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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


Q: But wouldn’t you say that there is a tension between the valorization of genuinely syncretic political and social spaces created in the subcontinent by travelling bards in the popular/oral storytelling, performative sphere and the careful empirical knowledge that is now required to situate literary texts and read them productively.

SPM: Our medieval and early modern popular bards and wandering yogis were doing more than just telling stories and singing songs, they also developed and spread powerful ideas across the subcontinent’s various regions.  This is exactly what our Sufis did as well.  One could argue that these bards and mystics were also collecting and analyzing empirical information about the places they visited, exploring new ideas, testing new theories – and these would be evident in how the songs and stories were adapted to the different regions and subcultures of India.  If you take a look at the way Kabir exists in the popular imagination even today, and consider how many people in villages still write – not just recite Kabir but even compose – in his radical iconoclastic metaphysical mode, you will see that criticism and literature coexist in the everyday lives of ordinary people.  That is part of what Shabnam Virmani’s films on Kabir showed, I think.  Taking the implications of her films seriously can enable us to rescue Kabir and other writers from the confines of the academic canon and open our eyes to the vitality that often exists in popular cultural spaces.

Q: How do we prevent the world lit you speak of from getting commoditized and flattened in world lit courses?

SPM: The term “world lit,” as I use it, is a goal of critical practice, of cross-cultural conversations. It does not refer to a canon of literary works. Even Goethe, when he initially came up with the term “Weltliteratur” in the early 19th century, thought of it less as a body of literary works – fixed or growing – and more as the process by which critics and general readers learn how to live consciously and intelligently in a pluralized cultural space, a space shaped by increased travel and cross-cultural contact through translations and criticism.  Remember how dazzled Goethe was by Kalidas’s Sakuntula, which he read in translation?  His famous quatrain about Kalidas is written in 1791.  So naturally, Goethe invoked the virtues of cultural openness and tolerance while discussing world literature and praised the attempt made by writers and scholars “to understand one another and compare one another’s work” across national boundaries.  Our universities today can contribute to the cultivation of these virtues, but I am not sure that the best way to do this is to produce the one definitive anthology of world literature that all students should read.  A better way to begin is to deal with textual clusters of the kind we discussed in the context of Indian literature, and to show through comparative analysis how thinking “across cultures” is a difficult but necessary – and enormously rewarding — activity.  Part of the challenge is to change our reading habits, which are shaped by the habits of the cultures in which we have grown up.

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