INDIA AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: CERTAIN ISSUES

India is a country of immense linguistic diversity and, thus, a country of many literatures. Many of the 221 language groups are small according to the latest census, and it is only the eighteen listed in the Indian Constitution as major languages that comprise the bulk of the population's speakers. In addition to the eighteen languages listed in the Constitution, four more are recognized by the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) for reasons of their significance in literature (Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Indian English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kankani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu).

But in general, the perspective of India as a hegemonic language and literature area is ubiquitous. A writer in any one is counted as much Indian by the Sahitya Akademi as a writer in any other and no distinction is made between one literature prize and another. Thus, while we have a plurality of so-called major literatures in India, we are confronted by a particular proble-matic: Is Indian literature, in the singular, a valid category, or are we rather to speak of Indian literatures in the plural?

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Indologists were not interested in this question, for Indian literature to them was mainly Sanskrit, extended at most to Pâli and Prakrit. For example, with all his admiration for Sakuntala, William Jones was oblivious of literatures in modern Indian languages.Similarly, literary histories written in India by Indian scholars also focussed and still focus on a single literature. This single-focus perspective is a result of both a colonial and a post-colonial perspective, the latter found in the motto of the Sahitya Akademi: "Indian literature is one though written in many languages" (Radhakrishnan). However, this perspective was opposed by scholars who argued that a country where so many languages coexist should be understood as a country with literatures (in the plural). The argument was formal and without any serious political overtones, only insisting that instead of Indian literature, singular, we should speak of Indian literatures, plural.

A different kind of resistance 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. In brief, according to Amiya Dev, arguments of unity in diversity are suspect, for they encroach upon the individualities of the diverse literatures. In other words, a cultural relativist analogy is implied here, difference is underlined and corroborated by the fact that both writers and readers of particular and individual literatures are overwhelmingly concerned with their own literature and own literature only.

While Amiya Dev argues that in the case of India the study of literature should involve the notion of the interliterary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction, Gurbhagat Singh discusses the notion of "differential multilogue". Comparative Literature, for him, is thus an exercise in differential multilogue. His insistence on the plurality of logoi is particularly interesting because it takes us beyond the notion of dialogue, a notion that comparative literature is still confined to. Singh's proposal of diffe-rential multilogue as a program will perhaps enable us to understand Indian diversity without sacrificing the individualities of the particulars. Singh's notion of differential multilogue reflects a poststructuralist trend in Indian discourse today, a trend that manifests itself among others by a suspicion of the designation of Indian literatures as one.

The majority of criticism in India on Comparative Literature is borrowed from post structuralism. All scholars demand ‘celebration of the diversity phenomena’. Post structuralism understands difference as a notion of inclusion, that is, mutuality. Thus, it cannot accept the single-focus category "Indian" without deconstructing its accompanying politics. In other words, if the deconstruction of politics involves the weeding out of things excessively local or peripheral, it is appropriate because all value-loading is suspect.

 

If Indian literature had not been so heavily publicized and hammered down, as it were, into our national psyche, if our individual literatures had been left alone and not asked to pay their dues to "Indian literature," there would be no resistance to the notion of unity in diversity. And it cannot be denied that in the pursuit of "Indian literature" some of us have shown negative discrimination towards texts produced in "less impor-tant" and "different" literatures.

Yet, there are some problems with poststructuralism in Indian scholarly discourse and that is the prominence of theory to the detriment or non-existence of application. Instead of fitting theory to the experience of literature, the latter is fit to theory, thus resulting in an over abundance of meta-theory. Ironically, according to Amiya Dev, Indian poststructuralism inflicts upon itself a sameness with difference-speakers elsewhere and does not seem to recognize that difference-speaking in India may be different from difference-speaking elsewhere. At the same time, this poststructuralism does not seem to recognize that given all the differences pertaining to the Indian experience, underlying it and tying together the different entities, there may be a commonality, a sensus communis of a broadly cultural kind.

It is imperative to note that Indian literature is not an entity but an interliterary condition in the widest possible sense of the concept which is related to Goethe's original idea of Weltliteratur and its use by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The interliterary condition of India reaches back much farther than its manuscript or print culture. For instance, bhakti -- a popular religious movement as both theme and social issue (stretching from the eighth to the eighteenth century) -- had a variety of textual manifestations in various Indian languages. There are many other similar literary and cultural textualities in India whose nature, while manifest in different other systems of a similar nature are based primarily on themes or genres, forms and structures observable in historiography. It is possible, in other words, to think of a series of such sub-systems in which the individual literatures of India have been interrelated with one another over the ages.

Swapan Majumdar takes this systemic approach in his 1985 book, Comparative Literature: Indian Dimensions, where Indian literature is neither a simple unity as hegemonists of the nation-state persuasion would like it to be, nor a simple diversity as relativists or poststructuralists would like it to be. That is, Majumdar suggests that Indian literature is neither "one" nor "many" but rather a systemic whole where many sub-systems interact towards one in a continuous and never-ending dialectic. Such a systemic view of Indian literature predicates that we take all Indian literatures together, age-by-age, and view them comparatively. And this is the route of literary history. Sisir Kumar Das has taken with his planned ten-volume project, A History of Indian Literature, whose first volume, 1800-1910: Western Impact / Indian Response, appeared in 1991. The work suggests a rationale for the proposed research, the objective being to establish whether a pattern can be found through the ages. One age's pattern may not be the same as another age's and this obviously preempts any given unity of Indian literature. Thus, Das's method and results to date show that Indian literature is neither a unity nor is it a total differential.

Thus, the method of Comparative Literature allows for a view of Indian literature in the context of unity and diversity in a dialectical interliterary process and situation. The author's extra consciousness and not of an archival entity as such but rather a state of mind justify the unity of Indian literature. However, today, with a focus on reception and the theoretical premises offered by the notion of the interliterary process, Indian literature is ever in the making. Comparative Literature has taught us not to take comparison literally and it also taught us that theory formation in literary history is not universally tenable.

To give full shape to our own comparative literatures and to formulate a comparative literature of diversity in general, it cannot be overlooked that all Indian literatures are a product of a multiracial and multi cultural socio-political mélange. Indian literature must be taken as a complex of literary relations and any study of Indian literature must reflect that. It should not be an enquiry into their unity alone, but also a study in their diversity, which enables us to understand the nature of literary facts. The study of comparative literature is important for a student of literature to celebrate the ‘diversity’ phenomenon. Also, it should be studied as an alternative to all kinds of exclusiveness to which the existing literature departments are victims. This would be the healthiest alternative to the current exclusiveness, according to Sisir Kumar Das. One must also resist all the parochialism in literary studies, whether it emanates from the west or from the east.

The study of Comparative Literature must have a solid ground, a terra firma. And all literatures in India do have a solid ground, and therefore retain all the validity for a study in Comparative literature.  Having established the firm footing of Indian literatures, one must not forget the most imperative link between language and culture. Both cannot exist in a vacuum, or in isolation. There is a direct connection between people and literature. So one must not ignore this relation like the Western critics have done, warns Sisir Kumar Das. He stresses on the need of evolving an original literary theory in India, rather than appropriating words from the West to the Indian literary situation. We need to look at our literatures from within so that we can ‘naturally’ react to other literatures of the world.

Comparative Literature is an important device for post colonialism. In the ‘Empire Writes Back’ mode, Comparative Literature comes handy as a means to oppose the white superiority of culture and literature, as also its binary opposition of the ‘black/white’, civilized/uncivilized, literary/ non-literary etc. In his essay, ‘Towards Comparative Indian Literature’. Amiya Dev said, “Comparison is right reason for us because, one, we are multilingual, and, two, we are Third World.”

To sum up, in I. N. Chaudhari’s words from his essay, ‘Comparative Literature and a concept of literary history’, “Comparative Literature is a study of literatures aiming at the development of literatures aiming at the development of literature as a single discipline having a ‘ viable international perspective’.”