Hello everyone
I am Nehalba Gohil a student of the department of English MKBU . In this blog Im going to discuss about the article of comparative studies.
Sisir Kumar Das why Comparative Indian literature? ( Dev and Das 1989)
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About Sisir Kumar Das
1)Sisir Kumar Das was a poet playwright translator comparatist and a prolific scholar of Indian literature. He is considered by many as the doyen of Indian literary historiographers
2)Almost singlehandedly Das buit an integrated history of Indian literature a task that had seemed to many important scholars of Indian literature to be a historians despair.
In the beginning of the century, some of the scholars tried upon the idea of Indian Literature emphasizing the unity of themes and forms and attitudes between the different kinds of literature produced in different Indian languages during the last three thousand years. It discovers the essential threads of unity in two ways.
India is a Multilingual and Multiriligious country. “Coming back to the nature of Comparative Literature as taught in India, the epigraph by Sisir Kumar Das states the pressing concern of relationships that exist between Indian literature. It is also the comparatist’s need to move away from narrow geographical confines and move towards how literature across the subcontinent are to be understood in their totality.”(Das:96–97).
“For a country like India which has a history of literary traditions oscillating between script and orature, new methods of teaching and reading were to be envisioned. While dealing with the formal elements that go into the making of any text in India—which shares a similarity with African situations in terms of oral, written and indigenous sources” (Thiongʼo 1993)— identification of these methods as contours which aid in the reading of literature would apply. When speaking of literatures in the plural, the succeeding questions point towards the direction in which these literatures tend to inhabit a geopolitical location, otherwise termed a country, which is demarcated by boundaries, social, religious and linguistic. When reading any text, the value-loaded term ‘national’, ‘international’ and ‘indigenous’ prop up any student pursuing literature.
Comparative literature in Indian by Amiya Dev
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic.
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Dev also examines the search for common denominators and a possible pattern of togetherness and Dev underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of inter literariness. It is t/here Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and inter literary process: Indian language and literature ever in the re/making.
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Amiya Dev by Comparative literature in Indian
Abstract :-
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic.
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Dev also examines the search for common denominators and a possible pattern of togetherness and Dev underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of interliterariness. It is t/here Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and interliterary process: Indian language and literature ever in the re/making
Key points :-
Comparative literature in India
Problem of looking Indian literature as written in single language Sanskrit.
Single Focus perspective is a result of both a colonial and a post- colonial perspective.
Gurbhagat , singh -"Differential Multulogue".
Problems with regard to the concept of mutuality
Key Arguments :-
It has Binary opposition, focusing on dialectical.
The concept of the Hegelian and Marxist approach.
The Unity vs Diversity.
In this paper, he discuss an apriori placement of comparative literature in terms of features of diversity and unity in India, a country with enormous language diversity and consequently various literatures. Because I believe that in the case of India, the study of literature should include the notion of the interliterary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction, my proposal entails a special view of the discipline of comparative literature. Let me start with a quick overview of linguistic diversity: prior censuses in 1961 and 1971 reported a total of 1,652 languages, while the most recent census in 1981 documented 221 spoken languages (excluding languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers).Of course, many of the 221 language groups are small, and only the eighteen major languages named in the Indian Constitution account for the majority of the population's speakers. In addition to the eighteen languages listed in the Constitution, the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) has recognised four additional languages for their literary significance (Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Indian English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kankani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, This number of twenty-two major languages and literatures, however, is misleading because secondary school and university curriculum sometimes incorporate additional languages spoken in the vicinity of the educational institution.
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Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta Comparative literature in Indian An overview of its History
Abstract:-
The essay gives an overview of comparative literature in India focusing primarily on the department at jadavpur university where it began and to some extent the department of modern Indian languages and literary studies in the university of Delhi where it later had a new beginning in its engagement with Indian literature. The department at jadavpur begun with the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore's speech on World literature and with a modern poet translator as its founder. While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonising process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity. Gardually Indian literature began to receive prominence along with literature from the southern part of the globe.
Keywords: Decolonizing process, creativity, cross-cultural literary relations, interdisciplinarity.
The beginning :-
Tagore used the word Visvasahitya and stated that the word was generally termed comparative literature. His ides of Visvasahitya was complex marked by a sense of community of artists as workers building togather an edifice that of world literature. The nation of literature again was deeply embedded on human relationships and hence the aesthetic sense was linked with the sense of the human.
Bose also well known for his translations of Baudelaire . Hoelderlin and Kalidas wrote in his preface to the translation of Les Fleurs du Mal that his intention in turning to French poetry was to move away from the literature of the British the colonial masters while in his introduction to the translation of Kalidas's Maghdutam he wrote that it was essential to bring to life the literature of ancient times in a particular tradition in order to make it a part of the contemporary.
Indian literature as Comparative literature
T.S Satyanath developed the theory of a scripto centric body centric and phono centric study of texts in the mediaeval period leading a number of researchers in the department to look for continuities and intervention in the tradition that would again lead to pluralist epistemologies in the study of Indian literature and culture.
Centres of Comparative literature studies
In 1986 a new full-fledged department of comparative literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University Surat where fouce was on Indian literature in western Indian. Also in 1999 a department of Dravidian Comparative literature and philosophy was established in Dravidian university Kuppam it must also be mentioned that comparative poetic a core area of comparative literature studies and dissertation particularly in the south was takes up as a central area of research by the Visvanathan Kaviraj institute of comparative literature and aesthetics in Orissa.
The two merged in 1992 and the comparative literature association of India was formed which today has more than a thousand members. In the early years of Association a large number of creative writers participated in its conference along with academics and researchers each enriching the horizon of vison of the other.
Reconfiguration of areas of comparison
Along with Indian literatures, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude became a part of the syllabus with a few other texts from Latin American Literatures and then Literatures from African countries were included.
As for the other Area Studies components, the department today hosts Centres for African, Latin American and Canadian studies where some research work and annual seminars are organized. A few, like the present author, are of the opinion that given the relatively small number of faculty in the department, the Area Studies programmes led to a division of the scarce resources and also diverted attention from some of the key challenges in comparative literature studies in India, namely, the systematic amalgamation of data related to the Indian context and its analysis from comparative perspectives, and also perhaps the mapping of intercultural relations with and among India’s neighbouring countries.
Burns and Wordsworth were very popular and it was felt that their romanticism was marked by an inner strength and serenity. The much talked about ‘angst’ of the romantic poet was viewed negatively. The love for serenity and ‘health’ went back to the classical period and seemed an important value in the tradition.
Among the projects planned under the inter-Asian series was one on travelogues from Bengal to Asian countries and here an annotated bibliography that could provide an initial foundation for the study of inter-literary relations was published. A second project involved working on the image of Burma in Bengali and Oriya literature in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Travel narratives and diaries, newspaper articles from old periodicals, excerpts from literature and pictorial images of Burmese people in the Indian press were compiled.
Conclusion :
In all its endeavors, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.
The comparatist work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and that the task of the construction of literary histories, in terms of literary relations among neighboring regions and of larger wholes one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has yet perhaps to begin.
