2

Comparative Literature, World Literature and

Indian Literature: Concepts and Models*

Harish Trivedi

Over the last decade or so, ‘Comparative Literature’ appears to have died and
‘World Literature’ to have arisen out of its ashes. In Gayatri Chakarvorty
Spivak’s book, Death of a Discipline (2003),1 the unfortunate ‘Discipline’ of
the title turns out to be Comparative Literature, and its demise is forecast
as certain unless it reconstitutes itself urgently along the lines suggested by
Spivak. Some 10 years previously, Susan Bassnett, perhaps a more thorough-
going and quietly dedicated comparatist, had announced that the death of the
discipline had already occurred,2 and gone on to explain that Comparative
Literature had been usurped, supplanted, and succeeded by two newer
disciplines: Postcolonial Studies, from a thematological point of view, and
Translation Studies, from a methodological point of view.
During the heyday of Comparative Literature, from approximately 1880
(or, if we begin from its general acceptance in the university departments
mainly in the US, from about 1950) to approximately 1990, World Literature
seems hardly to have been an entity at all. It had a hoary father figure in
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe whose few general remarks made apropos of
very little in the 1820s have been cited far too often as a hallowed mantra,
which however seems to have proved inefficacious, for Goethe’s prophetic
declaration that “the era of world literature is at hand” did not even come
close to coming true, while throughout the nineteenth century and the first
half of the twentieth century, the national borders in Europe grew more and
more entrenched, both militarily and culturally. In fact, there have been few

*Some of the materials contained here were first published in Trivedi (2006), un-
fortunately (and accidentally) in a draft version not intended for publication. This is a
re-conceptualized, revised and updated text, more substantial (in being about twice as
long as the earlier version, notwithstanding some deletions) and with a different orienta-
tion and addressivity. See Trivedi, Harish. 2006. ‘The World as India: Some Models of
Literary History’, in Gunilla Lindberg-Wada (ed.), Studying Transcultural Literary History
(pp. 23–31). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
18  Harish Trivedi

serious takers for World Literature in the period of nearly two centuries that
elapsed between Goethe and David Damrosch,3 which only goes to show
that Goethe was not the harbinger of a new dawn but a solitary cock that
happened to crow in the early hours.
Another equally revered, even more prophet-like, and similarly precocious
or untimely champion of World Literature, who is even more often evoked
in Indian discussions of the subject, is Rabindranath Tagore. He is, it turns
out, even hazier than Goethe in what he means by World Literature. In 1897,
as the director of Bengali studies at the National Council of Education in
Calcutta, he was invited to deliver a lecture on a specific theme, which he
then turned around to something else. As he said, “Comparative Literature
is the English title you have given to the subject I have been asked to discuss.
In Bengali I shall call it World Literature.”4
This may appear to be a case of killing two birds with one stone, but
that is not what the lecture does. In fact, it looks at neither bird and casts
no stone but instead takes off on a trip of its own, discussing a web of re-
lated themes only too familiar to all Tagore readers: the self, the soul, the
heart, “Himself”, the truth, “the innermost spirit”, “the outside world”5
and finally and generally, literature. In an essay that runs into 13 pages, he
mentions the title he was asked to speak on and his wilful translation of it (as
cited above). Only on the eleventh page does, he refers to few literary works
of any kind, and to no non-Indian work or author at all except, fleetingly,
Kipling and Tennyson.6
Tagore ends his lecture with a paragraph that begins: “Do not so much
as imagine that I would guide your way through world literature.”7 As the
authors of the ‘Notes’ to Tagore’s essay, Sisir Kumar Das and Sukanta
Chaudhuri, put it, the lecture shows no ‘awareness’ of any previous discussion
of Comparative Literature or of “the problems of influence and interaction
that form the core of comparative literary studies”, and as for making any
useful distinction between Comparative Literature and World Literature, “he
not only equates the terms but actually translates” one as the other.8 Tagore
thus shows what may be called a lofty indifference to both Comparative
Literature and World Literature, which seem to him to be Tweedledum and
Tweedledee, though that has not prevented many of his readers from hailing
him as a founding father of both the sub-disciplines.
Both Goethe and Tagore display the kind of well-meaning but vague
universalism that has served to give both Comparative Literature and lately
World Literature a bad name. Comparative Literature has been tradition-
ally derided by what comparatists (in revenge?) call ‘single-language experts’
as being shallow and dilettantish, a lax academic procedure (as distinct
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  19

from any systematic ‘methodology’) practised by jacks of all trades who,

furthermore, do not realize that all good literary scholars are comparatists
anyhow. As for World Literature, it is viewed with suspicion most of all not
by single-language experts but indeed by comparatists, who perhaps have
a gut fear that World Literature will erode if not cut away the very ground
that Comparative Literature has stood on. Those who study and promote
World Literature have been called, with palpable condescension, “world-
literaturists” by Spivak—as if they were a category as comical as members
of the Flat Earth Society, while Djelal Kadir, guest-editor of a special issue
on ‘Globalization and World Literature’ of the journal Comparative Literary
Studies, seems robustly sceptical of what he calls “the recrudescent chatter
on the topic of World Literature in our critical present”.9
As it happened, within months of the publication of this special issue,
Professor Kadir was one of the 30 odd scholars from around the world invited
to participate in a conference in Stockholm where there was much recru-
descent chatter on World Literature. There, he delivered a paper published
subtitled ‘For a World Literary History’10 and was, with half a dozen other
international scholars, invited to join the Stockholm Collegium of World
Literary History, whose main project, still in progress, is to write just such a
history. There may be some irony in Professor Kadir’s personal conversion to
the cause (“For those who came to mock remained to pray”), but there is also
evidence here of how strong the current wave of World Literature generally is.

World Literature and Globalization

As seen in the earlier discussion, the naming, conceptualization and valoriza-

tion of World Literature is traditionally traced back to Goethe’s effusive but
unelaborated remarks, but it is not adequately recognized that those remarks
were made in the first flush of the Western discovery of the literatures of
India and Persia, in the golden dawn of what used to be (before Edward Said)
unself-flagellatingly called “Orientalism”. That was still some decades before
the rise of militant nationalism and the corresponding transformation of
European nationalism into worldwide colonialism. Similarly, the enthusiasm
expressed in the late nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold for Comparative
Literature, as a tool for seeing and seeking connection everywhere, may again
be viewed in at least two alternative perspectives: (a) as a well-meaning and
high-minded call to enrol further members in the exclusive club of high
culture, or (b) more liberally, to invoke a universal republic of letters under
20  Harish Trivedi

the benign umbrella of imperial Britain—which itself was no republic then

and of course is not one even now.
It needs to be recognized equally that the chief proponent of the idea of
conceptualizing and syllabizing a corpus of World Literature in our times is
the American academy, especially that segment of it which is located in the
departments of English and/or Comparative Literature. If World Literature
already has a local habitation and a name, it is firmly within the groves of
the American academia. In some ways, World Literature is as American a
phenomenon as say Area Studies, and as the nomenclature ‘South Asia’ for
what used to be called India or the Indian subcontinent—a nomenclature
which, like ‘World Literature’, has in recent years found wide acceptance in
both Britain and Europe.
But why did America almost single-handedly begin to espouse the cause
of World Literature? Before we go into that patently political question, we
may acknowledge the immitigable reality, the brute fact if you like, that at
least since 1966 (when Jacques Derrida gave a highly influential lecture in
the US and attracted international attention for the first time), any new
intellectual concept or idea, regardless of whichever part of the world it
may have originated in, has not become an internationally viable academic
enterprise until the American academy has adopted it in a big way: witness
Deconstruction, Magic Realism, Multiculturalism, Cultural Studies, and
perhaps most ironically of all, Postcolonialism. Such globalization of the
world academy began a decade or two before the political globalization of
the Second World, that is, the USSR and its allies, beginning in 1989, and
the economic globalization that followed suit.
Thus, any fresh endeavour to propagate or realize the long-standing de-
sideratum of World Literature must now be seen to run parallel to, and thus
wittingly or unwittingly to be complicit in, the larger world-transforming
project of economic globalization, which not too long ago was known by the
name of neo-colonization. If the Third World shows no discernible signs of
constructing a corpus of World Literature and if World Literature does not
seem to fulfil any of its urgent needs—of which there are so many—why then
is the First World so keen to incorporate the many literatures of the world into
one monolithic World Literature? So far, we have only a few global bodies of
any consequence designated with the term ‘World’, of which the most power-
ful probably are the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO)
(not to mention the two WWF’s—the World Wildlife Fund and the World
Wrestling Federation—of which it is difficult to say which one is the more
beastly). Do we wish to carry across the connotations of this highly inequitable
‘World’ into our own relatively more democratic world of World Literature?
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  21

Alongside these more grounded connotations of ‘world’, we have the

more imperious and imperial term, the ‘globe’. The present drive for glo-
balization may be traced back to the early Renaissance representations of
Western monarchs, and even before that, of Mary Mother of Christ, as
holding in their hands a globe and a sceptre, emblems of sovereignty and of
‘empery’ as it was then called. The globe, in its rounded wieldy graspability,
has always connoted something an ambitious and expansionist ruler could
hold in the palm of his hand. If we are sufficiently aware of this context, it
becomes our vigilant task to keep the notion of World Literature untainted
by this history, and uncontaminated by the ongoing project of economic
globalization.

Western Models of World Literature

So far, all the projected models of World Literature have been necessarily
Western, though this does not mean, of course, that there is not a rich and
even bewildering variety of them. To recapitulate quickly, there was Goethe’s
model, essentially an orientalist and pre-nationalist model which rested on
the cusp of those two largely contrasted entities, the West and the East, as
did his own Divan and his extravagant praise of Shakuntala. More recently,
several newer models have been proposed, most notably (to be invidious) by
Franco Moretti,11 Gayatri Spivak, David Damrosch and Vilashini Cooppan,
each one of which responds to the academic and political reality of our own
times in its own way.
At the risk of gross simplification, Moretti’s model is distinguished by
two features: (a) its emphasis on genre, especially the worldwide spread of
the genre of the novel, and (b) its proposed procedure of ‘distance reading’.
Without underestimating the pragmatic value of Moretti’s model, one may
wish to ask how it is that the subgenre of the novel is the focus of his work,
in which the West is seen as the originary locus, rather than the broader
and fuller genre of narrative, in which the East had an earlier start, in the
form, for example, of the series of related or loosely linked tales, exempli-
fied by the Panchatantra, the Kathasaritsagara, the Dasakumaracharita, all
in Sanskrit and The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic. This is the model
and mode of narrative which later prevailed in the West too in the pre-novel
period, as in Boccaccio, Chaucer and Matteo Bandello, and dare one add,
which prevails again now, in our period, in several varieties of postmodern
post-novel narrative.
22  Harish Trivedi

If we choose to focus not on the novel but on the more multifarious forms
of the shorter and not necessarily bourgeois-realist narrative, we may find that
non-Western literatures were not so much obliged to effect compromises of
various kinds when they finally received and had to cope with the Western
form of the novel as they were inclined to reassert their native narrative forms
in opposition to the genre of the Western novel. In a study of some of the
earliest Hindi novels written in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
which several Indian literary historians have with evident embarrassment
dismissed as failed attempts at writing novels, I have sought to argue that
the induction of the novel in India imposed a ‘tyranny of form’, comparable
to the tyranny of British rule and running alongside it.12,13
As for Moretti’s ‘distance reading’, that is, a reading of foreign literatures
in their broad generic outline rather than in close linguistic and textual detail,
the kind of reading which can be accomplished quite as well in translation
as in the original, one must perhaps look at it as another manifestation of
fast food MacDonaldization, as a New Comparatism which no longer has
enough time, so to say, to go and actually learn languages as it evidently
did in the heyday of the now much-maligned Orientalism. This is precisely
the vital deficiency that Gayatri Spivak identifies as the sign of the death of
Comparative Literature, and her kiss-of-life remedy for a last-gasp revival of
Comparative Literature is that it should distance itself from Cultural Studies
which she characterizes as “monolingual, presentist, narcissistic”.14 Instead,
she pleads, Comparative Literature should go back to the basics and join
forces with Area Studies where at least a full and functional knowledge of
the languages of the areas is still regarded as essential (even if as a part of
global strategic essentialism). Of all the many radical interventions made by
Gayatri Spivak in her widely influential and enduring career as a theorist,
this is probably the one that is the most truly subaltern, as being an advocacy
of the languages in which the subaltern speaks.
In his book What Is World Literature? David Damrosch offers a new defini-
tion of the problematic term, a definition so empirically innocent of theory,
and so readily workable and user-friendly, as to seem incontrovertible and
irresistible. “I take World Literature” he says, “to encompass all literary works
that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their
original language”.15 But this turns out to be not so simple as it sounds. Not
only does Damrosch put “translation” before “original language” here but,
more importantly, he regards World Literature as a body of work already given
to us rather than one to be looked for and to be gathered together: It is “all
literary works that [already] circulate beyond their culture of origin” without
presumably any helping hand from us world literaturists. World Literature
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  23

thus becomes, according to Damrosch, “not an infinite, ungraspable canon

of works but rather a mode of circulation and reading”.16
This must be World Literature without tears or indeed without even
breaking into a sweat. If World Literature is no more than “a mode of
circulation and of reading”, it need involve no more than what we are read-
ing anyhow because it is already in circulation. There is no rescue involved
here and no recovery or discovery, no widening of horizons and no reaching
out, but a mere passive responsive capacity and readiness to pick up what-
ever is washed up to our doorstep by the tides of global market forces or the
quirks of literary transmission and translation. While we readers of World
Literature just sit there, it is any book that aspires to become part of World
Literature that must do all the running, and it must furthermore “suddenly
leap out with a freshness and vivid realism to which we can immediately
respond”.17
In short, it is the mountain that must move across the world and come to
the First World Mahomet, and it must be ‘immediately’ acceptable on First
World terms rather than its own native terms, without the First World having
to try to accommodate it or to effect any ‘compromise’ with it. Quite often, in
fact, it is a work from an alien culture which is already so oriented by the eager
and solicitous author as to meet the First World more than halfway down the
road which evokes this kind of an immediate response in the First World,
and that is precisely the reason why Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
seems to be everybody’s idea of World Literature. Correspondingly, a novel
written in an Indian language, acclaimed for several decades as a classic in
India, available in English translation but not successful in circulating widely
‘beyond its culture of origin’, would not for Damrosch qualify as a work of
World Literature. Paradoxically, his criterion for admitting a literary work
to the canon of World Literature is not the place it occupies in the culture of
its origin, but rather, how well it travels beyond the culture of its origin. In
this view, as indeed also in some of the more hybrid strands of postcolonial
theory, one cannot be thought to have been born until one has migrated.
If this seems a peculiarly laid back, complacent and undemanding view
of World Literature (but I must add that Professor Damrosch is a quick and
keen learner and has substantially modified the views I discuss here, especially
after his successive visits to India!), the one projected by Vilashini Cooppan18
seems to bend over backwards in ingratiating itself to its users or consum-
ers. In her fondly self-reflexive account of a new course in World Literature
that she apparently fortuitously begun to teach at Yale, she starts in the first
week with Gilgamesh together with an episode from Star Trek in which an
extract from Gilgamesh is actually quoted. It is as if without a tie-up with
24  Harish Trivedi

the latter-day outer-space TV series Star Trek, Gilgamesh would possess no

intrinsic claim to be a constituent text of World Literature.
Similarly, Homer’s Odyssey is revalidated through Derek Walcott’s
Omeros—chosen possibly because Joyce’s Ulysses, a more highly acclaimed
modern reworking, might have proved even more forbidding than Homer.
Selections from the Mahabharat similarly seem to come in a package with
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—though the whole world knows that on the
evidence of his own novel, Rushdie does not even know the difference be-
tween the author of the Mahabharat and the author of the Ramayan, to say
nothing of knowing anything more about these foundational Indian epics.
This is not World Literature—this is just some classics in the history of the
various literatures of the world dumbed down to bite-sized extracts, tied by
the tail to some current icon of popular culture, and tokenistically deployed
to fulfil the needs of a desperately beseeching presentism. The wide world
of World Literature seems constrained and shrunken beyond recognition
here by the perceived preferences and flickering attention span of enrolling
undergraduates, and tethered firmly to the bait of here and now.
These are but four recent interventions in the debate on what World
Literature is and how best to do it. It is perhaps presumptuous on my part
to attempt to arbitrate between them, for this World Literature is clearly
born out of the circumstances and circumscriptions of the Western world;
it certainly is not my World Literature. I can only distance-read it, if that.
If a course in World Literature in the US seeks to ensure a certain level
of undergraduate enrolment, all it can do apparently is to slip in a bit of
Gilgamesh under the sugar-coating of Star Trek and serve a grain or two of
the Mahabharat with the chutney of Midnight’s Children.

Western Models of Indian Literature

There are, to my knowledge, no Indian models of World Literature. There

should be, if only because India has, over the last couple of decades, come
to occupy a steadily enhanced place in the world economy and has gained
more and more of the world’s ear. By the logic of literary capitalism, if India
can become a member of G-20, why can it not have a model of its own of
World Literature? In fact, the trenchant American intellectual Susan Sontag
wrote some years ago a rather uncharacteristic article in the Times Literary
Supplement titled ‘The World as India’, in which she argued that what India
is today, the [rest of the?] world will become tomorrow, especially pointing
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  25

to the spread in India of the English language and American culture, as evi-
denced in the call centres and in international civil aviation.19 One can, on
the contrary, argue that the outsourced call centre jobs have come to India
not because of any proven excellence on the part of Indian workers, but on
the contrary because Indians are happy to do them for a fraction of the wages
that these jobs carry in America, and though English-speaking young men
and women may be attracted to these supposedly glamorous jobs, their role
and function in the world economy are no more than that of ‘cyber-coolies’.20
Instead of any model of World Literature, what India has to offer instead
are several models of writing a literary history of India and these may hold
some relevant lessons, of both appositive and a negative kind, for the project
of writing a history of World Literature. This is for the reason that the Indian
literary tradition has been shaped by many parameters and circumstances
which are similar to those which shape our ideas of World Literature. We
have in India a continuous history of literary production extending over
more than 3,000 years, and we have 24 literary languages, which are each
about a thousand years old except that some are older and they are written
in an almost equally large number of exclusive scripts. Our older indigenous
culture was subjected to pervasive imperial impact by two radically different
civilizations—the central Asian Arabic/Turkish/Persian–speaking Muslim
civilization from about AD 1200 onwards, and the European Portuguese/
French/English–speaking Christian civilization from about AD 1500/1750
onwards. Thus, our literary history is marked by major encounters, cross-
fertilizations, and syntheses, such as have shaped World Literature too on a
substantially larger and wider scale.
A literature begins to be conceptualized in its entirety only when it is seen
steadily and whole and that happens only when a history of that literature
begins to be written; it is from such a history that any sound theorization of
that literature may arise. The first history of Indian literature was not pub-
lished until the 1850s and it was written by a European scholar in German.
Perhaps, there is a lesson there for us already. Is the writing of histories a
peculiarly Western concern and even a fetish, an urge to understand anything
and everything through systematic chronological documentation, through
taxonomy, through periodization—all of which is based on the implicit as-
sumption that what is not documentable did not exist? Indians allegedly and
notoriously had no history, not even a political history, until the Greeks came
in a one-off raid which can be precisely dated from their records, and then,
after a gap of a thousand years, the Muslims came in repeated forays and
eventual conquest, all of them accurately chronicled. There was throughout
these millennia in India what Weber tactfully and insightfully called a “want
26  Harish Trivedi

of external chronology”.21 But did we have something else in place of history?

Surely, we must have had a past, and probably we also had a living memory,
in a cultural tradition which still places a premium on oral transmission in
a way the West has long discarded or forgotten.
In the matter of literature, when foreigners did begin to write our history
for us, their major sources were not only surviving texts of creative writing
but a whole rich series of works on poetics, in both Sanskrit and the modern
Indian languages and many of these critical and theoretical works, by way
of citing suitable illustrations, incorporated virtually an anthology of the
literature as well. Can the evolution of poetics be regarded as a possible
alternative model to chronological history, with a collation and theorization of
the conventions governing the production as well as the reception of literature
providing as much of an insight into the literary culture as the actual works
of literature? A celebrated recent history of Hindi literature bears the title
Hindi Sahitya aur Samvedana ka Vikas, that is, the development of Hindi
literature and sensibility. When writing a history of World Literature, should
we similarly pay attention not only to sets of dates, facts and texts but equally
to the protocols of transactions between writers and readers, to matters of
shared assumptions and notions of taste, and the cultural environment or the
aesthetic economy within which literature was produced and—as we now
say—consumed? The terminology in Sanskrit poetics for such an approach
to literature, centred equally on the author and the reader/viewer, includes
the key concepts of dhvani, or the connotative capacity of a text; rasa, or the
varieties of aesthetic impact experienced by the reader and the sahridaya, the
reader or viewer who responds literally with his heart but figuratively with
a cultivated and sympathetic sensibility.
Apart from the coincidence that the second published work to call itself a
history of Indian Literature was also written by a German, Morriz Winternitz,
these two early works also had in common the remarkable fact that both
treated of literature written in just one language, Sanskrit. In these works,
published in three volumes (1904–1922),22 Winternitz makes some room
in an appendix in the last volume for the modern Indian languages, only
so as to ensure that his work does not “remain incomplete”. In all fairness,
Weber too had acknowledged that he was not really attempting a history of
‘Indian Literature’, as his title indicated, for in that case “I should have to
consider the whole body of Indian languages, including those of non-Aryan
origin.”23 One of the many reasons given for Western attention to Indian
literature being concentrated almost for over 100 years on writings exclu-
sively in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit is that it suited the West to believe that
whatever was worthwhile in India was all in the past and that the present
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  27

was wretched, negligible and not worth serious attention, a view that served
to justify colonial rule.
Learning a negative lesson from Weber and Winternitz, we may therefore
admit into a History of World Literature first a fuller representation of the
modern and the contemporary phases of all literatures, of the periods closer
to us in time and historical experience. Second, we must not be misled
into granting over-representation to any one language, however apparently
dominant. It has been said that what Sanskrit was to ancient India, English
is to modern India, but we must not repeat the mistake made by Weber
and Winternitz by letting literature written in English crowd out literatures
written in other languages—not only in India but all over the world. The
English language has recently acquired a global spread, especially as the
medium of business and finance, but the medium of the many literatures
of the world continues to be the local language. Just because 91 per cent of
all the secure websites in the world today are in English, it must not mean
that anything like a comparable proportion of space should be accorded to
literatures written in English in a history of World Literature even for the
modern period, to say nothing of those earlier periods when English either
did not exist or was merely one provincial or national language amongst
many and there was no cyber space and no websites.

Recent Models of (Comparative) Indian Literature

The Weber–Winternitz ‘Sanskritic model’ of writing Indian literary history

was in due course succeeded and supplanted, as Sujit Mukherjee24 has
shown, by two other models which he calls, respectively, the ‘Hindustani
model’ and the ‘Bharatiya’ model, which are quite different in methodo-
logy but which have one vital factor in common, that both attempt a com-
parative understanding of the many linguistic and cultural constituents of
Indian Literature. A remarkable development in the growth of Comparative
Literature in India is that it is much of the time confined to India. It is not so
much Indian Comparative Literature (on the pattern of French or German
Comparative Literature) as it is Comparative Indian Literature. Comparative
Literature in India is by and large practised as if India were by itself large
and various enough for whatever comparative studies we may wish to
undertake—as if, so to say, India were a world in itself.
In Mukherjee’s ‘Hindustani’ model, the history of the literature in
each Indian language was written separately, in juxtaposition but not in
28  Harish Trivedi

conjunction with the history of literatures in the other languages. In the

‘Bharatiya model’, it was sought to integrate a history of literatures written
in the numerous Indian languages as a unified narrative. This Bharatitya
model, Mukherjee specified, could not possibly be adopted and attempted
by any single author of Indian literary history but only by a team of authors
working together or a committee.
As if to prove Mukherjee wrong, Sisir Kumar Das came along in the
1990s to author single-handedly two volumes of a projected 10-volume
History of Indian Literature,25,26 with a third semi-finished volume published
posthumously.27 The broadly Bharatiya or integrationist model which Das
adopted may be described as not really the nationalist model that Mukherjee
had postulated but the culture-over-language model. It is true that the
newly independent nation state of India was explicitly anxious to integrate
the various regions, languages and ethnicities of India into one nation: The
phrase ‘national integration’ resounded loud and clear through the first
quarter century of Indian independence in a most unembarrassed and un-
apologetic manner. The Sahitya Akademi, the Indian National Academy of
Literature, established in 1954, adopted for its motto a formulation ascribed
to S. Radhakrishnan: “Indian literature is one, though written in many
languages”, and Sisir Kumar Das’s History of Indian Literature was perhaps
the most impressive and persuasive literary manifestation of that pre-
postmodernist pre-globalization ideal.
Das’s History, as initially conceptualized by him, was to be titled ‘An
Integrated History of Indian literature’ and the adjective ‘integrated’ was in
fact dropped shortly before publication, as a concession to the changed times.
Not that Das had ever bought into the political project of nation-building;
rather, his considered view was that Indian Literature was one integrated
whole because one unifying culture overrode the great variety of the Indian
languages. As he put it, India, despite its many languages and the literature
or literatures written in them, was “a single cultural universe”, and further-
more “a single universe of expression”, namely, it had a literature governed
by a common poetics.
This is the point at which the various formulations of Indian Literature
and of World Literature most radically diverge. An attempt to write an
‘integrated’ history of World Literature will not be open to the charge of
being complicit in a nation state–driven political agenda, if simply because
there is no nation state called the ‘World’; indeed, a current idealism which
inspires many proponents of World Literature (and, equally, of globaliza-
tion) is to subvert the very idea of the nation. Thus, an integrated history
of World Literature will serve to transcend the shadow lines of the nation
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  29

state. At the same time, no one could possibly claim, or would even want
to claim (as Das did for India), that all the literatures of the world share “a
common cultural universe”.
A major work of literary history of what I may be forgiven for still calling
India, published subsequent to Das’s splendid endeavour, is the 1,000-page
single volume, Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia
(2003), edited by Sheldon Pollock with seven Western and ten Indian
contributors.28 (This may be the moment to say that though I was myself
a member of a ‘team of experts’ who assisted Sisir Kumar Das with one of
the volumes of his History and also a contributor to the volume edited by
Sheldon Pollock, I have not let mere modesty prevent me from critiquing
both these works in terms of their general plan and project.)
Literary Cultures in History is of significance in our present context for
two reasons: One, that it is a multiauthor history with chapters by 17 dif-
ferent contributors ranging over 15 languages, which clearly could serve as
a model to be emulated by a history of World Literature, and two, that it
was drafted and revised over a period of more than three years during which
nearly all the contributors met every six months in order to exchange and
discuss drafts and to ensure that the various chapters would finally give the
impression that, just like their authors, they had actually met before and
were not merely strange and fortuitous bedfellows. There is a kind of multi-
author work, usually of Comparative Literature, which is eventually held
together by nothing stronger than the book binder’s thread and glue, but
perhaps few editors have tried harder than Sheldon Pollock to ensure that a
work by many authors was still made to cohere by a really interactive sense
of academic camaraderie.
At the same time, each chapter in the Pollock volume was aimed not at
narrating the old-fashioned, step-by-step, continuous chronological saga,
but rather at picking out and highlighting certain disjunct moments in the
literature of each language which would yet represent and serve to sum up
the essence of that literary tradition. Thus, a characteristic title of one of the
more successful chapters in the book, by Norman Cutler, is ‘Three Moments
in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture’. However, the cutting loose
from chronology and the impulse to seize upon single moments, which
through ‘thick’ (and sometimes openly ‘anthropological’29) description still
aimed at evoking the spaces left out of the narration, perhaps resulted in
a methodological double bind, of which each contributor struggled to break
free through a variety of strategies. Possibly because each narrative was
deliberately discontinuous, the cumulative sense at the end of the volume
was not that of having surveyed a ‘landscape’ but rather (in the alternative
30  Harish Trivedi

modes of photography that cameras offer) that of having looked at a series

of ‘portraits’. Oddly, despite all the repeated consultations built into the
project, the numbers of cross-references between various chapters were few
and far between and inserted more often by the assiduous editor than by the
heedless contributors themselves. Indian literature proved not easy to knit
together on the basis of contributions by single-language experts.
In the context of Indian literary history, Pollock’s volume is probably
the finest example of a post-structuralist endeavour which is not only out
of necessity but even more out of ideological post-structuralist inclination,
disjunct. Thus, between them, the two most recent and successful histories
of Indian literature, those by Das and Pollock, offer as radically divergent
models as could be conceived for writing a history of World Literature. It
was thought improbable that a single author could ever attempt a history of
Indian Literature until Das wrote his three volumes. It was thought reason-
able that a single author could provide a coherent and continuous account
of literature in any single Indian language, until Pollock and his cohort went
about deliberately writing discontinuous and disjointed accounts of their
respective languages.

Indian Literature and World Literature

When we transfer these models to the scale of World Literature, we will have
to make similar choices with some deliberation. Should a history of World
Literature highlight similarities and connections across regions and civiliza-
tions and thus attempt to shrink the world, or should it, on the contrary,
seek to bring out the local distinctness of each region and language to seek
to show how richly varied our world is—and how the last thing we should
want to do is to integrate or harmonize it in any way? One supposes it all de-
pends on how one views the process of globalization—as beneficial, essential
and inevitable, or as an inequitable imposition to be resisted and thwarted.
No definition or theorization of World Literature can carry the demon-
strable force of a history of the corpus; the proof of the pudding again is
in the eating. In this context, one may look again at some of the pragmatic
procedures and guidelines adopted by the ongoing project of writing a
history of World Literature based in Stockholm (the one in which Djelal
Kadir is a participant and contributor, as incidentally am I and also David
Damrosch). It was decided early that our ‘World’ will be divided for the
purposes of this history into six macro-regions, named in the following order:
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  31

East Asia, South and South-east Asia, West and Central Asia, Africa, Europe
and the Americas. What is more, each of these macro-regions will be allot-
ted equal space in the four-volume history. A set of issues regarding society
and culture generally and literary production and consumption specifically
will be discussed with regard to each macro-region and period, which will
hopefully provide the common grid to support the detailed discussion of
the various literatures with their own particularities. It was decided that an
insider/native expert with first-hand knowledge of the local language and
culture and preferably located in the area will provide an account of each
macro-region, with the help of a few fellow contributors, so that not only
translated texts but untranslated texts too will be discussed equally, as they
are in the original languages. Thus, World Literature will comprise not what
is already available and circulating in parts of the world other than that of its
origin, but the literatures of the world as they are read and regarded in situ.
It remains to be seen how this history now being drafted will evolve and to
what extent it will fulfil its own plan and projection.
In the end, a word of apology (in the older sense of defence) may be
needed for the procedure and orientation adopted in this chapter. Why is
my discussion so brazenly India-centred even when ostensibly discussing
the World? Well, it is so first in the hope that it may thus provide one of a
number of different local perspectives on a common object, World Literature,
just as another essay may have provided comparable examples and lessons
from Chinese or Arabic literary histories. Second, it is so in order to reinforce
the argument that there are points of view located outside the globalizing
West that may have their own value. In fact, an India-centred view of the
World and its literature may be of some use simply because of the fact that
it is not West-centred.
Nor is such a view advanced here as if it were a universally prevalent view,
which is how West-centred views of World Literature have been projected
in the past—and even now continue to be projected, as if nothing had
changed. In her highly acclaimed book The World Republic of Letters (2004),
Pascale Casanova begins with a chapter titled ‘Principles of a World History
of Literature’30 and has another chapter titled ‘World Literary Space’,31 but
her heart seems to lie in showing how Paris was the centre of the literary
and cultural universe throughout the nineteenth century and well into the
twentieth century. She also has a subsection titled ‘The Empire of French’,
in which she notes that “the triumph of French was … so complete … that
its claim to superiority came to be true as a matter of fact”,32 and became
simply “the language of ‘civilization” as even the Germans acknowledged!33
Writers and artists born in all parts of the globe simply had to come to Paris
32  Harish Trivedi

to be “crowned” for “Paris is not only the capital of the literary world. It
is also … the chief place of consecration in the world of literature.”34 Even
when ranging far and wide and discussing far-flung writers, Casanova never
seems to leave Paris. Mario Vargas Llosa was awakened to literature by Sartre,
and “The road to worldwide recognition for William Faulkner likewise went
though Paris.”35 Altogether, it would appear that what Casanova is talking
about throughout is not ‘The World Republic of Letters’ but instead the
French Republic of Letters. (On the only occasion I met Ms Casanova, in
2006 in Los Angeles, she told me that some critics of her work had called
her a ‘nationalist’, and I tried to cheer her up by suggesting that they should
have instead used a word of French origin that was as apt: chauvinist.)
The Empire of French at least had a long history and substance to it,
but claims are being made to universal domain and sway on behalf of much
younger and callower Western literatures as well. Shades of the Planet, a book
of critical essays edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, professors
at Yale and Harvard respectively and both ‘Americanists’ by specialization,
bears the subtitle American Literature as World Literature (2007)36—not and
but as! The general premise of this book, and also the focused argument of
an earlier book authored by Dimock, Through Other Continents: American
Literature across Deep Time (2005),37 is that older literatures from all other
continents that any American author has read and fed on thus become a
constituent part of American Literature. Such works of literature rescued from
‘deep time’ by American writers include Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the
Dead and the Bhagavad Gita. By this logic, to read is to possess; to know is
to own. It is as if all the other literatures of the world had ever been written
only so that they would one day achieve their consummation in thus being
incorporated into the last and the best of all literatures, American Literature.
But even more galling is the fact that such an argument is being put
forward in the name of liberalism and in the cause of making American
academia more open-minded. As Dimock laments:

For too long, American literature has been seen as a world apart .... An
Americanist hardly needs any knowledge of English literature, let alone
Persian literature, Hindu literature, Chinese literature.38

It is to repair such omissions and to remedy such provincialism that

Dimock bravely ventures out to survey and annex all the other literatures of
the world, including ‘Hindu Literature’—whatever that may be.
In the face of such expansionist presumption on the part of both the New
World and of what President Bush with condescension called ‘old France’,
it may not be such a bad thing to speak up for India and to claim a little
 Comparative Literature, World Literature and Indian Literature  33

space for ourselves on this planet in deep time. To conclude this coda which
began as an apology, there is no need for us to be too apologetic in countering
such supreme arrogance and abiding and blinkered ignorance. Let us make
the world a more level playing field for all literatures, including our own, so
that we may eventually have a concept and corpus of World Literature that
truly extends across the world.

Notes and References

  1. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University
Press.
  2. Bassnett, Susan. 1993. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
  3. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
  4. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2001. ‘World Literature’ in Sukanta Chaudhuri (general ed.),
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Writings on Literature and Language (p. 148). The Oxford
Tagore Translations series. Notes by Sisir Kumar Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
  5. Ibid., pp. 138–148 passim.
  6. Ibid., p. 147.
  7. Ibid., p. 150.
  8. Ibid., p. 376.
  9. Kadir, Djelal. 2004. ‘To World, to Globalize: Comparative Literature’s Crossroads.’ Special
issue: ‘Globalization and World Literature.’ Comparative Literary Studies, 41(1), p. 7.
10. Kadir, Djelal. 2006. ‘Iron Square Memorandum (Mutatis Mutandis): For a World
Literary History’, in Gunilla Lindberg-Wada (ed.), Studying Transcultural Literary History
(pp. 32–42). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
11. Moretti, Franco. 2000. ‘Conjectures on World Literature.’ New Left Review, Vol. 1
(January–February), pp. 54–68.
12. Trivedi, Harish. 2003. ‘Hindi and the Nation’ in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures
in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (pp. 958–1022). Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
13. Trivedi, Harish. Forthcoming. ‘Love, Marriage and Realism: The Novel in Pre- and Post-
colonial India’ in Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (eds), Locating Postcolonial Literary
Genres. New York: Routledge.
14. Spivak, 2003, p. 20, op. cit.
15. Damrosch, 2003, p. 4, op. cit.
16. Ibid., p. 5.
17. Ibid., p. 67.
18. Cooppan, Vilashini. 2004. ‘Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny Life of
World Literature.’ Comparative Literary Studies, 41(1), pp. 10–36.
19. Sontag, Susan. 2003. ‘The World as India: Translation as a Passport within the Community
of Literature.’ Times Literary Supplement, 13 June 2003, pp. 13–15. Also, Letters to the
Editor, 27 June 2003, 1 August 2003, 22 August 2003, 12 September 2003.
34  Harish Trivedi

20. Trivedi, Harish. 2003. ‘Cyber-coolies.’ Letters to the Editor, Times Literary Supplement,
27 June 2003 and 22 August 2003.
21. Winternitz, Moriz. 1922 [tr. 1963, 1967] 1985. History of Indian Literature (Vol. III),
Subhadra Jha (trans.). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
22. Weber, Albrecht. [1852]1882. History of Indian Literature (second ed., p. 7), John Mann
and Theodore Zachariae (eds). London: Trubner & Co.
23. Ibid., p. 1.
24. Mukherjee, Sujit. 1981. Some Positions on a Literary History of India. Mysore, India: Central
Institute of Indian Languages.
25. Das, Sisir Kumar. 1991. A History of Indian literature. Vol. VIII: 1800–1910: Western
Impact: Indian Response. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
26. Das, Sisir Kumar. 1995. A History of Indian Literature. Vol. IX: 1910–1956: Struggle for
Freedom: Triumph And Tragedy. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
27. Das, Sisir Kumar. 2005. A History of Indian Literature, 500–1399: From the Courtly to the
Popular. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
28. Pollock, Sheldon (ed.). 2003. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
29. Ibid., p. 437.
30. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters (pp. 9–44), M. B. DeBevoise,
translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
31. Ibid., pp. 82–125.
32. Ibid., p. 66.
33. Ibid., pp. 68–69.
34. Ibid., p. 125.
35. Ibid., p. 130.
36. Dimock, Wai Chee and Lawrence Buell (eds.). 2007. Shades of the Planet: American
Literature as World Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
37. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep
Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
38. Ibid., p. 3.