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This blog is on Thinking activity given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir on Comparative Literature and Translation studies.
Article :1
Why Comparative Indian Literature?
-Sisir Kumar Das
Abstract
Since the beginning of this century a group of scholars have been trying to project the idea of an Indian literature, empha- sizing the underlying unity of themes and forms and attitudes among the various literatures produced in different Indian lan- guages during the last three thousand years or so. This is partly a manifestation of the Indian intellectual's anxiousness to dis- cover the essential threads of unity in our multilingual and multi religious culture. Its impact on our literary studies, still fragmented into smaller linguistic units, is extremely limited, and certainly the idea of an Indian literature as conceived by Sri Aurobindo and others has failed to provide us with a criti- cal framework to study Indian literatures together, except in viewing Indian literatures as expressions of a common heritage. Nevertheless, it has encouraged some of our scholars to identify certain themes and ideas and to see their ramifications in differ- ent literatures of India. Laudable though these attempts are in discovering the basic unity of the Indian creative mind, they are made at the risk of ignoring the plurality of expressions in our creative life.
The word 'comparative', however, has created some confusion and one wonders whether it is being used to lend some respectability to the study of Indian languages by linking it up with comparative literature, still a Western dis- cipline, or indeed to indicate the proper framework within which Indian literatures can be studied.
Key points/Argument
Western comparatist has kept himself restricted to Western Literatures.
One can argue that comparative Western literature is the study of different national literatures, while comparative Indian literature is the study of literatures of one nation, or, according to some, of one national literature written in many languages.
Whatever be the goal of comparative lit- erature, it must have a terra firma, a solid ground. Indian litera- tures, produced in Indian languages like Hindi or Tamil Marathi or Assamese, alone provide that solid ground to start with.
Literature deals with the concrete, not with abstractions, It is born of language and yet it goes beyond language; it is nourished by a culture. Its meaning and significance comes out of its relation with that culture.
Any attempt towards a literary cosmopolitanism neglecting the literature or literatures that are components of a cultural history is bound to turn into dilettantism.
The lesson we must learn from the Western comparatist is the lesson of vigilance against dilettantism.
Multilingualism is a fact of Indian society and Indian literature.
Amiya Dev said, 'Comparison is right reason for us be- cause, one, we are multilingual, and two, we are Third World,'s The fact of multilingualism is now more or less appreciated by Indian scholars.
The Third World situation that lends Indian comparative literature a greater validity may need further comments. Professor Dev points out in this paper that the tools of Western comparison are hardly adequate to deal with our literary situation. For example, the categories 'influence' and' 'imitation' and 'reception' and 'survival' need serious modification to suit the Third World literary situation.
Conclusion
In order to make literary studies free from these psychological restrictions, we need to look at our literatures from within, so that we can also respond to the literature of other parts of the world without any inhibition or prejudice. Our idea of comparative literature will emerge only when we take into account the historical situation in which we are placed. Our journey is not from comparative literature to comparative Indian literature, but from comparative Indian literature to comparative literature.
At the End of this article Das try to say us first we need to understand our own culture and language and literature then we can compared world literature. It was about narrow minded thinking about Indian literature then study Western literature but Indian as multilingual country first we start with india then we try to study world literature.
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Article -2
Comparative Literature and Culture
-Amiya Dev
Article 3
Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History
-Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta
Abstract
The essay gives an overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India, focusing primarily on the department at Jadavpur University, where it began, and to some extent the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi, where it later had a new beginning in its engagement with Indian 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. While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years, there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonizing process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity. Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence along with literatures from the Southern part of the globe. Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to the focus on reception and transformation. In the last few years Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.
Key points
The idea of world literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal, for instance, translation activities began to be taken up on a large scale and poets talked of establishing relations with literatures of the world to promote, as the eminent poet-translator Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy”
The talk by Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Visvasahitya” (meaning “world literature”), given at the National Council of Education in 1907, served as a pretext to the establishment of the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956.
Rabindranath’s talk on “visvasahitya” while writing about the discipline, interpreting it more in the context of establishing connections, of ‘knowing’ literatures of the world.
Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University.
A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held in Delhi University organized by Nagendra
Older definitions of Indian literature often with only Sanskrit at the centre, with the focus on a few canonical texts to the neglect of others, particularly oral and performative traditions, had to be abandoned.
Aijaz Ahmad, to trace “the dialectic of unity and difference – through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print”
Comparative Literature studies necessarily had to be interdisciplinary and were highlighted by the pedagogy practiced in the department.
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.
Indian literary systems along with diverse inter-cultural relations that communities in different parts of India have with different communities outside the borders of the nation state.
During the seventies and the eighties Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centres and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharatidasam University, Kottayam and Pondicherry. Although often Comparative Literature courses were held along with English literature, a full-fledged Comparative Literary Studies department was established in the School of Tamil Studies in Madurai Kamaraj University.
In Tamil, apart from studies related to the comparison of texts from two different cultures, Classical Tamil texts were compared with texts from the Greek, Latin and Japanese counterpart traditions.
The introduction of Canadian Studies was linked with a grant in the area, but gradually a field of studies focusing on oral traditions emerged within the space of comparison.
Components from the diverse Area Studies could possibly have been included as integrated parts of the main curriculum.
Right from the beginning of the discipline in India, cross-cultural relations between Indian literatures and European and American literatures had been in focus.
Sisir Kumar Das, that there were different Shakespeares.Shakespeare’s texts might have been imposed in the classroom, but the playwright had a rich and varied reception in the world of theatre.
From reception studies the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied. For example, one tried to study the
Romantic Movement from a larger perspective, to unravel its many layers as it travelled between countries,particularly between Europe and India.
Literature in modern texts and also inter and intra literary relations foregrounding impact and responses. While one studied Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jaina elements in modern texts, one also looked at clusters of sermons by Buddha, Mahavira and Nanak, at qissas and katha ballads across the country, the early novels in different Indian literatures, and then the impact of Eastern literature and thought on Western literature and vice versa.
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.
East-West Literary Relations, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Third World Literature. Incidentally, the department had in Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, an avid translator who translated texts from many so-called “third-world countries”
Romanticism as a term for periodization. Romanticism had very different dimensions in the Indian context and necessitated a different reading within a continuum that situated it often at the source of modernity.
Literature as knowledge system, therefore, became a thrust area for again it was felt that comparative literature with its interdisciplinary formation would be the right place to demonstrate the same.
The first preliminary research in this area led to links that suggested continuity and a constant series of interactions between and among Asian cultures and communities since ancient times and the urgent need for work in this area in order to enter into meaningful dialogue with one another in the Asian context and to uncover different pathways of creative
communications.
Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies. Both are seen as integral to the study of Comparative Literature.
The M Phil course on the subject at Jadavpur University highlights changing marginalities, ‘sub-cultures’ and movements in relation to contemporary nationalisms and globalization, and also sexualities, gender and the politics of identity.
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”
Conclusion
Delhi is the center of India, very rich in Indian diversity and multilingual people are there because of many reasons. We study that India influence a lot in Western literature first our write are wrote in English now the writer like Rushdie, Arundhti Roy they produced literature in English and getting many award on that also literature in India like Dalit literature it was now established.
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