From Indian Literature to World Literature:
A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


My point in my introduction to CML is not that literary histories are not important but that detailed textual interpretations and, in particular, cross-regional comparative studies are more urgently needed now to combat chauvinism.  It has been sixty years since Independence and we may need to take a short break from writing both national and regional literary histories to focus more directly on texts, and on comparative cultural themes.  As U. R. Ananthamurthy’s argued in his lectures at Cornell, we need more fine-grained interpretations of works of modern Indian literature as well as analyses of cross-regional textual clusters.  Some of the best essays on the idea of “Indian literature” – whether by Aijaz Ahmad, Sisir Kumar Das, Amiya Dev or K. Ayappa Paniker – point to the need for more comparative studies as well.  I especially like Paniker’s idea that we need to focus on textual clusters that define socio-cultural movements across linguistic regions.  (Kavita Panjabi’s new edited collection, Politics and Poetics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia, may do just this kind of work.  It was published in India only a few days ago and all I have seen is the table of contents, but it looks fascinating.)  What Amiya Dev calls “literary history from below” — perhaps also echoing the project of the British Marxist historians — would be valuable, but first we need to get away from the insular model of literary history by producing more comparative textual analysis across linguistic traditions.  A more adequate literary history will be possible once we have transcended not only the artificial opposition between high and low culture but also the huge wall conventional literary history erects between different – though related — linguistic traditions.

Let me give you an example of a situation where conventional literary history, with its primary focus on lines of direct influence within a linguistic tradition, can lead to a distorted view of cultural contact and diffusion.  A few years ago, I discovered that one of the radically new themes Balaram Das’s 16th century Lakshmi Purana explores concerns the dignity of work — everyday labor, including household labor.  It occurred to me that this theme echoes one of the main ideas of virasaivism, a movement that originated in 12th century Karnataka.  I hadn’t found direct textual evidence for this connection, and a narrow conception of literary history would have made me look for antecedents only in Odia-speaking regions (or in Sanskrit texts).  But virasaivism was a popular social movement, and its influence had spread far beyond its place of origin.  Traveling bards and monks spread its ideas across linguistic regions, and it would have been foolish to determine in advance that the sources of the Lakshmi Purana had to be found exclusively from within Odia-speaking cultures.  Given the novelty of the theme of everyday work in that period, I suggested in writing about the Lakshmi Purana – and it was no more than a suggestion – that there may well have been a cultural connection between the virasaiva tradition of thought and the radical ideas that Balaram Das was synthesizing and developing.  This suggestion should of course be examined more closely, and perhaps even developed into a full-fledged thesis by a scholar familiar with both linguistic traditions. But this is one of those connections that would not have even occurred to me if I had looked for influences only within Odia literature and culture.

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Essays in this Forum

Rethinking the Global South
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

From Indian Literature to World Literature: A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty
by Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

Asia in My Life
by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization
by Duncan Mceachern Yoon

The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu
by Sanjay Kumar

Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Endeavour through Sociology and Literature
by Gurminder K. Bhambra

Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies
by Tilottoma Misra

Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism: A Response
by Shivani Jha

Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
by E. V. Ramakrishnan

Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular
by Purushottam Agrawal

West Indian Writers and Cultural Chauvinism
by Jerome Teelucksingh

Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred

by Fatima Sadiki