Comparative Literature in Indian Languages

 Introduction 

The developments in Indian comparative discourse have taken place according to Lord Macaulay’s (1835) predictions in the theory of downward infiltration of education in the Indian caste system. This history of hierarchical comparativism cannot be studied without a reference to the rigid frame of four castes and varna-s: the Brahman priestly caste, Kshatriya warriors, Vaishya tradesmen, and Shudra servants. Within this frame there are thousands of sub castes and tribals with separate cultures, crafts and neo-casteist classifications of literature (mainstream, rural, regional, dalit, and tribal, respectively) in the same language. This is one of the hurdles in making learning more dialogic and dwarfs development of, in Emily Apter’s words, “democracy of comparison” (9). A foreigner can hardly understand Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “critique on the sign and the signifying monkey” (“Race” 902) in terms of the Indian caste system. It is not a coincidence that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi begins his autobiography with a reference to his “Baniya caste” (Vaiyshya varna), Raja Rao’s Serpent and the Rope parades superiority of the protagonist that he was born a Brahmin, and especially a number of dalit self-auto-photo-narratives exhibit markers of the castes of authors in the titles of books. The diversity of religions and hundreds of languages has added new dimensions to this caste system and that is not identical to classes as Marxists tend to believe. India is neither a multilingual “melting pot” like the U.S. or Canada nor a country with a single official language like China.

Constitutionally recognized languages are twenty four and spoken languages are hundreds: Hindi 551.4, English 125, Bengali 91.1, Telugu 85, Marathi 84.2, Tamil 66.7, Urdu 59, Kannada 50.3, Gujarati 50.3, Oriya 36.5, Malayalam 13.8, Punjabi 31.4, Assami 18.9 (all figures are in millions, 1991 Census). Five percent of English educated elites with “cultural capital” dominate the rest of the population. Sixty percent of the population is illiterate. The sudden rise of English to the second largest language in prominence is not an accident of a neo-colonial situation. 

The classical poet Chandrashekhar privileged comparative thinking, but it was too hierarchical to be effective to produce new knowledge. In contrast, Karl Marx criticized the British Parliament and Press for being responsible for “the emergence of sharp class divisions … and a so called ‘public opinion’ which is manipulated by the Brahmins of the press have, on the contrary, brought in to being monstrous sameness of character that would make Shakespeare,” and further pointed out how new bungalows of lords being built on the banks of the Thames with the “blood and flesh of the colonized people” (Deshmukh 265) and Fyodor Dostoevsky ridiculed the Indian Brahman priest in the prisoners’ mime show in The House of the Dead. Such internationalizations of the image of Indian culture also display intricacies in Indian cultural politics of aesthetics. Colonial records reveal how the Brahmins, traditional monopolizers of scholarship and guardians of religion and culture, internalized English and mediated Western knowledge and power structures

This was present first in European imperialism and today it is a major component of Indian diaspora. It is on this historical background that humanities scholarship in India is in need of “home-grown framework”-s of comparative scholarship with reference to Indigenous “ancient cultures with substantial theoretical thinking embedded in both scholarship and creative works”

The legacies of Anglophone scholarship

Since 90 percent of teachers at all levels during the colonial period belonged to the Brahmin/priestly caste, postcolonial comparativism is determined by their literary tastes. For example, the histories of literature in any Indian language exhibit 99 percent names of the contributors from this subculture group only (see, e.g., Jog). Such a discourse of power by the priestly class and that mediated and mediates Western culture and imperialism is bound to use it to maintain its traditional hegemony. Library holdings and curricula in the beginning of the twentieth century display such Western comparative texts as Frank Byron Jevons’s Comparative Religion (1908), A.W. Jackson’s (1862–1937) An Avesta Grammar in Comparison with Sanskrit Phonology Inflection-word Formation with an Introduction on the Avesta or Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett’s Comparative Literature (1886), etc. But the discipline of comparative literature did not strike deep roots in India because of the resistant Vedic cultural structures and caste conditioned literati. For example, Ganesh Sadashiv Bhate, who was educated in England, wrote a number of comparative essays in 1913, which were posthumously published in 1995. Tryambak Shankar Shejwalkar was a historian and critic in comparative scholarship and vision and he warned his own priestly class not to mediate Western scholarship instead of performing such in a comparative Indian-Western context: in consequence, his work was disregarded. 

Vasudev Balawant Patwardhan (1870–1921)—editor of the weekly Sudhakar (Reformist) and a scholar of English and philology at Fergusson College Pune—suggested the inclusion of comparative chapters on affinities between Western literature in the history of Marathi literature. However, his proposal was turned down by the conservative teachers of Sanskrit and Marathi (see Jog). Thus the Janus face (or two layers/voices, i.e., Indigenous and Western) of modern Indian languages and literatures remains unexplored. The achievements of two students of his college, who studied in England, exhibit two distinct sub-caste conditioned cultural contributions to humanities scholarship: Panjabrao Shamrao Deshmukh’s The Origin and Development of Religion in Vedic Literature (1933) was a pioneering comparative study and B.S. Mardhekar, who studied Anglophone aesthetics of modernism and attended poetry writing workshops in England during the years 1929–1933 for his Indian Civil Service examination but failed the exams. He returned to India to publish his Arts and Man (1937) in English and Saundrya ani Sahitya (1955) in Marathi and became the father of modernism and new poetry (see Patil, Anand, Samagra). Mardhekar’s work is relevant because of his studies of European and U.S.-American literature and the transplantation of British modernism in Bombay (see Edman; Shoemaker). Importantly, Mardhekar’s theories of aesthetics and “new” poetry generated formalist criticism in Marathi. While René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949) and its translation remain a “Bible” of critical thought in India still today, in contrast, Wellek’s Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (1970) neither entered university curricula nor appeared in translation and thus suggests that the move from formalism has not been recognized in India. While new criticism has diminished in the U.S., it survives in India. Following Paulo Freire, I describe this as the “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Teekavastraharan 203–18) and postulate (see British Bombay) how conflicts of caste constitute a persistent factor in the study of literature in India.

 In turn, the postulate ought to lead Indian comparativism to the internationalisation of the study of literature and culture—among others—to include aspects of interculturality. Since its inception in the mid-twentieth century Western-based comparative literature in India has been displaying a rich colonial legacy along with its paradoxes and mediating Anglophone aesthetics. But even if we consider Anglophone-based scholarship in India, within such, for example, although 26/11, 13/7 and other symbolic references to terrorist attacks in India have acquired the semiotic significance of 9/11 in New York, Indian scholars have not produced interdisciplinary interventions like Apter, whose book “was shaped by the traumatic experience of September 11, 2001” (viii). The impact of the Cold War in humanities scholarship is a further interesting subject for research but here, too, the colonial impact is felt: K.M. George’s edited volume Comparative Literature (1984) is a misnomer because it is a merely juxtaposed survey of literature. Better work is presented, for example, by Sisir Kumar Das who compared literary terms in Indian languages and compiled a comparative English history of Indian literatures. Namwar Singh pleaded for the decolonization of the Indian mind, but this occurred two and half decades after Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s avowed comparativism and Nativism.

 A theoretical problem that tortures a teacher of English in the “Third World” is the question of what kind of English studies would replace it. Indian authorities of university curricula attempt to restructure syllabi by replacing Hamlet in place of Othello, but hardly displace either by Derek Walcott’s The Branch of the Blue Nile (1995) or by a Chinese play. Hence, the level of scholarship is not only conditioned by Western paradigms but also by the Indigenous paradigm which fails to make the understanding of Edward W. Said’s notion of the “worldliness of text” (The World). Although the Government of India has issued priority to comparative humanities and made it mandatory to establish interdisciplinary schools of languages and literatures, these were usually transformed into departments and thus the institutional presence of the discipline of comparative literature is met with resistance. As I indicate above, this does not mean that there is no comparative scholarship in India; what this means is that because of the lack of a good number of full-fledged departments of comparative literature and thus degree granting institutional presence with the corresponding availability of teaching positions, the discipline lacks relevant presence compared with, for example, departments of English. This situation is similar to the West (i.e., the U.S. and Europe): Susan Bassnett declares the death of comparative literature in 1993 or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remains Euro-U.S.-American centred with characteristics from hierarchical “innate Nativism.” While Haun Saussy declares that comparative literature has achieved a place in the sun intellectually, this positive view is not borne out on the institutional level (see Tötösy de Zepetnek, “The New Humanities” 55) and in my view this is relevant to the situation of comparative literature in India as well. 

Spivak’s problematic notion of “can the subaltern speak?” or one of V.S. Naipaul’s indictments that Indians need certificates of recognition from foreigners show how Spivak’s and Naipaul’s caste inheritance makes them ignore the inter caste battle for recognition (see, e.g., Shih, “Global Literature”). Moreover, Salman Rushdie’s charge of “shadow literatures” (ix) cannot be answered adequately unless Shu-Mei Shih’s concept of “comparative racialization” is modified in Indian contextures as “comparative castealization” of culture and literature (“Comparative Racialization” 1347). The notion of the “empire writes back” was privileged by Western scholars, but hardly practised in India except perhaps in power politics. The use and misuse of caste not only in literature but also in all walks of life is a serious issue, and hence the need of the merger of comparative literature and cultural studies. For example, Roy Moxham brings to the light how the plot of the film Bandit Queen was a convincing lie devised to criticise Thakurs (Kshatriyas): the “true story is that there are no upper caste guys” in Phoolan Devi’s village and “even director Shekhar Kapur admits that” (9). To boot, this international “fakedom” (see Ruthven) of caste politics was accepted as “true” by Robert Young Jr. in his Postcolonialism Theory (2003). And thus, for example, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concepts of “race, writing, and difference” (“The Blackness”) have not yet gained currency in India. 

Rethinking the study of culture with comparative dialogism

 The effects of globalization in culture need to be studied comparatively because Western literature, cinema, song, music, dance, and the many types of popular culture are part and parcel of contemporary Indian culture. A few scholars such as Aparna Dharwadkar and Vinay Dharwadkar have exposed the misuse of Western texts that colonize Indian literati and scholars again. But it is necessary to study, as Stephen Greenblatt suggested by the phrase “invisible bullets,”not only the poetics of culture but also the politics of style and caste-culture in adaptations of Western texts. The narratives about the West’s shaping of colonial identities are not paired with both the narratives about the colonizer’s shaping of Indigenous identities and of their own identities. “India” is not, in Homi K. Bhabha’s terms, “narrating” in comparative double voice but more powerfully in an alien master’s voice. Thus I postulate that we need new models for agency in comparative studies. 

The future of comparative literature and comparative cultural studies in India

 In relation to the intellectual history and development of comparativism in India, the institutional presence of the approach is relevant: the first Department of Comparative Literature was established at Jadavpur University in 1956, at that time following the French model. The Department, along with the publishing of the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, paved the path for new developments. Since then and particularly since the 1990s—while based, principally, on Anglophone scholarship—comparative literature scholarship in India produced a wide array of work including studies about Western texts compared with Indian and within Indian literatures (see, e.g., Bandyopadhyay; Chanda; Mohan; Pollock). An important development is that the Comparative Literature Association of India (established in 1987) founded a digital journal, sāhitya: The Journal of the Comparative Literature Association of India in 2011. Among other journals published in India of interest is the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics published since 1978 at the Vishvannath Kaviraja Institute.

Conclusion

“Comparative Literature in Indian Languages” Anand Balwant Patil discusses developments in humanities scholarship in India. He posits that giving much space to “modern” Anglo-American aesthetics in university curricula is itself a politics of aesthetics. The changed political status quo after 1947 effected a change in the mediation of Anglophone aesthetics in humanities scholarship. For example, India has no school of postcolonial studies to offer a blueprint of the “postcolonial project” to counterbalance the influx of Anglophone scholarship. Patil presents a discussion of the status quo of comparative scholarship in India, its theoretical underpinnings, and argues for the development of homegrown comparative scholarship in the humanities. 

Work Cited:

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Das, Sisir Kumar. “Western Terms and Their Indian Adaptations.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative literature 19 (1980): 1–17. 

Das, Sisir Kumar. “Terms for the Medieval Indian Long Forms.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature 24 (1984): 74–75.

Ghandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Trans. Mahadev Desai. Ahamadabad: Navjeevan P, 1929.

Naipaul, V.S. Literary Occasions: Essays. London: Picador Paperback, 2011.

 Ngũgĩ, wa Thiong’o. “On the Abolition of the English Department.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2010. 2092–97.

Patil, Anand Balwant. "Comparative Literature in Indian Languages." Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies (2013): 299-310.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003

Walcott, Derek. A Branch of Blue Nile. London: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1986

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