Conversation with Satya 14

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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

We need a more complex and accurate model of cultural interaction and interchange across borders, and this is in part what comparative textual studies can produce. The outlines of “Indian literature” can be discerned more clearly in these cross-border interchanges than in any grand narrative composed of different conventionally-defined literary histories. CML, which is a collaborative volume, is intended to contribute in a modest way to this general turn away from insularity and chauvinism and toward critical comparatism. But it is no more than a small step in this direction.

Incidentally, the rise of the discipline of Comparative Literature in Europe was itself a reaction against the blinkered vision produced by exclusively national literary studies. Hugo Meltzl, founder of the first journal of comparative literature in the 1870s, talks about the need for a journal like his to counter the cultural tendency of every nation to “consider itself … superior to all other nations.” He calls this tendency the “national principle,” popular in 19th century literary studies in Europe. (Needless to say, healthy forms of cultural self-esteem and fellow-feeling, which include love of one’s community and one’s neighbors, do not require a belief in the superiority of one’s community over others. Jingoism or chauvinism is an unhealthy cultural development and it should be not confused with genuine pride in one’s culture and community.)

Meltzl’s anti-nationalist vision was a necessary antidote to the dominant traditions of literary studies in his time, but unfortunately the comparative focus of his discipline did not develop much beyond its Eurocentric origins, even after such inspiring 20th century movements as third-world decolonization and socialist and feminist internationalism. There are the beginnings of a new debate about world literature among scholars in the West, however, and I feel that students of Indian literature can contribute a great deal to the vision of a genuinely decolonized and egalitarian idea of “world literature.” But that idea should emerge from detailed textual and cultural interpretations, from empirical knowledge of cultures in history, rather than from idealist speculations about Literature (with a capital L) or the kind of sweeping self-glorifying narratives we often get from purely literary histories, especially those devoted to a single tradition.

Q: So you would agree that there is another concept vital to the chauvinist view of literature, and that involves seeing literary studies as a regulatively monolingual practice? You implicitly oppose this monolingualism and language chauvinism by discussing the cross regional readerships which read Chaa Mana Atha Guntha in Telugu, Hindi, Bangla. One could say that, for instance, the dividing line between chauvinist and anti-chauvinist approaches to Premchand’s realism depends in great part on whether his works are seen in cross-regional clusters and his realist novels and short fiction are situated in several literary traditions, not only in the literary canon of adhunik Hindi. In a comparable way would you agree that the dividing line between chauvinist and anti-chauvinist approaches to Chaa Mana Atha Guntha rests on whether this early realist work is subsumed into pride of Odia culture movements or into a comparative and cross regional reading practice? Is the critique of monolingual approaches to Hindi and Odia and other vernaculars the next logical step in the examination of early realist novels and of literary realism in South Asian literature?

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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