuiversity

departments and through professional associations is, of course, only half the
story, if not even less. The spread of Comparative Literature as an academic
discipline in M a has so far been severely hindered for the dcular reason that
with hardly any Comparative Literature departments in the country, graduate
students who specialise in Comparative Literature have nowhere to go to teach
and thus spread the discipline! Nor do we have in India any monolingual
departments liberal enough to include the tag of Comparative Liberature, as for
example in the "Department of English/French/- and
Comparative Literature" so commonly to be found in the U.S.A.
Nevertheless, it is probably tme that at least as much work is going on in
Comparative Literary Studies m the various mono^ departments in the
two-hundred4 uuiversities in India as in the half dozen Depertments of
Comparative Literature so called. But here, an hportant distinction needs to
be made between those who practise Comparative Literature in a lkprhnent of
English and those others who do so in a department teachmg any of the Indian
Literaiwes. Traditionally, most of the older teachers of English in India (as
well as some of the younger ones even now) have believed in "the well of
English undefiledn; in matters concerning the cauon/syllabus,they have been
even more orthodox than the British themselves, and the inclusion of a course
even in American Literature or Commonwealth Literatun was until recently a
hard won victory. A course in Comparative Literaiwe is often seen by
members of the En&& fwulty in India as even more insubstantial or
academically suspect; there is also the apprehension, sometimes, dsat it may
prove more subversive. Thus, at the h t congress of CILA held in the
University of DeIhi in 1984, a Professor and then Chair of the Deparhnent of
Engltsh at the same University (who had been invited to deliver the inaugural
address partly for his personal stature and partly because of the defbme still
accorded to Departments of En&& by departments teaching other indigenous
literatures) first trotted out the long exploded dictum that one was doing
Comparative Literature anyhow when one compared Macbeth with K~ngLear,
or even the main plot of a play with its sub-plot, or even two characters within
the same play, and then went on to exhort such English teachers as were
present in the audience not to "abandonn English and jump on to the
'bandwagon" of Comparative Literature.
In the same Department of English at the University of Delhi, an optional
course in Comparative Literature and Lit- Translation was launched at the
M.Phil. level only a few years later, and has been rurming ever since to full or
nearly full subscription. For w i s h teachers, an opportmity to teach
Comparative Literature has offered liberation in two different ways: by letting
them teach works from any part of the world so long as the course also included
I ~ n v d znb&im
: n p. 7 ]
New c o m ~ s o 23:

some works of Anglo-American literature broadly on the same theme or in a

similar form, and by allowing them to examine historically and self-reflexively
the introduction of Enghh Literature in India. As Swapan Majumdar has
suggested, while compamtists in the West may consider the influence or impact
of one author or at most one movement on another in a different language, in
India we have the opportunity to examine the impact of one whole literature,
the Enghsb, on several literatures in the Indian languages, over a period of
nearly two hundred years.
The agenda for those doing Comparative Literatrrre in departments
teaching any of the Indian Literatures is often quite merent. For them, the
non-moving leg of the compass is not English Literature; it is the literature in
their own language. Their comparative study concerns the exchange or
transactions between two or more Indian Literatures, for example those
between Hindi and Bengali or Hindi and Urdu or Kannada and Malayalam.
The term Comparative Indian Litemme, strictly spealang, is thus applicable to
neither of these two categories of practitioners. For the English teachers,
Comparative Literature is often an escape h m the monopoly of English
Literature to World Literature, while for teachers of any of the Indian
Literatures, it is an attempt to reach across the plurality of eighteen or twenty-
two Indian Literatrrres in different languages to a more integrated notion of
Indian Literature in the singular.
In fact, Comparative Indian Literature is a tenn often used as if it were
virtually synonymous with Indian Literature. (If Emopean Literature as a term
were to come into greater c m n c y , following the forthcoming introduction of
the Euro and other related developments in the EU, the situation would
probably not be much different in the case of Western Comparative Literaiure
either.) After the huguration of India as an independent nation-state on that
momentous midnight of 14-15 August 1947, "Indian Literature" became a
nationalist desideratum; if it did not already exist, it appeared that it had to be
invented. The Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Letters), set up in
1955 at a meeting presided over by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
and addressed by the then Education Minister Abul Kalam Azad, so evolved as
to have in time for its agenda the affirmation of an integrated if not unified
entity called Indian Literatwe. Many of its major publications bear titles which
reinforce this project: The Who's Who of Indian Writers, The Encyclopedia of
Indian Literature in 5 volumes, and A History of Indian Literature initially
projected in nine volumes of which the last two volumes have been the first to
be written, by Sisir Kumar Das (covering the periods 1800-1910 and 1911-56,
respectively). The English-language bimonthly journal of the Akademi is titled
Indian Litemlure, while its Hindi journal is called Samkalin Bhamtip Sahitya
(Contemporary Iudian Literature); both journals represent in translation the
whole range of literature in all the major Indian languages. Early in its
existence, the then President of India Sir S. Radblaishnan (who had earlier
I New Cornparisan 23:p.8 Trivedi: I ~ c t i o n I
been the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and a Fellow of All Souls
College at Oxford) pronounced a mantm in this regard which is still routinely
used in various meetings and publications of the Akademk "Indian Literature is
one, though written in many languages". Given the kind of scholar he was, it is
likely that Radhakrishnan was here malang a deep comparative allusim to a
statement made in an uponishad nearly three thousand years ago: ERant
sadviprah bahuciho &ti (Truth is one, though the wise speak of it in
different ways). An extension of this is the fonnula through which writers
invited to speak at various meeliugs of the Akademi are inl~oducedby its
officebearers: "He or she is an Indian writer writing in Ba-mli
etc.".
The difficulties of homogenising and blending into one master narrative
literature written over a long period in twenty-two languages in many distinct
regions or provinces, several of which are bigger in area and population than
most of the sovereign nations of the world, are considerable but not
insuperable. With all its little errors and inumsistencies and some unevenness
of emphasis, Das's two volumes have come to be regarded as a model of this
kind of comparative historiography, and may even hold some lessons for the
projected History of Elwpecm Literature which has for long been one of the
more cherished plans of the Inamational Comparative Literatme Association.
One of the Indian languages included in Das's volumes as well as in all
the other Akademi publications named above is English. Its acceptance as an
"Indian" language may have been a litde slow and grudging but the question
which used to be asked until the 1970s "Can Indians write d v e l v in a
foreign language?" has since then not be& m e r e d so much as brushiunder
the carpet by the huge international success of writers such as Salman Rushdie,
V i Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Anmdhati Roy. Indeed, such has been the
irresistible rise and commercial success of Indian writiug in English over the
last couple of decades that it now bodes to dominate the whole of the Indian
literary landscape. As Salman Rushdie declared in his introduckq article in a
special issue of The New Yorkr brought out in June 1997 to mark the fiftieth
year of India's independence, Indian Writing in English in prose, "both fiction
and non-fiction [...I is proving to be a stronger and more important body of
work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen 'recognized'
lauguages of India, the so-called 'vernacular' languages, during the same timen.
On the face of it, this assessment seems to be quite as outrageous and gratuitous
an insult to all of Indian Literature as the one offered by Lord Macaulay right at
the beginning of British rule in India, in 1835, when he roundly asserted that "a
angle shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native litemtum
of India and Arabia".
Whm Macaulay made his notoriously odious compa~%~n, he went on to
confess at the same time that he had "no knowledge of either Sanscrit or
Arabic". Nor does Rushdie's knowledge of the Indian laqpages seem to be
I Trivedi: ZnWction New Comparison 23: p. 9 1
any more extensive, in spite of the famed "bihgdkm" of his novels which
consists basically of s p d c h g some words of simple Hindustani over his
English text, and not always correctly. But Rushdie's claim that Indian Writing
in English since Independence has been "stronger and more important" than all
the rest of Indian Literature must perhaps be gmted, in the sense that he does
not claim it to be either better or more substantial, and is thus as- more
the global clout of the language in which it is written rather than its intrinsic
quality or worth. The playing field in India is so uneven now that the mere
advance royalty paid for just one of their books to Rushdie or Seth or Roy
would probably suffice to buy out all the publishing houses in Hindi - and may
be in Urdu and Kashmiri besides. The comparison between Indian English and
the other Indian languages is thus, in a brute material sense, a comparison
between incomparables.
The indigenous considerations governing the practice of Comparative
Literature in India are ovenidden in some other crucial ways too by what is
going on in the rest of the literary world. For a variety of reasons, the study of
Comparative Literature seems to have suffered a decline over the last couple of
decades in Europe and America. The shine seems to have gone off the
discipline, as it has incidentally also in the case of Linguistics; for both
subjects, the golden age seems to have come and gone. In her recent book
Comparative Litemre, Susau Bassnett has in effect raised the cry:
Comparative Literature is Dead! Long Live Post-colonial Studies and
Translation Studies!! And shoclong as it may seem, it is perhaps true that much
of the traditional agenda of Comparative Literature has now been appropriated
by Post-colonial studies. As the title of the editorial by Steven Totosy de
Zepetnek in a recent special issue on "Postcolonial Literames" of the
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature puts it, in a bit of wry rearguard
action: "Post-colonialities: ... or, This (Too) Is Comparative Literature"! And
as for Translation Studies, not only has it turned out to be the tail of
Comparative Literature which is now beginning to wag the dog but it has in fact
gone and attached itself as the tail to another dog, namely Post-colonial Studies.
Especially in the works of two widely influential Indian post-colonial critics,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, Post-colonial studies and
Translation have intersected in persuasive ways and effected potent
conjunctions. In a new volume of essays titled Posi-colonial T r d a t ~ o n ,
Maria Tymoczko and G.J.V.Prasad have in their respective contributions even
suggested that much post-colonial writing itself may be read as a form of
translation. In India too, as in the West, the earlier strength of Comparative
Literature has been undercut by the newly emergent currents of Post-colonial
Studies and Translation Studies, to an extent greater than that in Britain and
perhaps comparable to that in the U.S.A.
The present special issue of New Comparison offers a rare and welcome
oppcuhmity far Cmpamive Literature in India to reach readers abroad. When
this issue was being planned, the following List of suggested areas and topics
was circulated to invited and prospective contributors, and it is reproduced here
as a broad sample of the current state of engagement with Comparative
Literature in India:

Part I: History and Theory of Comparative Literature in India

(Note CLI = Comparative Literature in W)

(a) A brief history of the growth of CLI

@) A considerationof how CLI is different &om CL elsewhere
(c) The politics of CLI
(d) Models for writing Indian literary history
(e) Theory and Practice of Translation in India
( f ) Some select aspects of comparison between Indian poetics
and Western poetics
(g) An agenda for CLI now

Part 11: India and Britain: Comparative Case Studii

(h) Aspects of "Orientalkrn"
(i) Indian and Western notiom of narrative
(i) The impact of English Literature on Indian Literature, with
special attention to any of the following:
0-i) Shakespeare
(j-ii) the English Romantic poets
(j-iii) the Yeats-Eliot mode of Modernism
(j-iv) Indian writing in English

(k) the Indian impact on English literature, not perhaps in tenns

of bthmnce and moments but rather in terms of how India
has been represented in English literature.

Part IIk Bibliography and Reviews

(1) an Annotated Bibliography of Indian works on Comparative

Literature and Translation, mainly in English
(m) reviews of three or four recent Indian works on Comparative
Literature and Translation, by Western scholars
(n) reviews by Indian scholars of three or four recent works on
Comparative Literature and Translation by Western scholars
1Trivedi: Intr&tion New Cmparfson 23: p. 11 (

This problematisation or (more accurately and modestly) itemisation of

Comparative Literature in M a was, of course, highly partial, in being both
subjective and incomplete, and even this partial agenda has been only partially
realised duough the ten contributions published below. On the other hand,
what it has been possible to offer in this issue does represent the work of some
of the better known comparatists now at work in India, and it does range across
several of the major areas of interest for all Indian comparatists.
Thus, Sisir Kumar Das, the doyen of Comparative Literature scholars in
India, leads off with a survey of how "Indian Litmature'' came to be constmcted
by Western and Indian scholars. G.N. Devy, who has acquired a reputation as
probably the most vigorous of the W v i s t " scholars in India and who recently
resigned as a Professor of English to work on the tribal languages of India as
Head of the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre in Baroda, offers a
contrast between Comparative Literature in the East and the West. Of the four
reception studies which follow, the h t one is by B. Rajan, probably the most
eminent of all Indians who have taught English Literature in the West (with
major works on Milton and T.S. Eliot); he offers a reading of Paradise Lost in
terms of what Milton knew and made of India. Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta,
currently Head of the Comparative Literam Deparhnent in Jadavpur
University, records the early reception of not a book nor an author but a whole
new genre, the novel, in Bengali. S. Balu Rm,who worked for the Sahitya
Akademi for a quarter of a century and retired as the editor of its journal Inrlian
Litemlure, traces the revolutionary impact of a book of English romantic poetry
in Kannada translation on the subsequent poetry written in that language. E.V.
Ramakrishnan, Professor of English at the University of South Gujarat at Surat
(where, incidentally the East India Company had set up its Eirst factory early in
the seventeenth century) reads modernlist poeby in some of the major Indian
languages in the diachrooic perspective of the example of modernist poetry in
the West on the one hand and the contemporary reality in India on the other.
The last three essays again fonn a loose group, in their concern with aspects of
Sanskrit poetics and their applicability to modem andlor foreign literature.
Both M.S.Pati and K. Ayyappa P d e r are senior Professors of English who
have made significant contributions to the development of Comparative
Literature in their respective parts of India, in the States of Orissa and Kerala,
respectively, and if both are concerned with illustrating their arguments h m
the same author, John Keats, the reason may be that Keats was much in the
minds of his admirers recently because of his birth-bicentenary, which was
incidentally marked by more seminars and conferences in India than it might
have been in Britain. In the last article, Jancy James, Director of the
Comparative Literature Centre in T r i v a n h expounds a key concept of
Saaskrit poetics: vakrokti. Fmally, Bharati Puri and Kanika Batra, both fiom
the University of Delhi, have supplied a select aunotated bibliography of Indian
contributions to Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. Altogether,
this necessarily Imperfect and inadequate introduction to Comparative
Literature in India will yet, it is hoped, offer a comparatively new,even strange,
and possibly stimulating perspective on the business of Comparalive Literature
to most of its Western readers.'

I am gratsll to my f i r i d and colleague Sisir Kumar Das h r his constant,cheerful help

in thc &tug ofthis special issue.
Sisir Kumar Das

CONSTRUCTIONS OF "INDIAN LITERATURE"

The term "Indian literatme" has remained controvexsial as well as problematic

since the beginning of its use as a category of identification of a body of
literary works composed in more than one language. The first phase of ihe
history of the term, as well as of the concept of Indian litemlure, belongs to the
Orientalists who more or less identi6ed it with ancient Indian literatures, or to
be precise with Sanskrit literature. Albrecht Weber's The History of Indim
Litemure (1852) was perhaps the first work to deal comprehensively with a
literature which was identified as "Indian literature''. But Weber was also the
first scholar to admit the limitations of the term. His words are worth quoting
not only because with them the concept of Indian literature began to be
problematised but also because they are i n s m e n t a l in the construction of a
hegemonic view of literature.

At the very outset of these lectures I find myself in a certain degree of

perplexity, being rather at a loss how best to entitle them. I cannot say that
they are to treat the history of Indian literature, for then I should have to
consider the whole body of Indii languages, including those of non-Aryan
origins. Nor can I say that theia subject is the history of "Indo-Aryan
literature", fw then I should have to discuss the modern languages of India
also, which form a third period in the development of Indo-Aryan speech.
Nor, lastly, can I say that they are to present a history of "Sanskrit literaturen,
for the Indo-Aryan language is not in its first period "Sanskrit" i.e. the
language of the educated, but is still a popular dialect, while in the second
period the people spoke not Sanskrit but M t i c dialects, which arose
simultaneously with Sanskrit out of the ancient Indo-Aryan vernacular. In
order, however, to relieve you from any doubt as to what you have to expect
from me here, I may at once remark that it is only literature of the first and
 second periods of the Indo-Aryan language with which we have to do. For
the sake of brevity I retain the name "Indian literaturee'.l
Weber realised that the term Indian literature, if it must have a critical and
empirical validity, should be identified with a literature produced in one
language only. Yet, whatever the compulsions and howsoever clear he was in
definmg his objective, he was obliged to use the term in a sense much narrower
than it would be expected to signify. Perhaps he did not realise that the term he
used "for the sake of brevity" c d d give out wrong signals.
The complexity of the issue of Indian litexatme was addressed again a
little more than half a century later by another European scholar: Maurice
Wintemik. In the introduction of his three-volume History of I d a n
Lltemhrre, he declared without any ambiguity that the "history of Indian
literature in the most comprehensive sense of the word is the history of a
literature which not only stretches across great periods of time and an enormous
area, but is also one which is composed in many languages". 2 Yet, he, too, did
not tty to deal with the %holey' history of Indian literature, the area of which
he so courageously defined, but remained confined, more or less, within what
can be broadly called Sanslait literature. A cursory description of literary
works in some of h e modern Indian languages that one may find in his work
makes the difference between his conception and execution extremely
conspicuous.
It is important to note that two scholars sepamted by time and geography
thought of a literature "composed in many languages" and yet they finally
worked out an approach to such a rnuWaceted Indian goddess by limitiug it to
the celebration of one supreme deity: Sanskrit literature. Both these works, of
Weber and of m~ltemitz, created, or helped in creating, a perception of Indian
literature based on the idea of a pan-Indian language, although they did not
state that explicitly. Theb works privilege Sanskrit and do not attempt to
construct a framework that can integrate other languages into it. Their
h e w o r k s accommodated Pali and other M t literatuns only margdly,
and were madequate to tackle the multilinguahsm that dominated throughout
the medieval and modern periods. The existence of a dominant pan-Indian
language provided them with a rationale and empirical support for the idea of
"Indian literature".

-HT WEBER. The Hisfov of Indian Lifemfure,haoslated [ h u Akademische

Vorlesungenaber indische Uneraturgeschichte (&rlin, 1852,W ed. 1875)]by 1. M m and
M r c Zadrariah (Loodon, 1978; rpt. of Varanasi: Chowkbamba Sanskrit Series, 1%1), p.
1.
MAUR~CE History of Indian Literature, translated [hm Geschichte
der indlschen btemfur (in three volumes, Berlin, 19091 by S. Ketar (Vol. I, Calcutta
University, 1926), p. 35.
I Das: Constructionsof " I d a nLitemture" New ConyKoison 23: p. 15 I
The necessity of a pan-Indian language was felt more strongly than ever
by the historians of Indian literatures as part of their anxiety to legitimise the
concept of Indian literature, since it was not possible to think of a literature
without a location in a language. Indian literature, one may argue with some
justification, does not have an empirical validity; at the most it can be identified
as an aggregate of literatures written in many languages, or as a literature
composed in the most dominant and the most widely distributed language,
which can be accepted as a representative of Indian literary activities.' The
first possibility, too obvious to be stressed, is puerile as a critical category; the
second can hardly go beyond projecting a distorted and hgrnented history.
Although the Weber-Wintemitz model never explicitly claimed Sanskrit as the
representative of all Indian literatures, it lent suppart to the second approach to
Indian literary history as evidenced fiom the works of many Western scholars
who had equated Sanskrit with Indian without qualms. Eclwin Arnold's Indian
Poetry (1884), for example, included translations of two books of the
Mahabhamta, a few verses of the Hitopadsha and the Gilagovinda only. This
is not only a synecdochic representation of Indian likraiure, but also an attempt
to identify - as Arnold himselfstates in the preface - the W"Indian literature
by which he meant literature w e e h m umtamiuation of all foreign
influences". H.G.Rawlinson's description of Indian literature in Cussell's
Encyclopaedia (1953) as "essentially philosophical and religious" is a
e c t a b l e conclusion of someone who ignored not only -ils produced in
various modem Indian languages but also a large part of Sanskrit literature
which is neither philosophical nor religious.
The idenMcation of Sanskrit literature as the ''realn Indian literature may
be prompted not only by the Chientalist's wncem for ancient India: it has a
more basic and fundamental issue to deal with. The issue is the hhlibility of
the languageliterahre equation throughout the history of civilisation. A
literature must be defined with reference to a language: Greek literature cannot
be defined as anything else but a body of texts composed in the Greek
language; Hindi literature is identified as a body of works produced in the
Hindi language. This axiomatic status of literature is a stumbling block in the
conceptualisation of Indian literature where the word "Indian" stands not for a
language but for a p p l e or a geographical area. Hence the search for a
language.
The search for one language as the sole identifying ma& of Indian
literature is bound to be futile. Yet the scholars have not abandoned it

' For the debate on the nature of "Indian L i r e " , see The Idea of an Idan
Latemrure, ed. Sum MUKHENEE (Myson: Central htitutc of Indian Lmgqp, 1981); sea
also KRISHNA KRJPALANI, Modem Indian Litemture (Bombay:Nirmala Sadamad Publishers,
1968); and the address by Niharranjau Ray included in Indian Utemture, ed. A. PODDER
(Shimla. Indian Iostitute of Advanced Study, 1972).
I~ e ~omprpison
w 23: p. 16 Das: Cmtructim of “Znr6ianLiterature" I
altogether. Sukuma~Sen, a noted historian of Ben& literature, is one of
several recent scholars to think of Indian literature within the framework of
national and regional lauguages. In the preface to his scholarly work Bhuratiya
Sahiryer I t i h (A History of Indian Literature, 1%2), he states his idea of pan-
Indian languages as follows:
My subject matter is the literature that is not written in any pradesik b h m
(regional speech) but in a language that is not the property of any particular
region, a language that was prevalent in all regions (of India) and the
lit-= of which beloaged equally to all regions - that is to say Vedic,
Sanskrit, Buddhist Sanskrit, Pali, various M t , Apabhramsa and Avahatta -
the literatures of all these ancient and medieval Indo-Aryan languages are
what I have described in this book.'

The shift fiom the Orientalists' construction of Indian literature is clear. The
criterion is not the dominant language or even literary merit but the
geographical distribution of a language. In this scheme of pan-Indian literature,
none of the Dravidian languages, nor any one of the modern Indo-Aryan, has
any place. Sen ignores another language, English, despite its wide distribution
and the fact that the literature produced in it is not a "property of any particular
region". Several critics and writen of our time, as diverse as P. Lal and Shashi
Tharur, have indeed claimed Indian English writings as the only true Indian
literature. If one takes the viewpoint of the advocates of Indian literature
written only in a pan-Indian language, then the obvious conclusion will be that
there was an M a n literame in the ancient period which died with the
emergence of modem Indian languages; and again another Indian literature
arose when the Indians found a non-Indian language, i.e. E w s h in the
nineteenth century. Thus, in this view, India had an Indian literature in the
ancient period as well as in the modern period but in the medieval period India
did not have Indian literature but only regional or provincial literature.
The insistence on accepting a pan-Indian language as the true vehicle of
an Indian literature is derived as much fkom the existing linguistic hegemony in
the countq as fiom a failure to acknowledge the history of Indian
multilinguahsm. The multiplicity of languages in India, which baffles the
speakers of monolingual nation-states, is not a sudden and abrupt phenomenon
in Indian history. These languages have been in existence for the last several
centuries, at times interacting with one another, at times fimclioning within a
well-constructed hierarchy of communication patterns, but never in complete
isolation fiom the others. A discourse of Indian literature is not possible
without a reference to this histo~yof multilingualism, nor is it possible to
understand the forces determiniog the history of any slngle literature without

SUKUMAR SEN,Bhamtip Sahifyer I t i h (written in &a@), 1962, Introductim.

I Das: C o n ~ ~ c t iorfn"IndianLifercdure" NewConqx~rison23:p.17 I
recognising the linguistic hierarchy existing in different parts of India at
different times.
The poets and the scholars and the nationalist leaders, who too
participated in the growth of a discourse on Indian liberature h m the beginning
of the twentieth century, never looked at India's m u l t h g d h as a possible
threat to the construction of the Indian nation. It was realised that the European
concept of a one religion, one language, one nation equation was alien to India.
Although India was politically never united, a perception of cultural lmity did
exist throughout the history of India, and this perception was much stronger
than a political unity. The nationalists' auxiety for discovering unity in
diversity was reflected in creative as well as in discursive writings defming and
defending the fomdations of Indian nationality, which also became the
argument for the recopition of an Indian literatme as a uuikd whole.
Subramania Bhar* the most distinguished Tamil poet of this century, wrote in
a poem that addressed mother India, "Do you not know that in eighteen
languages sweet1 we sing your praises in manifold ways?" In another poem he
upheld the theory of unity in diversity even more cogently: ''Thirty c r m faces
she had But life only one/ Eighteen glorious tongues she has/ But thought onty
onen.
This metaphor of India with many tongues but one thought is the poetic
transfiguration of the nationalists' ideology. In the 1920s Sri Aurobindo in
defence of his formulation of Indian literature as an expression of "the Indian
mind" pointed out the inadequacy of the Wework of the pan-Indien language
and recognised the role of all lauguages, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan, ancient and
modern, regional and national in the m d q of the Indian mind.
Nor is it in the Sanskritiotongue alone that the Indian mind has done high and
beautiful and perfect things,though it couched in that h n g q e the larger part
of its most prominent and formative and grandest aeations. It would be
fbr a complete estimate to take into account as well as the
Buddhast~cliterature in Pali and the poetic literatures, here opulent, there
more scanty in production, of about a dozen Sansbitic and Dravidian
tongues. The whole has almost a continental effect. 5
This view of Indian literature was reiterated by Sarojini Naidu, the poet turned
politician, in a speech at the first Ail India Writers Conference organised by the
Indian PEN in 1945. "Why then," she wrote, "we ask should Indim writers all
meet together in conference? Why? - because India is cine and indivisible.
While her children speak with many tongues, they can only speak with one
undivided hearr.6 The metaphor of one and many culminated in 1954 in

5 SRIA ~ R o B Foundations
~ , of I d a n Culture (New York, 1953), p. 289.
SCC K.R. SRINIVASA IYENGER(dd.), Indlan Writers in Cow31 (Banbay:
International Book Hou8e. 1947). p. 10.
I ~ e w ~ o m p a r h n 2 p.
3 : 18 Das: CoPrsirrctitionsof "I& Literature" I
Radhakrishnau's oxymoron - which became the motto of the Sahitya Akademi,
the Indian Academy of letters - " M a n literature is one, though written in
many languages".
While many nationalist thinkers, including Sri Ambindo, considered
Indian literalure as empirically valid, there were others who were anxious to
construct it as mnethhg desirable. Sir Ashutosh Mukheajee, the Vice-
Chancellor of Calcutta University who established the first department of
modern Indian languages in the country in 1919 in his concern for the
development of a titerame which he calledjariya sahitya (national literature),
wanted a method to be devised which would allow the ti- produced in
different linguistic areas of the country - Banga, Bihar, Utkala, Gur~ara,
Gandhar, Pmjab and so on - "to be thread into one garland" and to be
"assembled on the same shore of the Ocean of literature". It is unnecessary to
go into the various issues arising out of this blueprint of an idealistic national
project, except to emphasise that he thought it was primanly an academic
project. "If we have to bring about the literary unity of India," he declared, "we
shall have to do so through our universities".7 The construction of an Indian
literature was for him a nationalist agenda.

The nationalist construction of Indian literature as one though written in many

languages need not be criticised as reductionism and without any empirical
validity. Such an exercise, however, initiates a significant debate on the nature
of literature and its relation with a community. Dunng the last two centuries,
which witnessed reorganisation of communities and changes in the political
boundaries of many countries, the infallibility of the language-literature
relationship has also been questioned. The recognition of American literature
as distinct £tom the British, though written in the same language, is no longer a
matter of controversy. The case has been strengthened by the emergence of
Canadian and Australian literatures also written in the same language. It only
shows that a common language cannot marginalhe the question of nationality,
and that nationality or the consciousness of one's belonging to a community,
political or social (and occasionally religious) can assert itself as the most
important factor of one's identity. This is not to challenge the essential
relationship between language and literature, nor to underestimate the linguistic
materials that form literary structures, but to look at the literary activity of a
given community in relation to its cultural context. The acceptance of a model
of literature produced in a monolingual culture, or a culture where the
supremacy of one language is legitimised as universally valid, is

'I MUKHOPAD~AY (MUKHERJEE), "Bbaratiya Sahitya Bhavisyat" (lkFuture of

lndian Litemhue), included in Jatiya Sahify (National Literature),Calculta, 1924.
1 Das: Constructiollsof “IndianLiterature " N e w C ~ s o n 2 3 p.19
: I
methodologically unsound In areas where many languages operate the one
language-one literature equation may satisfy the pwists, but the community's
response to titeratme transcends linguistic demarcations. I would like to quote
a passage from A Parsage to Inda as a convenient illustration of the attitude of
a community towards literary texts written in more than one language, and how
it is possible for the community to treat them as a part of a larger whole.
Presently Aziz chaffed him, also the wants, and then began quoting poetry:
Persian, Urdu, a little Arabic. His memory was good, and for so young a man
he had read largely; the themes he preferred were the decay of Islm and the
brevity of love. They listened delighted, for they took the public view of
poetry, not the private which obtains in England. It never bored them to hear
words, words, they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to
analyse, the name of the poet, Hah, Hali, Iqbal was suflicient guanmtee.
India - a hundred Indias - whispered outside beneath the indiffkmt moon,
but tbr the time, India seemed one aud their own, and they regai~~ed their
departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they feh young again
because reminded that youth must fly.

Let us not be distracted by the fact that the passage is part of a narrative
strategy devised by the novelist to achieve a desired effect, and that it is also
possibly a part of a construction of an Oriental universe by a foreign o W e r .
Let us also ignore the suggestion, if there is one here, of a coalescence of
historical times projecting an India that never changes. The materials with
which the passage is constructed are relevant: the participants in a literary
activity which involves reading and listening, the linguistic competence of the
participants, knowledge of three languages in varying degrees, enjoyment of
literature as a public or social activity and the manner in which two themes,
"the decay of Islam" and the "brevity of love", the one public, political and
historical, the other prima, personal and universal - are integrated, and finally
how the three poets writing in different languages - Hafh wrote in Persian only
- and in three diffkcent periods, constitute the body of l i t e m of a closed and
homogeneous wmmmitv.
The perception of iterature as texts composed in different languages, but
with thematological or ideological cormections, is nothing new or
exiraordinary. It depends upon a particular community's exposure and attitude
to languages and literatures. One can think of three types of situation of
different languages coming into contact or being employed by a community.
The early Christians created a corpus of works - a unified area of religious
literature - in three languages - Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The more hquent
situation of language-contact in history, however, is a by-product of political
and military conquest of one language group over another. Conquerors dimpt
the linguistic homogeneity of the conquered societies, which in their turn try to
negotiate with new situations. The contact situations between Latin and Greek,
Arabic and Spanish, Arabic and Persian, English and various Indian languages,
[NW Comrpmisosr 23: p. 20 Das: Cmtructim of '7nriianLiteralure " I
though not identical in character, are a few examples. The third type can be
exemplified by Canada, where French and English o p t e in clearly specified
geographical areas, each stoutly defending its uniqueness, and yet each
contributing to the making of a national literatme. The Indian situation is
diffkmt h m all these three. Here is a continuous contact between languages
of different hmdies and between litemtures of varying quality and of different
traditions. L i s t s have demonstrated that despite their distinct genealogical
i-es the Indian languages converge with one another in their sound
system, grammar and syntax. The convergence among literature is even
stronger: there is a convergence towards common themes and genres,
metaphors and symbols,and even towards a poetics and literary terms. On the
basis of the convergence alone one can also look at India as a literature-area,
which provided the rationale for an Indian literature.
Let us consider a few facts of the history of Indian literary activity. It is
well known that ''Sauskrie plays developed the convention of using Fhlaits in
the dialogues of c& characters according to their class, caste and gender. A
play like the A b h i j m Wntalam reflects a situation of coexistence of
several languages, more or less e . comprehensible by the literary
c o e t y . Such texts of linguistic mosaic can hardly be assigned to a
monolingual literary tradition. Is it a Sanskrit text or a text written in Fhlaits?
How does one determine its linguistic character - by statistical criteria or by the
hegemony of languages employed in it? This is an awkward example against
the one language-one literature relationship but it cannot be set aside as an
aberration. The community for which such a play was wrm i and staged had
no problem in accepting a multdhgd text as a legitimate literary work.
The European classicists studied Greek and Latin together and viewed
them as constituting a unified literary Miverse. The ancient Indians also
viewed Pali, Prakrits and Sanskrit in a more or less similar manner. An
allegorical account of the celebration of the birth of Kavya purusa (P-
Person) by an ancient literary critic may be cited in evidence. Saraswati, the
goddess of learning blesses her son Kavyapurusa in the following words:
May sound and sense be your body, Sanskrit be your face, Prakrits be your
arms, Apabhramsa your thighs, Paishachi your feef and a mixture of different
Praluits your breast .g

This is clearly a counterview to monolingual literature and an articulation of a

new idea of literature, a literature of a multilingual community. Linguistically
different though they are, the community considered the texts as components of
a single literany universe.

SaWarthau te Sariram Sadatam mukhem prakrtam vahuh j&mampablmnoab

pakcam padau un, misnun. Kalya mimama, I quoted in -AN MURHERIEE,
Lifemty Criticism in Ancient M u (Calcutta, 1966), p. 3.
1Das: Constructionsof "I& Litemhue " New ComparisonU :p.21 I

In exploring evidence for the existence of this perception of litemlure one

must not ignore the history of the growth of several artificial litemy dialects in
different parts of India as a result of language-blending or a special form of
"code-mixhg". The Gatha Sanskrit (or the Buddhist Sanskrit), an artificial
dialect comprising Pali and Sanskrit in which are composed Lalita V i s t a
Mahavastu and DivyavodaM, initiated a convention that continued for many
cenhuies. The same process is to be found in the manipmla (gem-coral)
l i m that existed both in Kerala and in Tamhadu. The fourteenth-catwy
text Lilatilakam defines it as a style mixed of Sanslait and Malayalam - bhasa
samskrtqoga manipmalam - "mani" indicating "Sanskrit" and "prayold'
being Malayalam. "As time progressed", writes a Malayalam scholar, %is
language became so multivalent and comprehensive that it set the aesthetic
standard in literature for later ages and periodsn.9 The hybrid language was
also used in theatrical pehrmances like Rutiyattam where the hen, spoke
Sanskrit, and the Yichcshaka (the down) in mixed Sanskrit and Malayalam.
Tamil scholars have noticed m a n i p d a being wed in its proto-fonn even in
the iuscription and copper plates of the Pallava and the Pandya kings h m the
fifth century A.D. onwards.10 In the Pallava period, the marupmla was
employed as a court language for a limited puIpose. As a language of
commentary, writes a Tamil scholar, "it was legitimately accepted by the
scholars who were well versed in both Sansluit and Tamil".
Such mixed languages strongly betray the hegemony of Sanskrit but they
are also evidence of attempts to make we of two languages belonging to two
different families (in this case Aryan and Dravidian) to create one body of
literature, howsoever specialised that may be. It is also important to realise that
the mmipravala is not an exclusively Dravidian phenomenon, nor is Gatha
SanrMt exclusively Buddhist. This device of code mixing was employed in
other parts of India as well as by other linguistic communities at different
periods. In the sixteenth century the Vaishnava poets all over Eastern India
created a new manipmvala, which they named Bmjabuli (literally, the
language of Braja, the homeland of Krishna) - different fiom Bmj, me of the
major dialects of Hmdi - where mani was not Sanskrit but Maitbili, and
pmvala was any one of the three languages - Assamese, Bengali or Chiya -
depending upon the poet's preference.1 This poetic dialect rejected the
hegemony of Sanskrit and privileged a bhasa (one of the modern Indian
languages) and thus tried to work out a new h e p o n i c relation among the
bhasas themselves. Like manipravala, the BwabuIi, too, had a large corpus of
poetic literature and enjoyed a tremendous prestige as a poetic lauguage.
- - - -

9 See Encyclopedia of Indian Lftemhrre,Vol. UI, @elk:Sahitya Akademi), p. 25M.

lo Bid., p. 2585.
l1 See SUKUMAR SEN, History of Brajabufi Literature, Calcutta University, Calcuaa,
1935.
1NW Comparison 23: p. 22 Das: Cmbwctions of "Indim Literature" ]

S h a d e v a , the versatile Assamese writer, chose Brajabuii as the medium of

both h g z t (devotional songs) and mhya nut, a particular kind of religious
drama. Even the gong VandeM a t m , effectively the national anthem of India
before indepdence but now considered to be a politically sensitive text,
written by B a n k Chandra Chatterjee in the last century, is written in two
languages, Bengali and Sanslait.
Another pronounced feature of the multilingualism co~ectingcent
lingustic-litemy traditions in India is the literary bilinpahsm which has
resulted either in the emergence of writers using more than one language in
their creative experiments or of fizquent switching from one language to
another. The Kamrada tenn ubhaya kuvi (poet in two languages) came in use to
designate writers practising in two languages, oftefi Kannada and Sanskrit. The
sixaenth-century poet Vadiraja Tirtha, a conkmporary of the more famous
F'uraudara Das, wrote in both Sanskrit and Kamrada as well as in Tub, a minor
language, for the untouchables of Karnataka. Pal Kuriki Sorrmath, the greatest
of Telugu Saiva poets of the shkmth century, wrote in Telugu and Kannada
and Sanskrit. Vidyapati, the fjfkenth-cenhuy Maithili poet, wrote in Sanskrit
and Ababtta and PraIait as well as in his mother-tongue, Maithili.
The language-switching is only a con6(fllraton of the litermy b i i
as well as of the perception of literature cutting across ling~~stic boundaries.
Radhanath Ray, the great nineteenth-century writer of Oriya, had his
apprenticeship in Ben&: his first work was in his mother-tongue, Bengali,
and only later did he switch to Oriya. The more familiar example is Ran
Chand, who also wrote in two languages, Urdu and Hindi, which are
grammatidy very close if not identical but culturally widely different. It is
possible to multiply examples to justify the existence of an idea of Indian
literature as a complex of litmtures, inkdependent, closely related and unified
by certain commonalties.
F. Kinck, the general editor of Lifemry History of Cmda: Canadian
Literahrre in English (1965) defends the sub-title in preference to "English
Canadian Literatwen because the former term, he writes, "puts the name of this
country first and suggests unity rather than division". The editor M e r
elaborates in way of justification of the qualifier Canadian, as not simply a
place but also as an environment. So far as the place is concerned, Canada is a
number of "places". What is true of Canada is valid for India, which if seen
chronologically also represents a number of places and tenitories whose
bouudaries were never Gxed for all time. Yet "India" always existed as a place,
as an environment, as a space where various traditions emerged, thrived,
collided and compromised with one another, and nourished themselves by
accepting from one another. The India of Chandragupta Maurya (fourth
century B.C.)or the India of Akbar the Great (sixteenth century) or the India
just before independence (1947) and the India of ow time are not identical in
terms of political space. Yet the perception of India is not a political variable.
I Das:Constructionsof "IMb'anLiterature" New Comparison 23: p.23 1
As a creation of the people's memory of a continuous journey through time, it
has a greater stability and longevity. The idea of Indian literature is sustained
by this perception of India where multiple traditions co-exist. Indian Literature,
as argued here, is neither any single literature claiming representative status on
the basis of geography or population, nor a single literature claiming the highest
literary excellence. It is also different fiom the view which projects Indian
literature as an aggregate of all literatures produced within the country - a view
too mechanical to deserve any critical attention. It is a structure that recognises
the uniqueness of each literary system and the relation between them; a
structure that accommodates pluralities of expressions, of responses and
reception, and rejects the superimposed scheme to fit everydung into a neat
homogeneity.
The pluralities of expressions in different languages do not rule out the
unities underlying them. This may be controlled by certain values shared by
the communities living in India fiom historical times, but that is not a
superimposed construction. The connection between different literatures has
been always recognised by the communities themselves. It is not only the
relation between Sanskrit and various other languages, but between these
younger languages themselves as well. I would like to point out a verse in the
Padma Purana, in the section "Bhakti Narada Samagama", which can be taken
as a projection of a synoptic view of a tradition both religious and literary,
involving several languages. Bhakti, conceived as a woman, speaks about her
itinerary through India and different phases of her growth:
I was born in Dravid land, I flourished in Kamataka, and 1 spent some time in
Maharashtra and also in Gujarat where I got emaciated. Of late I have come
to Vrindavan and have attained full youth and beauty.
Bhakti speaks for herself: she is one but assumes different forms. The
literature of Bhakti, too, - the major stream of medieval literature - is different
in different regions and yet has an underlying unity. Narayana Tirtha, a
sixteenth-century Telugu poet and the author of Krsnalila Ibrangini, is often
referred to as the reincarnation of Jayadeva, the twelfth-century poet who wrote
in Sanslait. It is not that the readers were unaware of the basic differences
between the two poets and their works, written in different languages and
separated by geography and time. Similarly we find the popular belief that
Lilashuka Vilvamangal was reincarnated as Jayadeva and Jayadeva was reborn
as Narayana Tirtha, who again was reborn as Ksetrayya. The metaphor of
reincarnation is a device of the indigenous folk poetics addressing issues of
translinguistic relationship. It emphasises the continuity of traditions, the
various regional and linguistic configurations of thought and experiences
claimed to be Indian.
Suniti Kumar Chatterji, in the introduction of Languages and Literatures
of Modem India (1963), divided the "matter" of Indian literature into three