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......