The rich scope of comparative studies in studying Indian Literature.
Introduction
'The
comparatist has to know that comparative literature is a method of
investigation while world literature is a body of valuable literary works'(Das
96). Despite this, the term 'comparative literature ' remains ambiguous to many
practitioners, students and scholars in India, who , one would expect, are
familiar with the debate surrounding the discipline because it addresses the
crucial issues of pluralism and cultural democracy in the subcontinent. The
purpose of this seminar is to specifically address this space, which has existed
in a disciplinary formation in India since 1956, but arises, as has been
pointed out above, from the plural horizons of culture shared across the
continent. The concept of comparative literature in India received an impetus
from Rabindranath Tagore's lecture delivered on the subject when he was invited
by National Council of Education in 1907.
But the idea
of Comparative Literature suggested by Das, a practicing comparatist, is
different from the idea expressed by Tagore. Studying Indian literature demands
a comparative method, and this cannot be substituted by the direct application
of any method or theory imported from outside the plural culture in which the
literature is located. Hence the 'mainstream' of Comparative Literature
practice may have suggestions to offer the Indian comparatist, but the task of
finding the method for Comparative Literature in India - not an 'Indian'
Comparative Literature, for often enough we may have to question the very basis
of methods laid down by the 'mainstream'- lies with us. This would qualify it
be an academic discipline.
We may place
the idea of Comparative Literature in a broader perspective by reading it
alongside the 'history' of the discipline elsewhere in the world. As academic
discipline it emerged in the recent period. The term 'litteratur comparee' was
first used by Villemain, a French scholar in 1829. The Indian situation may be
contrasted with these endeavours in that India is multicultural and
multi-linguistic. In such scenario, an 'inter-literary condition' used by Amiya
Dev to describe Indian literature, is the norm rather than the exception. Since
the basic objective of comparative literature is to counteract the hegemony and
the professed autonomy of national literatures, by shifting the theoretical focus
towards plurality and dynamism. We imagine that the minimum requisite of a
comparative study is to start with at least two literatures. But as Das has
reminded us, Comparative Literature is a method, not an object of study - hence
we are interested in how to study literature: how literature, i.e. what we are
studying, is created or produced, and how it elicits from us the responses that
makes it 'literature' rather than a text of the social sciences. Besides, the
binary view, comparing A to B, may not be sufficient to meet the full demand of
the study of comparative literatures as several literatures are produced in
different languages in all countries as an indivisible whole.
Larger part
of ancient Indian literature was produced in Sanskrit. The influences or
affinities between literatures which have been produced in modern Indian
languages in order to project India as one nation could not be studied largely
due to inaccessibility of the Sanskrit language to the majority in India but
its similitude was found with Persian and Arabic, and Greek and Latin. This
should have provided historical guidelines for a comparative practice of
pluralism in order to understand the inter-literariness of the Indian literary
culture. Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India, pleaded for a
comparative study of Gita and European works of great merit. But is comparison
with the west the only criterion for the study of comparative Indian
literature? Whether it is language or culture or political boundary that would
limit the study to a sole criterion and hence a single perspective, which is
against the very ideology of Comparative Literature
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