Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
E. V. Ramakrishnan
The title of the essay echoes a similar question A. K. Ramanujan asked about Indian way of thinking. He also added that depending on where the stress is placed, it contains many questions, “all of which are real questions“ (A. K. Ramajujan 2004:34). The present question will occasion several debates around a cluster of ideas and themes centred around the pastness and presence of tradition, India as a nation and a nation-state, colony and empire, homogeneity vs. plurality in Indian culture, modernity and its others, etc. Some of these issues will come up obliquely in the course of my essay. In the above-mentioned essay, Ramanujan talks of modernity as a movement from the “context-sensitive“ to the “context-free.“ “Context- free“ implies a level of standardization where identities and self-images are forced to conform to a normative principle that has evolved through several historical phases. The waves of modernity that remoulded our thinking during the last two centuries have taken us closer to context-free ideals of egalitarian, democratic ideals. However, the ethical turn we have witnessed in the wake of post-modernism is definitely a move towards context-sensitive ideologies. Perhaps the time has come to see how the various Indian languages and cultures have articulated the idea of “India.“ If Indian languages have never felt any urgency to debate the question of “Indianness“ in the context of literature, the reasons for this have to be sought in their internal dynamics. Comparative literature in India is not merely concerned with the question of pedagogy for informed readings of Indian texts classroom. With translations and widespread dissemination of Indian literary texts through media such as films, videos, blogs, etc., the boundaries of ethnocentric narratives of literatures can no more be held valid. Contexts-sensitive discourses need to be clear what contexts they are speaking from – or for or even against. Binaries such as inside/outside, ours/theirs or tradition/modernity are no more valid. The dispersed realm of India is a primary concern for a comparative enquiry. Literature is shaped by the material conditions of society. The multiple literary traditions in India which go back to the early part of the last millennium have developed through diverse trajectories, negotiating the hegemonic structures of power that informed the social spheres of which they were a product. Hence, while there are points of convergences, there are also points of departures that make generalizations regarding Indian literature suspect. Colonialism, as Satya P. Mohanty, points out, complicates the study of modern Indian literatures. What happened in the 19th century in India was a massive re-organization of our epistemological structures and a re- orientation of the imagination. The literary genres came to be redefined and the very location of the literary came to be aligned with new spheres of values. Writers such as Fakir Mohan Senapati, Tagore, Premchand and Kumaran Asan used the resources of the cultural past to confront the challenges posed by the encounter with “colonial“ modernity, a vague term that privileges the Western form of modernity and enforces a regulatory regime that reduces Indian thought and culture to the hinterland of the pre-modern. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |
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