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
[email protected] Diary: Mr Maurice Slawinski, Department of Italian Studies, Lonsdale College, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK. Email
[email protected] Production: Dr Howard Gaskill, Department of German, University of Edinburgh, David Hume Tower, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JX, UK. Email
[email protected] Reviews: (as of Issue 25) Dr. Duncan Large, Deartment of German, University of Wales College, Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. Email
[email protected]. 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 Literarische Kontexte w n K& (Mary Bryden), p. 152; BENITA VON HEYN~~Z, 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 panIndian 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
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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
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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.
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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 LitTranslation 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
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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 twentytwo 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
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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
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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 asmore 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
the English Romantic poets (j-iii) the Yeats-Eliot mode of Modernism (j-iv) Indian writing in English (j-ii)
(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 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 (1)
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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 der indlschen btemfur University, 1926), p. 35.
(in
History of Indian Literature, translated [hm Geschichte three volumes, Berlin, 19091 by S. Ketar (Vol. I, Calcutta
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"
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 panIndian 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
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 ViceChancellor 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 tiproduced 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 :
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,
I
[NW Comrpmisosr 23: p. 20
Das: Cmtructim of '7nriianLiteralure "
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 (PPerson) 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.
I
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
lo l1
1935.
-
-
-
See Encyclopedia of Indian Lftemhrre,Vol. UI, @elk:Sahitya Akademi), p. 25M. Bid., p. 2585. See SUKUMAR SEN, History of Brajabufi Literature, Calcutta University, Calcuaa,
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
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
1
