Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics Discourse in Indian poetry by E.V.Ramkrishinan

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I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics Discourse in Indian poetry" by E.V.Ramkrishinan This article is from 'Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity'.   This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract :

This article examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970. The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translation of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetics modes. Many Indian poets such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya,Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators.Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into India languages during this phase.

In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and performative act of legitimation,in evolving a new poetic during the modernist phase of Indian poetry. The term ‘translation ‘ to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intertextual text. Andre Lefevere’s concept of translation as reflections/ rewriting , the chapter argues that ‘rewritings’ and ‘reflections’ found in the ‘less obvious form of criticism…,commentary, historiography , teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of playshare also instance of translation. An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranayh Dutt, or scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also described as ‘ translational’ writing as they have elements of translation embedded in them. 

📌Key Points :

• Modernity and Modernism
• The project of Modernism in India
• Literary/ artistic movement 
• Postcolonial contex
• The reception of Western modernist discourses in India
• Translation 
• Indigenous roots/ routes ofmodernity and modernism
• Western modernity
• The metaphor of the mice
• The surreal image
  

📌Key Arguments :

It has been argued that the Idea of a ‘Self-reflection or Self-validating’ literary text, which is central to modernist poetic, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicated with colonialism. D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of the nation state. How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi,Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that Non-Western modernism are not mere derivate versions of European hegemonic practice.In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, ‘It was not

because they imbibed modernism that the adbunik Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath Tagore.

In ‘The Necessity of poetry’, Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies ,particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity. Mardhekar points to their blind search for survival in a hostile world. The surreal image in the line, 'sadness has poisonous eyes made of glass, sums up the opaqueness of their vision and the toxic nature of their condemned existence unrelieved by any sense of benign order of life.

📌Analysis :

The relation between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’ in Indian context , the purpose of discussion it may be broadly stated that Modernity designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformation brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production. Colonial Modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century.The term ‘Modernism’ implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterized by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as popular. The pistcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian Modernism. 

The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated by  the dynamics of socio-political upheavals related to the formation of the nation state and the realignment of power structures in society. Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature. The three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions-Sudhindranath Dutta(1901-60) from Bengali, ,B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56) from marathi,and Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004) from Malayalam. These three authors was bilingual and wrote essay in English as well as their own languages. Bengali emerged in 1930s an continued into the 40s and 50s, Marathi from 1950s to the 60s. Dutta's discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and Yeats prove his mastery over Western thought.

As a modernist poem, "The Camel-Bird' moves beyond the personal by embodying the condition of inertia that a colonised community is condemned to.B. S. Mardhekar transformed Marathi poetry and its dire dynamics in terms of its vision, form and content. Mardhekar intervened in Marathi literary tradition as an insider who had mastered the insights given by an alien traditionIn 'Mice in the Wet Barrel Died', which became the iconic modernist poem of Marathi. The metaphor of the mice is meant to evoke the morbid and the malevolent in modern life. When this poem was originally published in Marathi, in Abhiruchi, it was met with several disapproving comments, leading to long discussions and even parodies of the poem in Marathi.

Ayyappa Paniker was a poet, critic and translator, who, apart from introducing world poetry to Malayalam readers. The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur through the metaphor of the dream. The evocative rhythms of the poem provoke a profound disquiet that cannot be particularised. The self is seen as a site of struggle and conflict, but the modern men and women are denied the tragic dignity of epic heroes. It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity.

📌Conclusion :

Thus, language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of recognition. enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism, was postcolonial in its essence. The self-reflexive mo(ve)ment was also made possible by the carrying across of not content or form, but an interior mode of being that questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.

📌Work Cited :

• Ramkrishinan, E V. “ Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity.” Shifting Centres And Emerging Margins: Translation And the Shaping Of Modernist Poetics Discourse In Indian Poetry , 2017.

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Introduction: History in Translation by Tejaswini Niranjana

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I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "Introduction: History in Translation" by Tejaswini Niranjana . This article is from 'Sitting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context, 1992'.  This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract :

For a while now, some of the most urgent debates in contemporary cultural and literary studies have emerged out of the troubled interface of poststructuralist theory and historical studies. In its most basic formulation, the problem is that of articulating radical political agendas within a deconstructive framework. For a discipline like literary studies, the raison d'être of which is the analysis of representation, the critique of representation coming from within has engendered profoundly self-reflexive anxieties. It is in the context of this crisis that Tejaswini Niranjana's examination of translation as critical practice is made possible. Her analysis seems to amplify and elaborate the possibilities of the claim made by other postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as feminists such as Jane Gallop and Nancy K. Miller, that deconstruction can be used in politically enabling ways. Insisting that a questioning of humanist or Enlightenment models of representation and translation "can underwrite a new practice of translation . . . reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance" (6), Niranjana persuasively shows that a critique of presence can be taken to its limits and yet not incapacitate the interventionist critic.

She begins by addressing what she sees as deconstructive criticism's failure to address the problem of colonialism, as well as the neglect by translation studies to ask questions about its own historicity. Contemporary critiques of representation have not extended themselves to the point of questioning the idea of translation, of re-presenting linguistic meaning in interlinguistic transfers. Translation is made possible by the belief in mimesis, which in turn assumes the purity of the original. Niranjana cites powerful examples from the post-colonial context to show how translation was "a significant technology of colonial domination" (21); the use of translation to codify Hindu law, for instance, is revealed as imperialist cathexis, "to create a subject position for the colonised" (19) which would "discipline and regulate the lives of" Hindu subjects (18). In other words, the notion of "original" text was itself used to fashion the native's essence-an instance of colonialism's attempt to erase heterogeneity.

📌Key Points :

• Situating Translation 
• Translation As Interpellation
• The Question of History

📌Key Arguments :

In the colonial context, a certain conceptual economy is created by the set of related questions that is the problematic of translation. Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge.Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. 

📌Analysis :

Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized. She was, therefore, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization, given the enduring nature of Hegelian presentation of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could underwrite a new practice of translation. In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, my discussion functions in all the registers philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose. Another aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic (searching for an origin) and teleological (positing a certain end) nature of traditional historiography.A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus of Mill and Hegel. Her concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus." Rather, I am trying to question the with holding of reciprocity and the essentializing of “difference” (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of co evalness) that permits a stereotypical construction of the other.This kind of deployment of translation, I argue, colludes with or enables the construction of a teleological and hierarchical model of cultures that places Europe at I the pinnacle of civilization, and thus also provides a position ,for the colonized. This work belongs to the larger context of the “crisis” in "English" that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decolonized world. 

 📌Conclusion :

Her central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for “History" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial“ perspective- that of an  emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates. Since it is part of her argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, She should briefly go over Spivak's main points regardin the "Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of post-structuralist ideas may help us see more clearly how the notions of history and translation she wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of historiography but might also further strengthen that critique. 

📌Work Cited :

• Niranjana, Tejsawini. “Sitting Translation: History, Poststructuralism And the Colonial Context.” Introduction: History In Translation, 1992.

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On Translating a Tamil Poem by A. K. Ramanujan

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I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "On Translating a Tamil Poem"  by A. K. Ramanujan . This article is from 'Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed Vinay Dharwadkar'.  This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract : 

'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language? Ramanujan translated poems from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky by passes.The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. We know now that no translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.What is everyday in one language must be translated by what is everyday in the 'target' language also, and what is eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. In this article Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.

📌Comparison of Tamil and English Language :

While translating Tamil poem Ainkurunuru 203, He begin with the sounds. He find that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n, ñ, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English. How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n)? Tamil has long and short vowels, but English (or most English dialects) have diphthongs and glides. Tamil has no initial consonant clusters, but English abounds in them: 'school, scratch, splash, strike', etc. English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not.

So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another even in a related, culturally neighbouring language.Tamil metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants,can map one system on to another, but never reproduce it. English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a long tradition of second syllable consonant-rhymes. End-rhymes in Tamil are a modern innovation, just as second syllable rhymes in Engljsh would be considered quite experimental. The 'tradition of one poetry would be the innovation of another. The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one: what is A B C D E in the one would be (by and large) E D C B A in Tamil. Tamil syntax is mostly left-branching. English syntax is.

📌Key Arguments :

Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in Azande. Such observations certainly disabuseus of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation. Woollcott suggests that English does not have left- branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas used those possibilities stunningly, as we see in Thomas's 'A Refusal to Moum the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London; both were Welshmen, and Welsh is a left-branching language.

Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech. One could not use Dylanese to translate Tamil, even though many of the above phrases from Thomas can be translated comfortably with the same word order in Tamil.

📌Analysis :

The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters special to each language, quile untranslatable into another language like Tamil. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinShip, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged each relative are ali culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists. Ramanujan took two different poems about love (What She Said) and war ( A Young Warrior ) and made point that, when we move from one to the other we are struck by the associations across them forming a web not only of the akam and puram genres. But also of the five landscape.; with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes and motifs 0f love and war.

Love and war become metaphors for one another. In the poem “A Leaf In Love And War” we see entwines the two themes of love and war - in an ironic juxtaposition. A wreath of nocci is worn by warrior in war poems a nocci leafskirt is given by a lover to his woman in love poem. Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors. Ramanujan take a closer look at the original of Kapilar’s poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he point out that The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I have translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girl friend.

Four things that makes translation possible...

• Structural Mimicry
• Systematicity 
• Interiorized contexts 
• Universals

1) Universals: 

It such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. Universals of structure in both signifiers and signifieds are necessary fictions. The indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise. 

2) Interiorised Contexts: 

One is translating also this kind of intertextual web, the meaning- making web of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem. 

3) Systematicity: 

One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world. 

4) Structural mimicry: 

The structures of individual poems, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language, rhetoric , and poetics, become the points of entry. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items not single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical Units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.

📌Problems in translation :

To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'. Translations are trans-positions, re- enactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. One can often convey a sense of the original rhythm. but not the language-bound metre: one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words.

📌Conclusion : 

The translation must not only represent,, but re- present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following.If the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in ’carrying’ the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one. 

📌Work Cited :

• Ramanujan, A K. “Collected Essays Of A.K. Ramanujan, Ed Vinay Dharwadkar.” On Translating a Tamil Poem, 1999.

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Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy

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I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "Translation and Literary History: An  Indian View" by Ganesh Devy. This article is from 'Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Eds.)  Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi'. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract :

This article is about the  role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders. According to J. Hillis Miller ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.’Chaucer, Dryden and the Pope used the tool of translation to recover a sense of order. The tradition of Anglo-Irish literature branched out of translating Irish works into English.No critic has taken a well-defined position on the place of translations in literary history. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation.Translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. 

📌Key Arguments :

Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations: 

• (a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language             system
• (b) those from one language system to another language system, and
• (c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9).

In Chomsky’s linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii).

During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy:

• Comparative studies for Europe, 
• Orientalism for the Orient, and
• Anthropology for the rest of the world

After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism and after Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity.

📌Analysis :

The Problems in Translation Study

The translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. Translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it. Problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality the very foundation of modern Indian literature was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

📌Conclusion :

Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be shared. When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.

📌Work Cited :

• Devy, G. N. “Literary History and Translation: An Indian View.” Traduction Et Post-Colonialisme En Inde — Translation and Postcolonialism: India, vol. 42, no. 2, 2002, pp. 395–406., https://doi.org/10.7202/002560ar . 

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Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline by Todd Presner.

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline" by Todd Presner. This article is from book 'A Companion to Comparative Literature'. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract :

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom?

📌Key Argument :

Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before) (Presner, 2007 ).

Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why iany discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred years of print ” (Hayles, 2002 : p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.

Darnton ’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of an information - and media - specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.

Walter Benjamin did in The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.

📌Analysis:

• Comparative Media Studies 
• Comparative Data Studies 
• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies

1)Comparative Media Studies : 

For Nelson, a hypertext is a Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ … ] Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge. (Nelson, 2004: pp. 134 – 145)

2)Comparative Data Studies:

Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets. Jerome McGann argues with regard to the first in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

3)Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies :

James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind. ” 10 For Boyle, the real danger is not unauthorized file sharing but “ failed sharing ” due to enclosures and strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons (Boyle, 2008 : p. 182).Scholars such as McKenzie Wark and Kathleen Fitzpatrick have even “ published ” early versions of their entire books on Commentpress.

📌Conclusion :

This article mainly focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.

📌Work Cited :

• Presener, Todd. “A Companion To Comparative Literature.” Comparative Literature In the Age Of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline , 2011.

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Introduction : what is comparative literature today ? by Susan Bassnet

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I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about  "Introduction : what is comparative literature today ?" by Susan Bassnet.This article is from book 'Comparative Literature A Critical Introduction(1993)'. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

Introduction : what is comparative literature today ? from Riddhi Bhatt

📌About Susan Bassnett :

★ Susan Edna Bassnett, FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. 

★ She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which closed in 2009.

📌Abstract :

Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literatures across both time and space. Susan Bassnett gives a critical understanding of Comparative literature. She says that there is no particular object for studying comparative literature. Another thing is, we cannot give a definite term for comparative literature. Different authors of literature give various perspectives about comparative literature. 

📌Key Arguments :

 Critics at the end of the twentieth century,in the age of postmodernism,still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago: “What is the object of the study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the objective of anything? If individual literatures have canon,what might a comparative canon be? How can be comparatist select what to compare ?Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?”  Susan Bassnett argues that there are different terms used by different scholars for comparative literature studies. Therefore, we cannot put in a single compartment for comparative literature.  The second thing she argues is that the west students of 1960 claimed that comparative literature could be put in single boundaries for comparative literature study, but she says that there is no particular method used for claiming.

📌The key points in Analysis :

• The methodology of comparative literature. 
• Dynamic shifts in comparative literature. 
• Crisis of comparative literature in the postmodern literature field. 

📌Analysis :

The comparative literature has been developed through the progress of the world and through various cultures of different continents.  A different cultures of the continents have played a vital role in comparative literature studies, be it European, African, American and Eastern so on. Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said : “Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event,no single literature is adequately comprehend except in relation to other events,to other literature.”  Goethe termed Weltliteratur.Goethe noted that he liked to “keep informed about foreign productions’ and advised anyone else to do the same.It is becoming more and more obvious to me,”he remarked, “that poetry is the common property of all mankind.”  Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject,contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as separate discipline.  Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949,suggest that : “Comparative Literature …will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars.It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments,not easy to achieve.”

📌Conclusion :

The comparative literature could not be brought under one umbrella unless it becomes a particular branch of the discipline of literature. There are a lot of efforts are being taken to study comparative literature through a common language that is done in translation, which is understood by all people.  Comparative Literature has traditionally claimed translation as a subcategory,but this assumption in now being questioned.The work of scholars such as Toury,Lefevere,Hermans,Lembert and many others has shown that translation is especially at moments of great cultural changes. Evan Zohar argued that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of translation :when it is expanding,when it needs renewal,when it isin a pre-revolutionary phase,then translation plays a vital part. Comparative Literature have always claimed that translation as a subcategory,but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else.  Seenin this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective,and the long,unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline i its own right could finally and definitely be shelved. 

📌Work Cited :

• Bassnet, Susan. “Comparative Literature A Critical Introduction(1993).” Introduction : What Is Comparative Literature Today ?, 1993.

THANK YOU..

Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about  Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History" by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupt. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract :

The essay provides an outline of the history of Comparative Literature in India, focusing mostly on the department at Jadavpur University, where it all began, and to a lesser extent, the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Delhi. Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies at Delhi University, where it afterwards received a new name Its connection with Indian literatures is the starting point.The tradition began with the department in Jadavpur. With a modern poet-translator as its originator, it is based on Rabindranath Tagore's lecture on World Literature. While there were early attempts to decolonize and an overall desire to enhance and foster creativity, there were also subtle efforts to decolonize and an overall endeavour to promote and nurture creativity. Indian literature, along with literature from the southern hemisphere, gradually gained significance. In comparative literary studies, paradigms of techniques evolved from impact and analogue research to cross-cultural literary interactions, with an emphasis on reception and transformation. In Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives in recent years, connecting with various areas of culture and knowledge, especially those relating to excluded communities.

📌Key Argument :

In this article, Researcher givesoverview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in the India, focusing primarily on the department at Jadavpur University, where it began, and some extent the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi, where it later had a new beginning in its engagement with Indian literatures. The department at Jadavpur began with the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on World Literature and with a modern poet-translator as its founder. 

📌Main Analysis :

There were mainly seven most important sections in the article. Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta divided the article in the  below parts.

1. The beginnings
2. Indian Literature as Comparative Literature
3. Centres of Comparative Literature Studies
4. Reconfiguration of areas of comparison
5. Research directions
6. Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies
7. Non-hierarchical connectivity

1) The beginnings :

There were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in India long before Comparative Literature was established as a discipline, both from the perspective of its relation to litera- tures from other parts of the world—particularly Persian, Arabic, and English—and from the perspective of inter-Indian literary studies, the multilingual context facilitating a seamless journey from and to India. between works of literature created in several languages."Relationships of joy," Satyendranath Dutta wrote in 1904. (Dutta 124).Rabindranath Tagore's address to the National Council of Education in 1907, titled "Visvasahitya" (meaning "global literature"), provided as a pretext for the formation of the Comparative Literature department at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year the university began operations.Although it is impossible to speak of the epistemology of comparison with reference to a diverse group of individuals, the emerging contours of the discipline did reveal certain prerogatives. In the early stages it was a matter of recognizing new aesthetic systems, new visions of the sublime and new ethical imperatives – the Greek drama and the Indian nataka - and then it was a question of linking social and historical structures with aesthetics in order to reveal the dialectic between them. The he Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, which went on to become an important journal in literary studies in the country, came out in 1961.

2) Indian Literature as Comparative Literature :

In this part,It wasn't until the 1970s that fresh pedagogical views began to enter the subject of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur. Indian literature has made a significant impact on the curriculum.However, not in terms of establishing national identity.of Comparative Literature studies in the country was around this nodal component of Indian literar themes and forms, a focal point of engagement of the Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”. A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held in Delhi University organized by Nagendra, a writer-critic who taught in the Hindi department of Delhi University and a volume entitled Comparative Literature was published in 1977. However, it was only in 1994 that an MA course in Comparative Indian Literature began in the department. As stated earlier the juxtaposition of different canons had led to the questioning of universalist canons right from the beginning of comparative studies in India and now with the focus shifting to Indian literature, and in some instances to literatures from the Southern part of the globe, one moved further away from subscribing to a priori questions related  canon-formation.T.S. Satyanath developed the theory of a scripto-centric, body-centric and phono-centric study of texts in the medieval period leading a number of researchers in the department to look for continuities and  interventions in the tradition that would again lead to pluralist epistemologies  in the study of Indian literature and culture.

3) Centres of Comparative Literature Studies :

In the 1970s and 1980s, Comparative Literature was taught in a number of South Indian universities and departments, including Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharati Dasam University, Kottayam, and Pondicherry. Despite the fact that Comparative Literature classes were conducted often, In Madurai Kamaraj University's School of Tamil Studies, a full-fledged Comparative Literary Studies department was formed alongside English literature. K. Ayappa is a well-known poet, novelist, and critic. When discussing the south, Paniker, a Kerala native, must be acknowledged for his work in the field, particularly his work on literary theory similarities and his book on India's storytelling traditions.

4) Reconfiguration of areas of comparison :

At Jadavpur University, revisions and reconfigurations of comparison areas occurred once more in the 1980s. Along with Indian literatures, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was added to the syllabus in the late 1970s, along with a few other works from Latin American literatures, and eventually African literatures were included. These aspects of the syllabus were typically structured around concerns of solidarity and a desire to understand resistance to oppression, as well as bigger problems of epistemological changes and efforts to bridge gaps in history caused by colonial interventions.In the late eighties, with Comparative Literature moving out in different directions, it was felt that more structured approach to the subject was necessary. At Jadavpur, under the guidance of Amiya Dev, who was instrumental in the spread of Comparative Literature in different parts of India in the early years and for giving a direction to the discipline, a Master’s syllabus was designed that had genres, themes and

literary historiography as its core area and this model was more or l followed in many new department of comparative literature that would come up later.

5) Research directions :

The late nineties and the early twenties were a period of great expansion for Comparative Literature research in different parts of the country with the University Grants Commission opening its Special Assistance Programme for research in university departments. Many single literature departments were given grants under the programme to pursue studies in a comparative perspective. The English department of Calcutta University for instance, received assistance to pursue research on literary relations between Europe and India in the nineteenth century. Several books and translations emerged out of the project. The department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Saurashtra University, Rajkot, took up the theme of Indian Renaissance and translated several Indian authors into English, studied early travelogues from Western India to England and in general published collections of theoretical discourse from the nineteenth century.

The department at Jadavpur University was upgraded under the programme to the status of Centre of Advanced Studies in 2005, and research in Comparative Literature took a completely new turn. The need to

foreground the relevance of studying literature was becoming more and more urgent in the face of a society that was all in favour of technology and the sciences and with decision-makers in the realm of funding for higher education turning away from the humanities in general.Efforts towards this end led to an International Conference on South-South dialogue with a large number of participants from Asian and European countries. An anthology of critical essays on tracing socio-cultural and literary transactions between India and Southeast Asia was published.

6) Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies :

It must be mentioned at this point that Comparative Literature in the country in the 21st century engaged with two other related fields of study, one was Translation Studies and the other Cultural Studies.Comparative Literature’s relationship with Translation Studies was not a new phenomenon for one or two departments or centres, such as the one in Hyderabad University, which was involved in doing translation studies for a considerable period.It must be mentioned though that despite tendencies towards greater interdisciplinary approaches, literature continues to occupy the central space in Comparative Literature and it is believed that intermedial studies may be integrated into the literary space.

7) Non-hierarchical connectivity :

It is evident that Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in accordance with historical needs, both local and planetary. Several University departments today offer Comparative Literature separately at the M Phil level, while many others have courses in the discipline along with single kinds of literature.

📌Conclusion :

As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with issues that would lead to the enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings. In doing so it is engaged in discovering new links and lines of non-hierarchical connectivity, of what Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called “co-construction”, a process anchored in “subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction” (Sangari 50). And comparatists work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and that the task of the construction of literary histories, in terms of literary relations among neighbouring regions, and of larger wholes, one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has perhaps yet to begin. In all its endeavours, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.

📌Work Cited :

• Dasgupta, Subha Chakroborty. “ Comparative Literature & World Literature.” Comparative Literature In India: An Overview Of Its History, 2016.

THANK YOU...

Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about  "Comparative Literature in India" by Amiya Dev. This article is from the book 'CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.4 '. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract :

In this article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev's argument is based on the fact that India has a diverse range of languages and literature

,implying a pre-existing scenario and surroundings of plurality. As a result, he claims that referring to Indian literature in the singular is inappropriate. Nonetheless, Dev points out that speaking about Indian literature in the plural is problematic as well. He contends that such a categorization either ignores or obscures obvious interrelationships and affinities. His paper contrasts the unity and diversity theories, identifying the link between Indian commonality and variety as the primary focus of comparative literature in India.

📌Key Arguments :

In this article, She discusses a categorical imperatives placement of comparative literature in terms of features of variety and unity in India, a nation with enormous language diversity and, consequently, many literatures. Scholars of literature argue for either a unity of Indian literature or a variety and distinctness of Indian literatures based on history, philosophy, and frequently politics. Instead of a binary approach, my proposal entails a unique perspective on the subject of comparative literature, since I suggest that the study of literature in India should include an understanding of the interliterary process as well as a dialectical view of literary interaction. 

She argue that Brief summary of linguistic diversity: earlier census in 1961 and 1971 reported a total of 1,652 languages, while the most recent census in 1981 recorded 221 spoken languages (excluding languages with less than 10,000 speakers). Of course, many of the 221 languages and dialects are small, and only the eighteen major languages listed in the Indian Constitution account for the majority of the population's speakers.

📌Main Analysis :

In the article, we see that Except for one new entrance in the nineteenth century as a result of colonial Western influence, Indian literatures are old — two of them (Sansjrit and Tamil) ancient in the sense of antiquity, while the rest have an average age of eight to nine hundred years (Indian English).Presently, a different kind of resistance has emerged to the unity thesis in the form of what may be called "hegemonic apprehensions." This perspective includes the argumentation that the designation "Indian literature" will eventually be equated with one of the major literatures of India, perhaps or likely with the largest single spoken language and literature.

The foundations of Comparative Literature as either a field in India are the dilemma of unity in variety and its viewpoints. Let me start by mentioning Gurbhagat Singh, who has been talking about "differential multilogue" (see Singh). He rejects the concept of Indian literature as such, preferring instead to refer to literatures created in India. He also dismisses the concept of Indian literature since it implies and supports a nationalist identity. Singh, as a relativist, attributes not just linguistic but it also cultural uniqueness to literatures. He dismisses both the French and American schools, as well as Goethe's Weltliteratur, when it comes towards the history of comparative literature as a subject.

"The notion of an "English" archive of Indian literature came about two decades ago by the suggestion of V.K. Gokak and Sujit Mukherjee who were speaking of an Indo-English corpus of literature that was created out of English translations of major texts from major Indian languages (see Mukherjee)."The approach Das has taken is methodologically pragmatic: He has a team of scholars working with him (at least one scholar for each language) who collect the initial data which he then processes through a number of checks resulting in a chronological history of literature.

Apart from reception studies, there are a number of additional factors that contribute to interliterary knowledge of Indian literature: we are immersed in our own languages, whether we are active or passive bilinguals, and we have access to one or two other languages. We now have access to materials from a fourth and more languages thanks to inter-Indian translation. As readers, we now arrange messages in various languages alongside our original and the first text, whether consciously or subconsciously. Alternatively, one may argue that these other linguistic texts compel us to use it.

📌Conclusion :

After finishing this essay, we can state unequivocally that the issues of unity and diversity are not unique to India. However, in keeping with Amiya Dev's suggestion that the location of both theorist and theory is critical, illustrate the proposal's application here. For example, if Canadian diversity had been highlighted, it would be from the outside, from an Indian perspective. Although Amiya does not advocate severe relativism, Comparative Literature has taught us not to take comparisons literally and that theory creation in literary history is not always tenable. And that we should start by looking at ourselves and gaining a clear understanding of our own conditions. Let us begin by fleshing out our own comparative analysis.

📌Work Cited :

• Dev, Amiya. "Comparative Literature in India." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.4 (2000): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1093>

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Why Comparative Indian Literature? by Sisir Kumar Das

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about  "Why Comparative Indian Literature?" by Sisir Kumar Das. This article is fromthe book 'Comparative Literatutre Theory and Practices'. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

ABOUT AUTHOR :

• Sisir Kumar Das (1936–2003) 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". 
• Almost singlehandedly Das built an integrated history of Indian literatures composed in many languages, a task that had seemed to many important scholars of Indian literatures to be “a historian’s despair”.
• His three volume (among proposed ten volumes) A History of Indian Literature (Western Impact: Indian Response 1800–1910; Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy 1911–1956; From Courtly to Popular 500–1399) is credited for having devised hitherto absent methods necessary for situating diverse Indian literary cultures in history.
• Apart from this, another monumental work in Das’ scholarly oeuvre is the multi-volume English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, edited by him.

COMPARATIVE INDIAN LITERATURE :

INTRODUCTION :

• 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 literatures. It is also the comparatist’s need to move away from narrow geographical confines and move towards how literatures 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.

ANALYSIS :

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 literatures. It is also the comparatist’s need to move away from narrow geographical confines and move towards how literatures across the subcontinent are to be understood in their totality (Das:96–97).

• Subdivisions, generic differences may occur, but identifying these differences and reading them as contours, instead of straight lines is what Comparative Literature sets out to engage with.
• While questioning the idea of an ‘Indian literature’ vis-à-vis ‘Indian literatures’, he highlights the notions one attaches to the word ‘Indian’ which could in itself be a pluralistic outlook of life, wherein the concept of Indian literature as inherently comparative may be considered.
• according to Das, the necessity of evolving a framework when two distinct languages/cultures encountered was inevitable. Das states in this regard:Arabic, Japanese with Chinese and Indians with the literatures of Europe. 
• All these contacts have resulted in certain changes, at times marginal, and at time quite profound and pervasive, in the literary activities of the people involved, and have necessitated an enlargement of critical perspective‖(S. K. Das 18).
• Das states how Warren Hastings, the first governor‐general of India, in his introduction of Charles Wilkin's translation of Gita (1785), advocated for a comparative study of the Gita and great European literature.

 I should not fear‘ he wrote, to place, in opposition to the best French version of the most admired passages of Iliad or Odyssey, or the 1st and 6th books of our own Milton, highly as I venerate the latter, the English translation of the Mahabharata‘ 

(S. K. Das 22) . 

• Translation brought world-renown to a number of regional writers. In ―The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin argues that translation does not conceal the original, but allows it to shine through, for translation effectively ensures the survival of a text (Bassnett 180).
• Such a characterization, he urges, either overlooks or obscures manifest interrelations and affinities.
•  His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis, and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparative literature in India.
•  He surveys the current scholarly and intellectual positions on unity and diversity and looks into the post-structuralist doubt of homogenization of differences in the name of unity.

CONCLUSION :

• After concluding this article we examine that Dev also examines the search for common denominators and a possible pattern of togetherness and Dev underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of interliterariness.
• It is 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.

THANK YOU......

The Joys of Motherhood

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt.  So today I want to talk about "The Joys of Motherhood " by Buchi Emecheta. As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called "African Literature". So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

Buchi Emecheta :

Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta OBE was a Nigerian-born author who lived in the United Kingdom from 1962 and created plays, an autobiography, and children's books. Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), and The Joys of Motherhood (1979) were among her more than 20 publications (1979). Allison and Busby, where Margaret Busby was her editor, published the most of her early books.Emecheta's themes of child trafficking, motherhood, female independence, and education-based liberation received critical acclaim and awards. "World stories," she once said, "where women face common difficulties of poverty and persecution, and the longer they stay, no matter where they originally came from, the more the problems become same."Her art delves into the conflict between tradition and modernity. "The first successful black woman author living in Britain after 1948," she has been called.

Brief Sketch of "The Joys of Motherhood" :

Buchi Emecheta wrote a novel called The Joys of Motherhood. Allison & Busby initially published it in London, UK, in 1979, and Heinemann's African Writers Series reissued it in 2008. The novel's central theme is the "need for a woman to be fruitful, and above all, to bear boys."It depicts the terrible storey of Nnu-Ego, the daughter of Nwokocha Agbadi and Ona, who had a miscarriage. Nnu Ego, a Nigerian lady, is the protagonist of this tale. Nnu's life revolves around her children, and it is through them that she earns her community's respect. With rising colonial presence and influence, traditional tribal beliefs and conventions begin to evolve, forcing Ego to question established concepts of "mother," "wife," and "woman." Emecheta compels her readers to face the problems connected with accepting new ideas and customs against the temptation to cling to tradition through Nnu Ego's trip. Emecheta discloses and praises the joys received from completing family tasks like as child birthing, mothering, and nurturing actions among women in this novel. However, the author additionally highlights how the 'joys of motherhood' also include anxiety, obligation, and pain.Emecheta "breaks the prevailing portraitures in African writing," according to critic Marie Umeh. "It must have been tough to create vivid images of African motherhood against the already established literary models, especially on such a delicate issue."

Double colonization of women :
The forces of the colonialist world in which the Owulum family lives have a significant impact on their lives. In The Joys of Motherhood, Emecheta presents colonialism in an unclear light. It pushes native cultures to embrace and follow systems and ideas that are not their own. Traditional Nigerian culture is effectively altered and threatened by capitalism, Christianity, and European conceptions of education and behaviour. The repercussions eventually affect everyone in society, undermining tradition and causing harm to both families and individuals. Nnu Ego's delight as a mother and the cohesive and interdependent family she long longed might have stayed whole and unspoiled without the alterations colonialism and its practitioners ushered in. The tragedy of Nnu Ego's narrative is that she is incapable of seeing and accepting change.

Neo-feminism – The Joys of Motherhood :
Nnu Ego and Nnaife, who exhibit stereotyped Ibo male and female roles, symbolise their society's and generation's traditional views. Their world, though, is in change. The old, unchallenged assumptions have started to shift. Boys are not always the primary source of support for their families. Girls acquire respect and influence as a result of their abilities and education, not merely because of the higher bride price. As once-solid gender categories grow more flexible, these shifts in perception can be unexpected and disturbing for the older generation. Nnu Ego has a negative reaction to her husband's job of washing a woman's personal belongings. Subservience, she believes, "robs him of his manhood." Nnu Ego, on the other hand, is not immune to the effects of the virus.The shift and fracturing of gender norms have not spared Nnu Ego. While her identity is almost exclusively based on her position as a mother, she does occasionally step into the typically masculine role of provider and earner in order to sustain her family.

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A Dance of the Forests

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt.So today I want to talk about "A Dance of the Forests " by Wole Soyinka. As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called "African Literature". This task s assigned to Miss. Yesha Bhatt. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

Wole Soyinka :

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka is an English-language Nigerian dramatist, writer, poet, and essayist. He was the first Sub-Saharan African to be honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. In the Nigerian city of Abeokuta, Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family. He started at Government College in Ibadan in 1954 and went on to University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England after that. He worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London after studying in Nigeria and the UK. He then went on to compose plays that were staged and broadcast in both nations. He was a key figure in Nigerian politics and the country's fight for independence from British colonial authority.He seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio in 1965 and broadcast a call for the Western Nigeria Regional Elections to be cancelled. During the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, he was arrested by General Yakubu Gowon's federal authority and held in solitary confinement for two years.
Soyinka has been a vocal opponent of successive Nigerian (and African) regimes, particularly the country's several military rulers, as well as other political tyrannies such as Zimbabwe's Mugabe dictatorship. "The oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it," he has written extensively.Soyinka left Nigeria on a motorbike via the "NADECO Route" under the reign of General Sani Abacha (1993–98). Later, Abacha issued a "in absentia" death sentence on him. Soyinka returned to Nigeria after civilian authority was restored in 1999. Soyinka projected 2020 as the most difficult year in the country's history in December 2020. He stated, " "With the volatility that marked the year 2020, and as activities come to a close, the tone has been repulsive and pessimistic. I don't want to come out as negative, but this has been one of the most depressing years I've ever witnessed in this country, and it's not because of COVID-19. Natural disasters had occurred in other places, but how have you managed to cope with them?"

Brief Sketch of A Dance of the Forests :

Wole Soyinka's drama A Dance of the Forests is one of his most well-known works. The play "denigrated the beautiful African past and cautioned Nigerians and all Africans that their energy should be devoted in the future attempting to avoid repeating the mistakes that have already been done," according to the playwright. It was an iconoclastic book at the time of its release, infuriating many of Soyinka's own Nigeria's elite. Politicians were enraged by his foresight in portraying post-colonial Nigerian politics as aimless and corrupt. Despite the barrage of criticism, the play continues to have an effect. Soyinka espouses a singular vision for a new Africa, one worthy of trying to forge identity free of colonialism.A Dance of the Forests is Soyinka's dramatic debut, and it is widely regarded as the most complicated and difficult of his works to comprehend. In it, Soyinka exposes society's flaws and shows that the history is no better than the present when it comes to the nefarious side of life. He exposes the Nigerian society's fabric and issues a warning as the country approaches a new stage in its history: independence.

Narrative technique of the play - A Dance of the Forests:

The narrative technique of this play has little to do with classic western drama's five-act format. It is split into two halves. The first half follows the protagonists' experiences as they learn to know one another, with Forest as their guide. Father, disguised as Adenebi, makes his way to the woodland and celebration of the birth of his son the coming together of the tribes.Ogun and Eshuoro are on the search for Demoke at the same time. Murete is compelled to confess what he knows by both of them. Demoke's father, the Old Man, and Agboreko both strive to find Demoke and save him. All of the protagonists in this scenario disregard the invited visitors from the past, the Dead Man and the Dead Woman. The second section transports us to Mata Kharibu's court, where the characters we've previously seen reprise their roles as characters from the past—apart from the Dead Man and the Dead Woman, who portray themselves as they were when they lived, and the courageous warrior and his expectant wife, of course.

The thematic resonance becomes a little muddled following the scenes from Mata Kharibu's court, as we have a succession of various choruses, ghosts, ants, and the Triplets' masque. Disguise and masquerade take the place of traditional tale telling, and the plot stagnates. The pace slows until picking up again when Demoke gets involved in the game of ample to reunite the Half-Child with its mother and perform the totem pole climbing expiation ceremony. As day rises, Ogun departs, Eshuoro and his jester run, and Agboreko and the Old Man stumble across Demoke and learn a bit about the strange night's events.Part truth, part anything beyond material reality as we know it, part ritual, part clear storstoryey, the play is, therefore,therefore part reality, part something beyond material reality as we know it. To some extent, the dance is circular to symbolise the cycle of sin which has continued from Mata Kharibu's time to the present, and which will hopefully be ended by Demokel's selfless act of forgiveness on behalf of the whole community.

The contrast Soyinka establishes between the past and the present, between the living and the dead, between dark or terrifying times and moments of light-hearted tomfoolery, is remarkable. The opulent spectacle in a Soyinka play alternates with "moments of dark caricature" and "electric caverns of tension succumbed to wide planes of laughing and celebration," according to Femi Osofisan (Maja-Pearce 48). Part One of the play exemplifies this disparity. The comedic taunting of Murete by Ogun is juxtaposed with the anxiousness of the Old Man seeking for his son, as well as the darker and more clandestine interaction of the four characters in the forest, Demoke, Rola, Adenebi, and Obaneji.

Also, I want to discuss Western Influences on 'A Dance of the Forests'...

Western Influences on 'A Dance of the Forests' :

Soyinka was familiar with the western dramatic tradition as a result of his education in Nigeria and Leeds, as well as his job in London. In A Dance of the Forests, we may discern certain influences of this tradition, however subtle they are. Because of Soyinka's ambition to bring the Yoruba worldview and Yoruba theatre to the world's attention, they are feeble. When the Spirits and the Half-Child converse, their words sound a lot like choric passages from Aeschylus and Sophocles' Greek tragedies:

Half-Child: I who yet await a mother

Feel this dread,

Feel this dread,

I who flee from womb

To branded womb, cry it now

I'll be born dead

I'll be born dead.. . .

Spirit of Darkness: More have I seen, I, Spirit of the Dark,

        Naked they breathe within me, foretelling now...

Half-Child: . . .Branded womb, branded womb...

Spirit of the Palm: White skeins wove me.

Spirit of the Darkness: Peat and forest...

Half-Child: Branded womb, branded womb. (64-65)

The Half-Child is evocative of the bleeding child conjured up by the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth- IV. I. 77ff, to signify Macduff's "unnatural" or CaesarIan birth. Muerte appears to be a cross between Ariel and Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Forest Father's role in bringing the four live people together and so initiating the cycle of sin and atonement is evocative of Prospero from Shakespeare's The Tempest. He is the one who creates the appearance of a shipwreck in order to make up for previous wrongdoings and restore his lost dukedom.

However, there is a crucial distinction to be addressed here. While Prospero makes several allusions to grace, prayer, and "heavenly melody," Forest Head makes none of these references. Soyinka gives the idea that Forest Father has no higher divinity on whom he relies. Unless one wishes to perceive a parallel between Demoke's sacrifice on behalf of the community and Jesus' sacrifice, the Christian worldview does not enter A Dance of the 'Forests.

Work Cited:

• Bevington, David. "Macbeth". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Dec. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Macbeth-by-Shakespeare. Accessed 23 February 2022.
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Wole Soyinka". Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Sep. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wole-Soyinka. Accessed 23 February 2022.
• Hylton, Jeremy. “The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare.” The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare, Shakespeare.mit.edu, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/index.html.
• Soyinka, Wole. A Dance Of the Forests . Oxford University Press, USA, 1966.

THANK YOU.......

The Only Story

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about  "The Only Story" by Julian Barnes. This book is part of our syllabus. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Contemporary Literatures in English. It is a requirement of our studies that we complete a thinking activity following each course. So, I'll respond to 'The Only Story's' queries in his blog. We have a group task in this paper. There are four units and four groups in our class. So here I am, putting together a group task presentation. This group effort included me as well.

📌Here is the link of the professor's blog CLICK HERE

📌Brief Sketch of Julian Barnes & Novel :

Julian Patrick Barnes is an author from the United Kingdom. With The Sense of an Ending, he won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, after being shortlisted three times before with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes also uses the alias Dan Kavanagh to write mystery novels. Barnes has also written anthologies of essays and short tales in addition to novels. He was made a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. The Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize are among his other accolades. He was given the Jerusalem Prize for 2021.

The short novel tells the narrative of Paul Roberts, a 19-year-old Sussex University undergraduate who returns to his parents' home in London's green southern suburbs (Sutton, in Surrey, is suggested as a model.) The setting is the early 1960s, with a few allusions to present events. Paul joins the tennis club, which is one of the few social activities available in such settings. He is paired with Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old married lady with two kids older than Paul, in a mixed doubles match.Surprisingly, Paul and Susan fall in love, and Susan finally abandons her family to live with Paul in South London. Susan quickly slides into drunkenness and dementia due to a lack of activities other than housework. Paul sets out on a journey around the world, picking up jobs and ladies as he goes.Paul is a figure that epitomises alienation. He has no interest in politics or religion, and no specific aim, so he just goes with the flow. He readily confesses that recollection is fallible and that he may not be telling us the truth when he recounts his life in this book.

Here is the Official Website of the Author : http://www.julianbarnes.com/

📌Memory Novel - Structurally as well as thematically :

Julian Barnes explores the concept of memory in this storey in a fascinating way. When we recount a narrative, such as the one told in this novel The Only Story, memory takes precedence. It's been said that :

"History is collective memory; memory is personal history"

Whenever we look into the history of a nation, civilization, or human people, we may wonder what it is, and it is possible that it is everyone's memories. And history is written from that communal memory. So, what truly is memory? Our personal history is written in our memories. It's a private existence that takes place in private locations. The life that is recounted or not narrated, told to everyone or not only to self, or a history that is just written for self and not shared with anyone else is only created for self. So it's memory, which would be personal history, which may or may not be shared with others, but which is just for oneself.

In the genre of writing, we discover that when one individual (Paul Roberts) is sitting there in his old age, reminiscing about his own life and telling us about it. That individual will return to recollection, which is the only way we can convey the self-story. To inform others, we'll have to go back to our memories. So, what exactly is memory, and how do we approach it? When someone revisits a recollection and tries to piece together historical information from his life in order to give us his life narrative. Is it trustworthy or not? Can we argue that this is a real narrative because true stories are usually regarded histories? Is it possible for someone to narrate a narrative on their own?

• Trauma is memory :

Dipesh Chakravarty writes on this in "Memories of Displacement: The Poetry of Prejudice of Dwelling," but not in the same way as Memento or Julian Barnes do, but rather in the framework of postcolonial and subaltern studies. Sir, I'd like to show you a piece of partition literature.The partition literature is riddled with pain; it's all about recollection, what went wrong, and Nas is a part of that memory. On that, storytellers were working. As a result, the encounter was quite upsetting. Trauma is thus a memory in and of itself. The historical and memory narratives are diametrically opposed. Memory storey is highly personal, but historical narrative is quite public. Historical narratives focus on external trauma, whereas memory narratives focus on an individual's interior trauma.

In the novel, When Eric was beaten at the time, Paul fled and later claimed that he went to assist the police, therefore all of these events indicate that Pual is a coward, a failure, and has lost his character. He's made a lot of bad judgments in his life, and his regret is never acknowledged.

📌Theme of Love (Passion + Suffering) :

"Remember,as you read this small book , generally and specifically about love, remember that suffering is,after all, the Latin root for passion".

(Ellen Prentiss Campbell)

• According to Murrah, “The Etymology of Passion.”...

The word ‘passion’ is one of those words where the modern application appears disconnected from the original meaning. The word itself comes from the Latin root word, patior, which means to suffer. It’s first use in English appeared around 1175 AD. Oddly enough the word is more frequently used in writing than in speech.

Many of the modern applications of ‘passion’ no longer convey the idea of suffering at all. It’s present use is one describing an intense desire, which is often sexual in nature. 

"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question" (Barnes, 2018, p. 3)

Love is a desire, yet it cannot exist in isolation from sorrow. This is how Barnes intends to approach the subject of love from a philosophical standpoint. Passion turns to pain in The Only Story. The narrative of Paul, a 19-year-old young man, and his deep attraction to Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old married lady with two kids. This is a storey of how passion can turn into suffering. But then we find counter argument by the speaker…

 "You may point out – correctly – that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love."

📌Paul - the unreliable narrator :

The novel's unreliable narrator is Paul. Because whatever he tells the audience is based with his own memories. He claims he's never maintained a diary. So, how can we trust our own memories? It's a huge problem. Paul isn't sure what he's been through in his life. He is debating the issues raised in this work.

“You understand, I hope, that I’m telling you everything as I remember it? I never kept a diary, and most of the participants in my story – my story! my life! – are either dead or far dispersed. So I’m not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened. I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. “

📌Susan - madwoman in the attic :

• The Madwoman in the Attic :

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's book The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, published in 1979, is a feminist examination of Victorian literature. Rochester's wife (Bertha Mason) is kept secretly trapped in an upstairs apartment by her husband in Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre. Gilbert and Gubar's book covers the work of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and the Bront sisters, as well as the angel/monster archetype in women's fiction. They say that 19th-century female authors were filled with wrath and frustration as a result of the sexist environment they lived in and the primarily male literary culture they attempted to enter, and that this female dissatisfaction affected their creative output.

Gilbert and Gubar claim that the figure of the mad lady was frequently used to express their fury. They finish by imploring female authors to break free from the patriarchal divide and not to be bound by its constraints.

• Character of Susan :

People may draw parallels between Bertha and Susan Macleod's personalities. Bertha was afflicted by his spouse, and Susan is afflicted by something similar. She develops an alcoholic personality. To Paul, she tells falsehoods. She is tethered to responsibilities in some way. His own spouse assaulted her. She had an adulterous affair with Paul, and she yearns for love and warmth, but she is continually the victim of hatred and sexual pleasure, and she has been beaten several times. When Susan went to his uncle Hemph's house, she became a victim of abuse as well. When she eventually travelled there with Paul, she felt lonely, but she became an alcoholic like anyone else at that time. Paul also renounces her and her kid Clara in the end.Clara is looking after her. Susan's character is intriguing since there is a character that serves as a counterpoint to Susan's.

📌Joan - one who understood existential enigma :

Joan is a tennis player and Paul's partner. Joan has several relationships with wealthy men. When Gerald died, Joan was heartbroken by life. When people are upset by life, they turn to pet animals for comfort. Joann did the same in this storey. Sibyl was her final companion.. Susan is telling Paul a storey. Gerald's sister is Joan. Joan grieved greatly after Gerald's death because Gerald was a close relative of Joan's, and his passing caused Joan a great deal of pain. Joan has the ability to protect herself from the harm. We could wonder whether there was nothing wrong with Joan because Susan is going through a difficult time in her life. Joan used to live with yeppers/dogs and now has another dog named Sibyl. Sybil is a legendary figure . Joan's character is described as follows in the novel:

"She was a large woman in a pastel-blue trouser suit; she had tight curls, brown lipstick, and was approximately powdered. She led us into the sitting room and collapsed into an armchair with a footstool in front of it. Joan was probably about five years older than Susan, but struck me as a generation ahead. On one arm of her chair was a face-down book of crosswords, on the other a brass ashtray held in place by weights concealed in a leather strap. The ashtray looked precariously full to me. No sooner had Joan sat down than she was up again."

📌Whom do you think is responsible for the tragedy in the story? Explain with reasons. :

Because of Paul, this disaster occurred. He was born with the ability to escape an unpleasant and difficult environment. Because of his departure, his childishness, the ark of his relation was destroyed. When his relationship ended, he began to place blame on others. Because, at the time the love tale begins, Paul is 19 years old and Susan is 48 years old. Here Paul is criticizing Gordon for domestic abuse, implying that the this tragedy would not have occurred if Gordon had not acted violently with Susan.

📌 Work Cited :

• Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Penguin Random House UK. 2018. Book. 24 January 2022. 
• Gilbert, Sandra M. The Madwoman in the Attic : the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
• Julian Barnes: Official Website, http://julianbarnes.com/