Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
E. V. Ramakrishnan
If a totalizing impulse is at the back of the universal as a category, we need to critically examine the contents of comparative frameworks that endorse such hegemonic positions. Languages as different from each other as Pali, Sanskrit, Urdu and Tamil, have developed argumentative traditions that have similar concerns. We need to bring out these concerns for a better understanding of a subliminal layer of dialogic space where conflict and contradiction do not neutralise the concern for the other. In fact it is in their subversive language that we may locate a discourse of ’comparativism’. Fakir Mohan Senapati’s use of Western texts could be compared with Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer’s use of Sufism. Both are “Indian“ because they give us a lexicon of experience to unpack the several essentialist ideas of India. We need to conceive of literary texts in broader terms to include cultural productions from different templates of time and space. Texts can be non-canonical and representative at the same time. An author considered minor may reveal much more about a culture than its supposedly ’major’ authors. The substance and worth of comparative approach will depend on the manner of treatment and the range and depth of concerns we bring to our reading. When comparative literature functions as a mode of apprehending the transactions between the literary, the cultural and the political in all its multivalent ways it would bring about a paradigm shift in its practice. The readings of texts such as Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third clearly show that the emergence of new literary forms cannot be grasped in terms of binaries such as ’traditional’ and ’modern’. The analysis of traditional cultures needs to be contextually sensitive. The moment of a densely written text such as Six Acres and a Third is informed by several ideological forces: social reforms that projected an egalitarian social agenda, the political mobilization at the grassroots that culminated in the anti-colonial freedom struggle, the recovery of a ’grand Indian tradition’ that highlighted an Orientalist perspective of the classical India, an elitist national bourgeoisie that was ambivalent towards the West and its rationality, and the fault-lines that ran deep in the world of the masses that were gradually becoming aware of its oppression and exploitation. The layered texts that capture these tendencies most effectively such as Indulekha in Malaylam, Saraswatichandra in Gujarati, Yamunaparyatan in Marathi, Chha Mana Atha Guntha in Oriya and Gora in Bengali are subversive and polyphonic at the same time. Even when their modes and models came from outside they answered a need in the native socio-political context. This brings us to the question of the very nature of our modernity. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |
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