The World Turn'd Upside Down

Interventions
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
ISSN: 1369-801X (Print) 1469-929X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20
The World Turn’d Upside Down
Rosinka Chaudhuri
To cite this article: Rosinka Chaudhuri (2019): The World Turn’d Upside Down, Interventions, DOI:
10.1080/1369801X.2019.1649180
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THE WORLD TURN’D UPSIDE DOWN
Reflections on World Literature
Rosinka Chaudhuri
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta – Cultural Studies, India
..................Picking a single influential book, this essay asks whose world it is that occurs
in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature and speculates on what the
Apter, Emily
argument looks like when seen from Calcutta/Kolkata. From there,
Europe crucially, it engages in a close encounter with Rabindranath Tagore’s
Viśvasāhitya (1907), contrasting it with Goethe’s Weltliteratur, not just
India
because it originated in a colonized country from a position without
literary studies comparable status or authority in concept formation, but to see if
Rabindranath’s was a fundamentally different reading of World Literature
postcolonial
to Goethe’s. His advice here, to find the world in the self, is one that may,
studies
perhaps, be mined for its emphasis on particularity and attention to the
Tagore, individual as it exists in relation to the whole.
Rabindranath
world literature
.................
.......................................................................................................
interventions, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2019.1649180
Rosinka Chaudhuri rosinka@cssscal.org; rosinkac@gmail.com
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
in ter v enti ons – 0 :0 2
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To see a World in a grain of sand. (Blake, from Auguries of Innocence)
Emily Apter’s 2013 book, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untran-
slatability, it must be acknowledged at the start, is a handy tool around which
to arrange a discussion on world literature. Almost everybody studying world
literature seems to have read it, apart from which it seems to best capture the
dilemma central to the question asked here: whose world are we talking
about when we talk for or against world literature? Except of course the title
of Apter’s book should more accurately have been Against Doing World Litera-
ture Studies, as its chief concern seems to be the emergence of world literature as
a twenty-first-century literary theoretical rubric, as the latter imagined title
suggests, rather than the literatures written in the world.
Apter herself notes in her book (2013, 186) that there have been “few inter-
ventions [that] question what a world might be” – “More emphasis on how
philosophy has defined ‘monde’ would contribute theoretical substance to the
paradigm of litérature-monde and nuance debates around world literatures in
every language”, she says, adding in a footnote that she proposes this from a
philological point of view that “nourishes” the consideration “of words them-
selves as objects of analysis” (fn. 16). It could be pointed out that “every
language” here was being used generally – obviously, not every language can
be kept in mind – while one could also speculate on whose philosophy she
was referring to when she spoke of “how philosophy has defined monde”. Geo-
graphically speaking, although there were references to Asian modernisms,
specifically the Chinese, in the chapter on the problem of “Euro-chronology
and Periodicity”, which noted that “in Western literary criticism, even when
the purview is World Literature, Occidental genre categories invariably func-
tion as program settings” (59), the only Indian-language words in the book
were vishwasahitya (which she interestingly renders as “literatures of the
world” rather than “world literature”, without explaining why), rashtriyasahi-
tya (national literature) and rashtra (nation-state), Hindi/Sanskrit words that
are included in the chapter “Keywords 5: ‘Monde’” in the context of another
theorist’s discussion of these concepts in an essay. The chapter discusses the
pros and cons of the “World Literature in French” project of 2007, positioning
the French debate as one developed in response to “the widely validated, post-
colonially inflected model of Anglophone world literature”, a field she is pre-
sumably placing herself both within and against.
All of this, however, has little relevance if one accepts the desirability of not
being representative. But with regard to the argument itself, it nevertheless
seems that being “against world literature” does not mean a departure from
the format of the polemic in almost all discussions on world literature,
whether for or against. Since it appeared in 2013, much has been published
from the western Academy on the question of the category of the world in dis-
cussions of world literature, offering rich interpretations of the “world” in
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................3
philosophical, ethical and aesthetic terms (Cheah 2016; Mufti 2016; Ganguly
2016). Recuperating the aesthetic–ethical purpose of literature in our global
era, these works are invested in showing that world literature is not just a
by-product of a colonial or neoliberal world order; nevertheless, it stands to
reason that further discussion should still be welcome. The question being
asked here (from a vantage point outside of the western Academy) is one of
simple inversion – such as would happen if we politically as well as physically
turned a globe upside down – hypothetically speaking, what does the argu-
ment look like from the South? The central question here is of location –
which viewpoint is world literature discussed from when it is argued for or
against? Does turning the world upside down present a specific opportunity
to draw a range of local scholarship and circumstances into the discussion?
Does that even matter?
Casanova’s (2005) “hypothetical model”, in a Chomskian sense, of “world
literary space”, a conceptual tool she suggested was “not ‘world literature’
itself”, is what accurately describes, rather, what I will call world literature
studies. While rejecting the inherent Eurocentrism of Casanova’s arguments,
this essay proposes, however, to take her central idea and substitute “world
literature studies” in place of “world literary space”, thus extending her argu-
ment to a field perhaps better fitted to meet the description of a space whose
“primary characteristics are hierarchy and inequality” and “a skewed distri-
1 Casanova’s globe, bution of goods and values” (83).1 This essay’s basic argument is premised,
of course, is always therefore, not on “world literature” but what it calls World Literature
turned to Europe,
which is where the
Studies, i.e. on debates between theorists of the field, rather than the field of
world literary space “world literature” itself, trying to make a distinction between discussions
“first appeared”, as on the primary texts of the literatures of the world and theories on how to
well as being “the
do or not to do “world literature”, or on how to conduct such a discussion.
most endowed with
literary heritage and Young (2013) puts across a similar thought in relation to the formulation
resources” as the of the category “comparative literature” when he remarks:
“first to enter into
transnational literary
competition”. As a performative kind of knowledge, it is consequently haunted by the question of
its methodology, perpetually alert to its principles of action, which is why compara-
tive literature has always been compelled to operate at the front line of “theory.”
Defined by the how, not the what, comparative literature thus paradoxically encoun-
ters the most fundamental question of all in “what does the comparative do?”. (684)
Self-evidently, world literature also seems to follow a similar logic.

To try and analyse how the vast field of world literature brings its respective
histories into play would be work that a team of scholars would need to do in
order to do justice to the complex contours of the field as it exists today.
Making no attempt to understand the field of world literature studies as the
product of a historical process, as an evaluation of such a vast range of
work would be beyond its abilities, and acknowledging that any such
............................
attempt would result in an inadequate engagement with the range of theoreti-
cal, historical and methodological work in the field, this essay settles, rather,
on using Apter’s book, fairly or unfairly, as emblematic of the field and on re-
reading Tagore to see if he might offer a solution to the problem of how to do
world literature. Like Apter’s own argument, it makes no claims to being
representative in its discussion, since it does not aim to be “a comprehensive
census-taking of the field of World Literature with pretenses to regional cover-
age and equitable language distribution” (2013, 17) Rather, Against World
Literature lists a number of what she calls “loosely-affiliated topoi – one
worldedness, literary world-systems, terrestrial humanism, checkpoints,
theologies of translation, the translational interdiction, pedagogy, authorial
deownership, possessive collectivism”, that provide many different ways of
looking at how untranslatability plays out in literary studies (16). Unlike
Apter’s method, though, where “There are few close encounters with individ-
ual texts and the texts that are analysed have been selected because they illu-
minate a problem and not because they are representative texts of world
literatures”, we are here fundamentally concerned, rather, with “close
encounters” with two “individual texts” – Apter’s book and Rabindranath’s
essay – although the texts have been selected for the same reason, in that they
2 A Bengali writer is “have been selected because they illuminate a problem”.2 There is no ambi-
usually referred to by tious list here that includes “the translational interdiction” or “terrestrial
his first name, a
practice which also humanism” – rather, the only attempt is to try and understand how the
tethers Rabindranath field of world literature studies – a completely academic rather than writerly
to a more local space – seems to be constructed when you look at it from a “third world”
situationality. I use
Tagore only in the
location outside of the western Academy. Like the famed self-reflexivity of
Anglophone context postcolonial studies, world literature studies is a space that rarely addresses
in my discussion here. the rest of the world – “that is, a body of literature expanded to a world
scale” (72) – but seems, in fact, to be always addressing itself.
This academic field began to emerge with the demise of postcolonial studies,
and was consolidated and enlarged in the Euro-American academic space over
the last two decades. Damrosch (2009) had quoted from Michael Palencia-
Roth at the start of an article written a decade ago, quoting the latter as
having said that “one must always begin from where one is standing … not
naively or blindly; that is, one must acknowledge one’s standpoint and per-
spective … and account for it in the interpretative process” (13). Damrosch
remarks that it was interesting that this point was made “not in geographical
but in disciplinary terms”. Both aspects retain some importance – the “specific
institutional locale” one is working in (or at) as well as the region of the world
one is physically located in as well as moored to in literary and cultural terms.
If our cultural and institutional locations are both a “limiting factor” and “an
arena of possibility”, then it should be specified here that, for me, it is a limit-
ing factor in the unavailability of the latest literary, critical, or world literature
texts in libraries in a city circumscribed by diminishing literary resources, but
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................5
an arena of possibility also in having recourse to a language and literature in

which world literature has been discussed robustly at least since 1907, when
Rabindranath Tagore lectured on and then published Visvasahitya in the
same city. Trained not as a comparatist, but in English literature, located insti-
tutionally among the social sciences, this reading of Apter and Tagore is
3 The question intended to further an argument I hope I will be allowed to make from the
Damrosch asked outside.3
here: “Just how
American, in short, is Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), translated by Apter
our view of world and others, is the hero of the argument presented in Against World Literature.
literature?” is The preface to Cassin’s book declares that, unlike preceding attempts such as
followed by a
the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy or even Raymond Williams’
discussion of how
Americans have Keywords,
traditionally
foregrounded the Dictionary fully mobilizes a multilingual rubric. Accordingly, entries compare
European, not
American literature in and meditate on the specific differences furnished to concepts by the Arabic,
its comparative Basque, Catalan, Danish, English, French, German, Greek (classical and modern),
literature Hebrew, Hungarian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish
programmes in the
United States in languages. (vii)
contrast with a
country like India, With the exception of Arabic and Hebrew, which are geographically not so
which discusses its
own literature more
remote from Europe either, the languages here used for mapping worlds
robustly and in through philosophical philology do not travel very far from Europe.
greater volume in a “Though, ideally,” Apter concedes, “it would have had a companion
journal such as the
volume covering Asian, African, Indian and Midle Eastern languages, the
Jadavpur Journal of
Comparative Vocabulaire succeeds within its terms as a latter-day version of the humanist
Literature. Apart translation studii” (2013, 32). Cassin’s own original introduction to the
from the obvious French edition (reproduced in translation in the English edition), however,
right of inheritance
argument, it could be made her project’s European location and intentions very clear from the
ventured that Indian first sentence, which states: “One of the most urgent problems posed by the
departments like existence of Europe is that of languages”, arguing, against the Anglophone,
Jadavpur have
traditionally lacked
for “the retention of many languages, making clear on every occasion the
both the personnel meaning and the interest of the differences – the only way of really facilitating
and the resources that communication between languages and cultures.” The Dictionary of Untran-
US universities have
slatables, she says,
had of a great many
European language
experts and is not tied to a retrospective and reified Europe (which Europe would that be, in any
materials, turning (no case?), defined by an accumulation and juxtaposition of legacies that would only
doubt also
nationalistically, in a reinforce particularities, but to a Europe in progress, fully active, energeia rather
formerly colonized than ergon, which explores divisions, tensions, transfers, appropriations, contradic-
country) to rich local tions, in order to construct better versions of itself. (2014, xvii)
cultural fields instead,
so translating lack
into plenitude. The importance of basing the Dictionary in European territory is reiterated
again and again in Cassin’s short introduction:
............................
The space of Europe was our framework from the beginning. The Dictionary has, in
fact, a political ambition: to ensure that the languages of Europe are taken into
account, and not only from a preservationist point of view, as one seeks to save
threatened species. (xvii)
Or again, towards the end: “The Dictionary aims to constitute a cartography

of European and some other philosophical differences” (xx). Grounding an
argument in its location in this way is helpful rather than detrimental to the
cause of world literature – the impulse behind the intention is understood
and appreciated – the book is not trying to be “the world” or, indeed,
cover it. Any attempt to elide this European location would beg the same ques-
tion Cassin asked here in the first paragraph in the context of Europe: which
world would that be, in any case?
Discussing the use of the awkward “untranslatables” in the title, the preface
to the English edition of Cassin’s book, however, seems to move in the oppo-
site direction to Cassin’s original intention when it declares: “We also decided
to eliminate the reference to Europe.” The Vocabulaire européen des philos-
ophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, resolutely Eurocentric and funded
by the EU, thus transforms, in the English language, into simply Dictionary
of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. The new editors concede
This was a difficult call, as the European focus of the book is undeniable. Removing
the emphasis on “European philosophies” would leave us open to criticism that the
Dictionary now laid claim to being a work of world philosophy, a tall order that it
patently did not fill.
Nevertheless, that is the road chosen, as
Our justification on this score was twofold: so that future editions of the Dictionary
of Untranslatables might incorporate new entries on philosophy hailing from
countries and languages cartographically zoned outside of Europe; and because, phi-
lologically speaking, conventional distinctions between European and non-Euro-
pean languages make little or no sense. (ix)
Moreover, they go on, “Notwithstanding concerns about the global hege-

mony of English … we assume that the book, by dint of being in English,
will disseminate broadly and reach new communities of readers” and that
“the book’s diffusion in Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and
Latin America will lead, we hope … to spin-off versions appropriate to differ-
ent cultural sites and medial forms” (ix). Although the ambition is simply to
widen the remit, a curious inversion happens with the widening, as what all
those sentences seem to be saying, or protesting, is that appearing as it was
now in the English language, the book did not have to declare Europe in its
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................7
title – there was simply no need – merely by dint of appearing in the English
language the editors, unlike in the original French publication, felt it was
now unnecessary to moor the work in its local European ground. The qualifica-
tion “European philosophy” could now simply become “philosophy”.
Now, one obvious fact about all of this, of course, is that all of this is pretty
routine. Coming from India, or China, or Singapore, or Kenya, those of us
who are concerned with keeping up with our cultural studies or postcolonial
studies or our French high theory have never batted an eyelid (however pro-
vincialized we may have found Europe to have become over the years in
current affairs) at the hegemony of Europe in all discussions in the humanities,
and the presumptuousness that is part of this hegemony’s language. Chakra-
barty (2001), who Apter mentions apropos Euro-chronology, declared in
2001 after Gadamer, and very much in the style of Said, “Provincializing
Europe is not a book about the region of the world we call ‘Europe’. That
Europe, one could say, has already been provincialized by history itself”
(5). Yet what he called the “asymmetric ignorance” of knowledge about the
East and West persists, he pointed out; academic structures worldwide are
predicated on an engagement with European thought as the “so-called Euro-
pean intellectual tradition is the only one alive in the social science depart-
ments of most, if not all, modern universities” (note the phrase “so-
called”). What he says about social science departments is equally true of
the humanities – faced with the task of analyzing not just social practice,
but contemporary literature too, very few Indian humanities professors
would invoke or argue seriously with the grammarian and linguistic philoso-
pher Bartrihari (fifth to sixth centuries), or with the tenth- or eleventh-century
aesthetician Abhinavagupta. Those traditions are truly dead, and history,
while sitting in the so-called third world we find it essential to know our
Marx or Weber or our Plato or Aristotle – these past European thinkers are
not quite dead for us in the same way. (I should clarify that Chakrabarty
speaks for historians and social scientists; writers in India were inventing
productive creative links with texts like the Ramayana or poets like Kalidasa
in the colonial period – links defined by nationalistic ownership as well as by
aesthetic preoccupation.) The enabling element identified by Chakrabarty
with regard to “a project such as that of ‘provincializing Europe’”, he said,
“is the experience of political modernity in a country like India”, where Euro-
pean thought is “both indispensible and inadequate in helping us think
through the various life practices that constitute the political and the historical
in India” (6).
There was no need there for the word “political” to have preceded “mod-
ernity” – just the statement that the experience of modernity in India needs to
figure out its own differences and contiguities in relation to European moder-
nity might have been enough. European thought is indeed “both indispensible
and inadequate” in also helping us think through the various literary practices
............................
that constitute the cultural field in India. Situated as his book and other works
by the Subaltern Studies historians were at the conjunction of history and the
social science disciplines, a space was nevertheless created for Indian intellec-
tuals to theorize their own postcolonial difference on their own terms within
the larger rubric of postcolonial studies. It is an accepted fact that these theor-
etical interventions by the Subaltern historians were made when they were
largely located physically in the western hemisphere, as Ahmad (1994, 172)
so sharply pointed out. The operations of power in the circuits of publishing
that determine academic curricula in “developing countries” may have
become global in their sweep in the neoliberal era, but the relationship of
control and domination with regard to intellectual hegemonies persists in
similar ways, even if methodologies of implementation may have changed
in the present day. My argument here, however, points in a related but slightly
different direction – to say that, ironically, it is the category called “world”
that repeats itself so often in the current epidemic of commentary on world
literature sweeping the humanities in the West that silently constitutes,
often, continuity with those familiar hegemonic structures of European aca-
demic thinking. Europe may already have been provincialized by history
itself, but the humanities classrooms in the West as well as in the postcolony
are still heavily predicated on the centrality of Euro-American theory (discur-
sively, Europe nowadays often references America as well) to discussions on
world literature. Postcolonial studies at least spoke of difference; world litera-
ture theorists speak of the world, but whose world?
In an article I have cited before (Chaudhuri 2013) in the New York Times
in 2008, art critic Holand Cotter had an insight he wanted to share with the
middle-class US readership the NYT caters to. Reviewing a show called
“Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (1882–1966)” at the Philadel-
phia Museum of Art, he wrote of how modernity is conceived of as having
happened exclusively in the West and then distributed like food aid to the
rest:
Along with detailed information about one artist’s life and times, the show delivers a
significant piece of news, or what is still probably news to many people: that mod-
ernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a
hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in
different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures,
but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound it was
a response to emergency. In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that
had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. (New York Times, 19
August 2008)
At the end of his retrospection on the art of Nandalal Bose, and reflecting on
the bedrock of modern Indian culture from which it sprang, Cotter
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................9
concludes “that every Museum of Modern Art in the United States and
Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change
its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right
to do otherwise”. The analogy is useful in more ways than one. The
MOMA museum floor, analogous to the premises of theoretical argument,
devotes the maximum use of floor space to western art, just as world litera-
ture theoretical discourse foregrounds the Euro-American Academy. The
arena of world literature studies today is like such a museum – there are
smaller displays from other parts of the world categorized or used and
labelled almost as neatly as museum displays, but the curation, conceptual-
ization and location of the matter of the exhibition or the academic book on
world literature at any particular time remains emphatically an in-house
affair, where “in-house” equals to “world”. Like the many Museums of
Modern Art (a name that claims a certain universality) located in
New York or London, the tour one undertakes upon entering any of these
discussions on world literature is curated locally (however inappropriate a
term like “local” might seem when applied to New York or London) and
addressed primarily to local audiences; after all, New York is where the
museum and its discourse are located. Over a decade ago, the novelist–
critic Amit Chaudhuri had noticed:
It is, for instance, always a task to enter a mainstream music and DVD store and
search for the corner that displays “world” cinema … Similarly, “world” music,
which is largely a post-globalization construct comprising a mish-mash of classical,
folk, and popular traditions from non-Anglophone countries. In this case, the
“global” anthropologizes the “world”; makes it remote, ornamental, tribal. (Chaud-
huri 2008, 201)
This “anthropologizing” of the literary wares of the world by the global mar-
ketplace works in the sphere of world literature studies as well, squeezing the
rest of the world, metaphorically speaking, into small stalls selling representa-
tive samples. A direct consequence of neoliberal globalization and the attend-
ant flattening out by the market of differences and networks, this functioning
of world literature studies within the western hemisphere is addressed by the-
orists such as Apter who lay claim to “a politics of literature critical of global
literary management within corporate education”. The intention is good, yet
one is reminded of Said’s (1978) assertion that all Orientalist scholarship was
somehow tainted by “the gross political fact” of colonisation – this might
seem extreme, “yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism”
(10). Following Said, hardly anybody would suggest anymore that knowledge
production is not organized by “the highly if obscurely organized political cir-
cumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced” (11), including the
............................
knowledge production in world literature studies in the Euro-American
Academy.
Concerned at the commodification and simplification of the world’s litera-
tures when transposed into world literature curricula, admirably, Apter’s
book did not disown its politics; it claimed “a politics of literature critical
of global literary management within corporate education”. One reason
why literary studies
falls short as anti-capitalist critique is because it insufficiently questions what it

means to “have” a literature … Literary communities are gated: according to
Western law and international statute, authors have texts, publishers have a univer-
sal right to translate (as long as they pay), and nations own literary patrimony as
cultural inheritance. (2013, 15)
This principled stand of uneasiness in the face of what she trenchantly calls
“the entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the
world’s cultural resources” (3) is critical of “studies of broad ambition”
like The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012), which, she
says, “fall prey inevitably to the tendency to zoom over the speed bumps of
untranslatability”. Untranslatability is a counter to “the expansionism and
gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavours” (Apter 2013, 3); it is also a
move against the “conditions of property-value and economic privatization
underwriting contemporary literary world-systems” (15). Yet, despite a
careful delineation by Apter of her stand against “World Literature” (where
W and L are in capital letters and within inverted commas), which she sees
as “grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal
appeal”, and despite her thesis against this, proposing instead “a plurality
of ‘world literatures’ (in lower-case) oriented around philosophical concepts
and geopolitical pressure points”, one finds, nevertheless, that Against
World Literature is still structured around the same European philosophical
concepts and the same geopolitical pressure points as the most talked of
books in the field. Apter pits a world literature in lower-case against one in
capital letters, and states she is against what she calls “a flaccid globalism”.
She is against the grouping of “non-European literatures” “under monolithic
rubrics such as ‘Islam’ or ‘Asia’” (but that term “non-European” itself seems
problematic: there is Europe, and there is a non-Europe which does not refer-
ence America); yet the authors she uses to make her case remain Pynchon,
DeLillo, or at most, Tolstoy; the theorists Wittgenstein and Derrida. I am
not making a case here that she should have used Premchand or the one per-
ennial favourite in world literature discussions, Tagore, instead; following
Derrida, one should know by now that overturning the binary is hardly a
useful solution if anyone were ever brave enough to attempt this, however
nice it would still be if someone tried.
THE WORLD TURN’D UPSIDE DOWN 11
Rosinka Chaudhuri
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The subtitle of Apter’s book, On the Politics of Untranslatability, captured

the fundamental precept of her position there, since her central thesis was “the
importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untran-
slatability” (4), and to “activate untranslatability as a theoretical fulcrum of
comparative literature with bearing on approaches to world literatures, lit-
erary world-systems and literary history” (3), among other things. Here,
translation, “seen as authorized plagiarism … belongs fully to no one”; it is
seen as “a model of deowned literature” that “stands against the swell of cor-
porate privatisation in the arts.” A “translational author – shorn of a singular
signature – is the natural complement, in my view”, she says, “to World Lit-
erature understood as an experiment in national sublation that signs itself as
collective, terrestrial property” (15). “A model of deowned literature” might
be something Apter and Rabindranath may have in common, as may be
explored, but here I would like to see if Apter’s fundamental tenet of “untran-
slatability” both was and was not what Rabindranath had in mind in the
context of his formulation viśvasāhitya. Apter mentions the essay, but does
not examine it; very few do.
Several overlaps exist between two recent interpreters of the Tagore essay
for prominent anthologies: David Damrosch’s World Literature in Theory
(2014) collects the essay and discusses it briefly in the introduction, while in
The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012) the discussion by
Bhavya Tiwari is more extensive. The brevity of Damrosch’s comments on
Tagore’s essay stands in contrast to the many paragraphs he devotes to
Goethe’s “seminal reflections on Weltliteratur in his conversations with
Johann Peter Eckermann in the late 1820s” (5) in this introduction. (His dis-
cussion of the Goethe–Eckermann conversations is actually much more
detailed and exhaustive in his book What is World Literature?, where his
commentary on this runs into many pages). Of Tagore here, however, in
the context of his inclusion in his anthology, he only has a single paragraph
or so:
Ideas of world literature spread far beyond Europe in the early decades of the twen-
tieth century. “Origins” concludes with two path-breaking statements on world lit-
erature from two very different locations. In his 1907 essay on vishwa sahitya or
“world literature,” Rabindranath Tagore speaks of the universal values that
world literature can embody – an argument that served a strategic local purpose
of its own, offering a counter to England’s strategy of ruling its colonial possessions
in India by dividing and conquering. (6)
To start with, the sentence construction of the first line – ideas shown spread-
ing out from Europe to far beyond it – gestures incipiently toward the “first in
the West and then in the rest” model which has surely, once we actually begin
to investigate the growth and interaction of literatures, only a limited use, as
............................
Damrosch himself might be the first to concede. Neither should one read
instrumentality into the strategic insertion of a text from India and one
from China at the “Origins” of World Literature in Theory. Instead, focusing
on his comments on the importance of the essay, we see he touches two fam-
iliar bases: (1) Tagore “speaks of the universal values that world literature can
embody” and (2) Tagore’s argument is a “counter to England’s strategy” of
divide and rule. The second comment, which he does not explain, seems puz-
zling until understood in relation to Tiwari’s discussion of Viceroy Curzon’s
plan to divide Bengal in 1905 and her foregrounding of the nationalist politics
of the forum for Tagore’s talk – the National Council of Education. (Writers,
arguably, however politically aware they may be, are not always responding
directly to political events in their thinking or writing.) The second point
about “universal values” is a common one in relation to Tagore – it was
also an accusation made by modernist poets such as Pound and Buddhadeva
Bose with regard to his poetry. Tiwari also refers to Tagore’s universalism,
speaking of his “supranational universality” (2012, 344) and of how he
“under the nomenclature of ‘vishwa sahitya’ advocated universality” (343).
On what the essay actually says neither says very much. Tiwari takes “a
quick glance” at the essay itself, a glance that does not encompass a single
4 Every reference to Bengali word in its gaze.4 She maintains Tagore’s universalism is “signifi-
the text of cantly modulated” in this essay because “Tagore is countering this policy
Rabindranath’s essay
here is from [of dividing Bengal] by using ecological metaphors of earth and land, empha-
quotations translated sizing the organic connectedness that exists beyond geographical or religious
by Buddhadeva Bose or linguistic boundaries when it comes to literatures and other art forms” (44).
in his 1959 essay,
“Comparative
Analysing the etymological roots of Sahitya in Sanskrit, where it “does not
Literature in India”. have the same resonance as the word ‘literature’ in English” (44), she
There is no reference returns to Bharata’s Natyashastra to explain Rabindranath’s understanding
to the Bengali essay
of the word. But to refer to the Sanskrit and claim that the essence of the
itself or any other
Bengali-language term sāhitya is to be found in its etymological sense of “togetherness” and
work here. “union” is to miss the point. The category sāhitya as Rabindranath knew
it, and in part defined it, was one that was reformulated and reinvented in
nineteenth-century India, torn from its original significations to mean what
it means to Indians today in some Indian languages. Alongside other cat-
egories such as kavi [poet] or itihas [history], the nineteenth century formu-
lated its understanding of sāhitya anew, in a different way to the traditional
commentaries and textual analyses of the past. Thus, in 1885, the famous
writer Bankimchandra Chatterjee had asked, in an introduction to the
poetry of Iswar Gupta (1812–59), “Who is a kavi?”, enumerating the ways
in which the word kavi, derived from kavya in the Sanskrit, “today means
poet” (using the English word in the Bengali text) in a different sense than
5 For a detailed it meant even fifty years before.5 World literature was born in such writings
discussion, see in Indian modernity from the 1850s onward.
Chaudhuri (2014).
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................
Tiwari is quite right to say that “many world literary traditions are in fact at
work in India, and as a result there cannot be one comparative literature or
even one world literature” (2012, 345) yoking Goethe and Tagore together
to coin her own model for India, “Comparative World Literature”, but
Tagore’s essay does not seem to be making quite that point. Both interpreters
seem to assume that the Gitanjali in English was translated from a single
Bengali text (“when he was moved … to translate his major poem cycle
Gitanjali into English” (Tiwari 2012, 342). Damrosch concludes his brief
comments on the essay with:
Tagore’s universalism had an outward as well as inward-looking use; a few years

after delivering his lecture, Tagore undertook the step of translating his book-
length poem Gitanjali into English, a self-translation that led to his becoming the
first Asian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. (2014, 6)
As much as the poet might have abhorred the idea of these translations from a
few scattered and slim volumes of his Bengali poetry (not, as he says, one
“book-length poem”) having what Damrosch calls an “outward use”, how
this was an outcome of “his universalism” remains unclear. Damrosch’s
mention of Tagore’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 alludes to the inevitable
worldwide circulation of the prizewinning text, thus fitting into his theoretical
paradigm of what makes world literature, but Rabindranath himself might
not have valorized the outward uses of poetry in quite the same way. He
wrote repeatedly, as we know, of the history of chance and misdirection
and the role of the unconscious both in the form these translations took, as
well as in their physical journey to fame (he lost the notebook with the trans-
lations on the London Underground), though one must be wary of his own
constructions regarding his creativity, which were hardly, as was once
6 For a detailed claimed for the British Empire, built entirely by accident.6
discussion, see Viśvasāhitya or “World Literature” was presented at the National Council
Chaudhuri (2016).
of Education in Calcutta on 9 February 1907, when Rabindranath Tagore
was 46 years old and an established poet in the Bengali literary sphere,
7 The essay was although still unknown to the world.7 It was published immediately after-
published wards in the same month in the revived journal Bangadarsan that he was
immediately after the
lecture in the Jan.– editing at the time with Srishchandra Majumdar – a literary journal of
Feb. 1907 number of immense import in the history of Bengali literature. It should bear pointing
the revived journal out here that in 1907, the year this lecture was delivered, Rabindranath’s
Bangadarsan that
Rabindranath was
beloved younger son, 11-year-old Samindranath, died of cholera, following
editing at the time the deaths of his wife, a daughter, and father in the preceding few years –
with Srishchandra this middle period, before world fame, has been framed by his biographers
Majumdar. It
as a significant time of reflection and writing for him.
appeared again in the
collection of five Rabindranath Tagore’s essay Viśvasāhitya, or “World Literature”, could
essays titled Sahitya be read as a foundational text that argues for an idea of world literature (a
............................
(Literature) published status it already claims historically) that, if read in relation to his philosophy,
by Visva Bharati
can be seen, in a sense, to overturn Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and
Press on 11 October
1907. A translation stand it on his head. Rabindranath’s essay on world literature is important
by Swapan not just because of the political and historical circumstances of its production,
Chakravorty is but because it advocates a method of “doing” world literature that potentially
available in the
Oxford Tagore frees us from the conundra besetting the methods that we have been discussing
Translations series so far if scholars writing on the essay were to read it for what it actually says.
(Chakravorty 2001). The idea of “the world” that he arrives at in this essay, in complete contrast to
This has been
collected by
Goethe’s, is a philosophical notion related to an understanding of the self and
Damrosch (2014). the other which is predicated upon his inheritance of, and interest in, both
Upanishadic high theory as well as popular folk culture, as we can see from
the references in the essay itself. In saying this, no opposition is posited
between Goethe and Tagore rehearsing a familiar West versus East narrative.
As any nuanced reading of either Goethe or Tagore will show, their pos-
itions were certainly not diametrically opposed. Rabindranath was an
admirer, and had read Goethe and referred to him in the letters he wrote
from his houseboat as a young man. Writing from the boat in the September
sunlight of 1894, he revelled:
How I love the light and the air! That may be because of the appropriateness of my
name. Goethe had said before he died: More light! – if I had to express a wish at a
time like that then I would say: More light and more space! (Letter No. 154, On the
way to Boyalia, Saturday, 22 September 1894; in Tagore 2014, 279)
Goethe is mentioned often, and another quotation is given twice in the orig-
inal German in the same letter, as if the music of the words in their source
language were important enough to make the citation in that language
itself. “I have kept something Goethe said always in mind – it sounds
simple, but to me it seems very deep – Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.
Thou must do without, must do without” – using the phrase again at the
end of the letter: Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren (Letter No. 236,
Kushtia, 5 October 1895; in Tagore 2014, 380–1). In another letter, in an
analysis that has implications for his formulation of viśvamānab as well as
viśvasāhitya, he asks: “Are you enjoying Goethe’s biography? You will
have noticed one thing – that although Goethe was in some respects a very
detached personality, still, he had a connection with men, he was absorbed
in man” (Letter No. 143, Shilaidaha, 12 August 1894; in Tagore 2014,
261). Reading the life of Goethe, he mentions, in the same letter, the “forceful
currents of thought” that Germany was “stirred at the time” by, naming
“Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, Schiller and Kant” as vital to the “revolution
of thought” in that country. Reflecting on the relative status of his own pos-
ition, he writes once again:
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................
Last evening I was reading an essay on Goethe by Dowden – there I saw that Goethe
had left everything behind to go and spend two years in Italy in order to immerse
himself in art … I think – if I had the good fortune of Goethe, if I hadn’t been
born in Bengal, if there were appropriate food for the soul to be found here, then
I would have attained immortality in the entire world – at present I am largely an
object of pity, and poor. If I can, I too shall set out into this world at some point
– that’s what I really desire. (Letter No. 242, Patishar, 25 November 1895; in
Tagore 2014, 386–7)
Set out into the world he did, and in the process, reformulated again for
himself and others the ideas of the world and of man and of literature that
had animated his thoughts from the start.
Rabindranath begins his essay with three short sentences: “All our faculties
of heart and mind are there only for contact with others. This contact is what
makes us true, what enables us to find the truth. Otherwise, ‘I am’ or ‘some-
8 All translations thing is’, makes no sense at all”8 (Tagore 1961, 762). The Bengali word “yog”
from the Bengali are or the Sanskrit “yoga”, which I have rendered as contact in this instance, may
mine unless otherwise
indicated. Differences
be used differently in different contexts, and the standard Sahitya Samsad
in emphases and Bengali English dictionary lists union, mixture, blending, relation, connection,
choices in relation to association, contact, cooperation, concert, and act of joining among the many
words and phrases
translated in that
variables provided. (Swapan Chakravorty in the Oxford Tagore Translations
essay are what series translated yog as “forging bonds” here.) This sense of “contact with
compel me to use my others” or yog – the act of joining – is understood by Rabindranath in meta-
own translations. A phors used throughout the essay to illustrate his thinking, and he ends the
change in a word can
lead to a change in essay too with this sense of connectedness, of totality, and of interrelation-
emphasis and thereby ships derived from the word he repeats many times at the start of it. Three
to a changed reading things, he continues, connect us to the world: first, buddhir yog, the intellect,
– my own
translations are no
which is arrogant with the power of knowledge; second, prayojaner yog or
doubt predicated on self-interest – imbued with use-value; and third, ānander yog, or “joy”,
the way I read the where we truly experience our self. (It is important to note the “speed
text.
bump” of untranslatability here – joy is too much on the surface to capture
the spiritual resonance of ānanda, but it will have to suffice – bliss or
delight, pleasure or happiness all have different connotations in the English
language.) It is in the first couple of pages that Rabindranath lays out the
relationship we have with the world through ānanda, which, for him, com-
prises the only true relationship we can have with it.
The Upanishadic significance of ānanda was central to Rabindranath’s phil-
osophy and also key to his father Debendranath’s spiritual explorations.
Searching through the Upanishads for words that were “both ancient and
in use, simple and easy to understand” in 1844, Debendranath (1962)
found two phrases: “satyam jnānmanantam brahma” and “ānandarupamri-
tam jadvibhāti” as suitable slokas (lines/verses) to begin prayers with at the
reformist Brahmo Samaj he headed at the time (49). The first phrase’s
............................
approximate meaning might be that reality (Brahman) is pure existence
(satyam), consciousness (jnānam) and infinite (ānandam or anantam), while
the latter phrase, which was later sculpted in iron letters in an arc over the
gate to his house at Santiniketan, means “That which is particularly expressed
9 “The Vedas declare in the nectar [amritam] of joy [ānanda]”.9 Debendranath’s modern interpret-
that reality ation of these ancient lines was part of his mission to fashion a new religious
(Brahman) is pure
Existence (Sat or
idiom, a quest that could be said, in spirit, to be like Rabindranath’s own use
Satyam), of a line from the Vedanta in this essay, Viśvasāhitya. Both uses of the ancient
Consciousness (Cit or texts (and such appropriation can be shown on many occasions) are accom-
Jnaanam) and Infinite
(Aananda or
plished entirely each “in his own way, unfettered by textbook Vedantism”
Anantam).” See (Guha 2003, 85). This principle of creative appropriation applies to the phi-
http://www. losophical significance of ānanda as well, and returning to the roots of the
practicalphilosophy. word in the Upanishads would have little relevance to the manner in which
in/2014/11/23/
satyam-jnaanam- Rabindranath turned it into a philosophical tenet underpinning his notion
anantam-brahma. of literature and existence in the world. Again and again in songs and in
poems and in his criticism, Rabindranath has reiterated the importance of
ānanda – the word coming up repeatedly in songs, sometimes simply, as in
āj kı̄ ānanda ākāsé bātāse (what joy today in the sky and the breeze) and some-
times philosophically, as in jagate ānanda jogye āmār nimantran (I have been
invited to the world to join in the festival of joy) among many other instances.
In this essay, Rabindranath’s understanding of ānanda is to be found for-
mulated in the relation of the self and the other. This yog or connection of
ānanda with the world is one where all differences cease to exist (samasta
pārthakya ghuciyā jāy) – there we do not feel the power of the intellect or
of work, there we experience (anubhav kari) only ourselves. “What is this
thing – the connection with ānanda?” – he asks in colloquial, non-literary
10 The calit bhāshā everyday language [ei ānander yog byapārkhānā kı̄?]’ (763).10 Here, in this
or spoken language essay, his answer is: “It is when we know the other as our self and know
Rabindranath uses in
this essay is also a our self as other.”11 These are the unacknowledged words of Chandidas,
remarkable the medieval Bengali poet whose lines “I have made others my own people,
innovation in 1907 and my own people others” McDonald (2017, 189) has quoted in Artefacts
from the literary
language or sādhu
of Writing with reference to Tagore’s interest in the wandering singer-mendi-
bhāshā in which the cants constituent of Baul folk culture who exemplify the intercultural ideals
literary was encased behind his university, Visva Bharati, no less than the philosophy animating
till then.
Viśvasāhitya. The words in the Chandidas song in Bengali are:
11 In the
Chakravorty
translation: “It is Ghar kainu bāhir
nothing but knowing Bāhir kainu ghar
others as our own
Par kainu āpan
and our selves as
other.” Ā pan kainu par
The translation by Openshaw (2002) adds “people” in the English where it

doesn’t exist in the original – a more literal version would read: “My home
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................
I have made outside / The outside I have made my home / Others I have made
my own / My own I have made other.” There is no inner and outer, the med-
ieval poet sang, no self and other. As Rabindranath paraphrased it a little later
again in Viśvasāhitya: “In this way [in order to express itself], the heart is con-
stantly at pains to find the world in our self and our self in the world” (767).
The preoccupations inherent in the essay are emblematic of Rabindranath’s
thinking, and exist in a thread with earlier and later works without which it is
not possible to understand this essay and its expression of his own philosophy.
One such continuity that may be traced between his thoughts here, and those
to be found expressed in the last essay he wrote (or dictated) Sāhitye Aitihā-
sikatā (“Historicality in Literature”) a few months before he died in 1941, is
that of a quotation he uses from the Brihadāryanaka Upanishad that occurs in
both essays. About thirty-four years separate the two essays, but the line still
speaks to him at the end of his life as it had here in relation to world literature
when he [mis]quoted it from memory as: navā are putrāsya kāmāya putrāh
priyā bhavati (763). Ranajit Guha’s discussion of these lines, that he translates
as “It is not for the sake of the sons, my dear, that they are loved, but for one’s
own sake that they are loved” in History at the Limits of World History
(2003), notes that these lines were mentioned by Rabindranath at least six
times in his life in readings that “are all at variance with one another” (85).
In Guha, the line is correctly rendered as: na vā are putrānām kāmāya
putrāh priyā bhavanti, ātmanastu kāmāya putrāh priyā bhavanti (83). As in
Viśvasāhitya, in Sāhitye Aitihāsikatā, too, however, this line acts as “a meta-
phor on creativity for Tagore when he returned to the text for the last time”
(86). For Rabindranath at eighty, also called visva kabi (world poet) by the
Bengalis, these lines “had summed up the experience of that long encounter
with destiny as he wrote, ‘I am a poet of the world (ami prithibir kobi)’” (80).
It is as a metaphor for creativity – “It is because the self expresses itself as a
creator in his son that he values him” – that Rabindranath uses the line in
Viśvasāhitya as well. Immediately following the unacknowledged line from
Chandidas, these lines are a prompt to open a discussion on the notion of
the self and the other. In Viśvasāhitya he glosses the four lines he quotes,
saying:
Yagnavalkya had said to Gargi: It is not for the sake of the sons that they are loved,
but for the sake of the self [ātman] that they are loved / It is not for the sake of wealth
that wealth is loved, it is for one’s own sake.
“What this means”, he says, is: “I want that within which I find myself most
completely. My son dispels my need, this means, in my son I find myself even
more. It is as if in him I become even more myself (āmi jena āmitara hayiyā
uthi).” On both occasions – in Viśvasāhitya as well as in Sāhitye Aitihāsikatā
– the lines are a prompt to open a discussion on the notion of the self and the
............................
other. Guha cites the philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta, who suggested
that in this Upanishad “the idea of the self moves to the center of intellectual
and spiritual interest displacing the notion of an external creator”, but he sees
that here, Rabindranath “severs it from its narrative background”, revising it
and freeing it for a new interpretation where, resisting any suggestion of self-
realization, or any understanding of the ātman as Self with a capital s, the self
is rather “understood primarily as a sovereign creative agent” (2003, 86).
Rabindranath proposes in this essay that man expresses himself in the
world broadly in two streams – in work and in literature (which, in his termi-
nology, sometimes seems a metaphor for and interchangeable with play).
Society, state, religion and sect have been built by the first; but where we
are alone, without relations, without connections – where we are “uncivi-
lized” in the sense of being free, that is the latter stream. In relation to litera-
ture (though not as if to define it), the words Rabindranath uses are
“asabhya” (“uncivilized”), “prayajanke chāpāiyā” (evoking overflow, some-
thing like “flooding the banks of necessity”), “anābaśyak” (without use or
purpose), and finally, the untranslatable “deule” or “bankrupt” (the diction-
ary has deuliya as “bank insolvent; beggared” – Rabindranath inverts the
conventional meaning to imply the highest state of renunciation: the unat-
tached / without possessions / beyond the worldly).
We come, at the end of the numerous examples and metaphors furnished by
Tagore to elaborate upon his understanding of what literature is and what lit-
erature does, to his claim that literature needs to exist in a domain “without
self-interest” (swārtha sekhān haite dū re). Parallel to the world of necessity
(prayajaner sansār), man creates a world of literature (sāhityer sansār),
which is superfluous, unnecessary (prayajan chārā). The notion of excess is
returned to: he points out that “beauty is extravagance, it is excessive and
wasteful expenditure” (behisābi bāje kharac – two adjectives here precede
the verb kharac or spending, as if one will not suffice), it “exceeds need”, it
flowers without use and flows without purpose. Nature (Tagore’s analogy
here for writing) is large because it is full of the unnecessary. “What is
expressed in literature?” he asks, and answers directly: “We find man’s
plenty (prācurya), his wealth (aisharya), that which overflows all his need.
It has that which does not finish within the boundaries of his world” (769).
This preoccupation with the superfluous goes back at least to 1894 to Rabin-
dranath’s essay on children’s nursery rhymes, where, too, words such as
anābaśyak, used repeatedly, and the celebration of the arbitrary and the unfin-
ished, the superfluous and the purposeless refer to “a sort of space”, “a recon-
figuration of emptiness, or a crack, a gap in the everyday realm of valuation”
(Chaudhuri 2008, 24). The words he uses seem to evoke what Lawrence said
about Cézanne in relation to surplus, which is what most interests him in Art:
“But I am convinced that what Cézanne himself wanted was representation.
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................
He wanted true-to-life representation. Only he wanted it more true to life”

(Lawrence 1961, 577).
In conversation with David Damrosch, Gayatri Spivak identifies this notion
of excess – the “peculiar idea” of bāje kharac – as one of the two “transgres-
sive moments” in this piece “worth looking at”; the other is “the intimations
of singularity, to which I cannot pay attention here” (Damrosch and Spivak
2011, 411). This repeated and “powerful metaphor” of “wasteful spending”,
she says, stands for “what in the imagination goes above, beyond, beneath,
and short of mere rational choice toward alterity”, unconsciously repeating
Lawrence’s famous passage on the workings of the imagination in Cézanne:
For the intuitive apperception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is
aware of it all round, not only just of the front … The true imagination is forever
curving round to the other side, to the back of the presented appearance. (as
quoted in Gomme 1978, 194)
“The uncertain intimacy open to ethical alterity is ‘wasteful’”, she continues,

for he “defines that worldliness beyond, beneath, above, and short of not only
merely rational choice but also the verbal text” (Damrosch and Spivak 2011,
472). Conceding that “this lesson is hard to learn”, “this message of Tagore –
that what goes across is not immediately profitable or evaluable … that it is
“value-added” in an incommensurable sense with no guarantees” (472), she
misses the significance of the word preceding bāje (literally: bad, but here:
useless) kharac, that would support her argument to the hilt – behisābi – a
word that means wasteful, but also evokes the accounts book, hisāb
meaning calculation, counting or accounting – so behisābi is that which
doesn’t adhere to the adding up. The message is also hard to learn, of
course, because it does not subscribe to the predominant metaphor of com-
merce, circulation in the world, or world-systems that underpins much of
the thinking on world literature. Neither can it be understood by incremen-
tally adding to the corpus: learning more languages, undertaking more colla-
borative work, or subscribing to a great deal of pluralism.
Viśvasāhitya is remarkable not just for the vision it holds of world litera-
ture, but because of the potential that vision holds in relation to reading/
doing world literature today. The kernel of Rabindranath’s thought in Viśva-
sāhitya is contained in a few paragraphs towards the end of the essay, where
he finally arrives at the crux of the matter: “Now it is time to come to the
point, which is: if we reduce literature to time-place-thing [deś-kāl-pātra],
12 The word pātra we do not properly comprehend it” (771).12 “We will find what we need to
can mean self or see in literature when we understand that literature allows man-in-the-
object – colloquially,
it means vessel or pot world [viśvamānab] to express himself” (771). (Again, the word viśvamānab
– in this sentence might be translated conventionally as universal man [viśva meaning both uni-
(sāhityake deś-kāl- verse and world], or, if we can disassociate it from the phrase, as man of the
............................
pātre choto kariyā world, but as he seems to be gesturing at man’s existence or being in the
dekhile thikmata
world, I have used man-in-the-world instead.) The writer, apparently, must
dekhāi hay nā) it
refers to the context express the feeling and sorrow of all mankind for his writing to assume the
of literature, and status of literature; arguably, this is the only universalist sentiment in the
would therefore be entire essay. But the statement is immediately qualified – “But – only if … ”
translated as object or
thing. Once more, we encounter an extended metaphor – “But only if we see that
viśvamānab constructs literature as a temple – but the entire structure is
always under construction, without a plan” (he uses the English word). He
has been called here (to the National Council of Education), he says, to talk
about what in English is called Comparative Literature, but which he shall
call, in Bengali, Viśvasāhitya, literally, World Literature, but if understood
in conjunction with viśvamānab then literature-in-the-world. Returning to
the thought that the sociopolitical–historical content or context of literature
is not literature, Rabindranath continues that Akbar’s rule, Gujarat’s
history, Elizabeth’s character is “mere information”, “just the pretext” –
these are merely the devices one may use.
When man expresses himself as man-in-the-world [viśvamānab], when he breaks

and builds and breaks himself again in order to experience his self individually
and collectively – that person tries to show us not individual people, but everyday
man in his everyday efforts and desires. (771)
In Sāhitye Aitihāsikatā Rabindranath had said much the same thing, identify-
ing his writing as emptied of history:
Like the Supreme Creator, he [the poet], too, creates his workout of his own self …
Thanks to his [the poet’s] creativity, what came to be reflected in Galpaguchha was
not the image of a feudal order nor indeed any political order at all, but that history
of the weal and woe of human life which, with its everyday contentment and misery,
13 For a detailed has always been there.13
discussion, see
Chaudhuri (2012).
Finally, we come to what is worth looking at in world literature: “to see
how man expresses his ānanda in literature, and which everyday form
[nityarū p] man’s self wants to show in the different forms [bicitramū rti] this
expressivity takes.” And again: “We must not interpret it as a constructed
composition; it is a world (my emphasis)” (ihāke krittim racanā baliyā
jānile haibenā; ihā ekti jagat). World literature, then, is not the sum of litera-
tures in the world; rather, literature is a world. So here, finally, we have it:
world literature turned on its head: it is not literature in and of the world,
“It is a world”; it is to be found within the self that expresses itself, therefore
it is within the self and so in the world, arguing, as Spivak puts it, “for a word-
liness in the literary” (Damrosch and Spivak 2011, 472). Further, it is a world
always under construction, always unfinished, always striving for completion.
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................
Like (Rabindranath suggests) the mandala of the sun, the trembling light sur-
rounding the part-fluid, part-solid inner sun, literature is an “intangible ema-
nation made of words” around man, surrounding him, spreading around him
and connecting with him: “the second world all around the world of man –
that is literature” (772).
This is contrary to Goethe’s Weltliteratur in German, a term, Damrosch says,
“he popularized while reading a Chinese novel in a week when he was also
reading Persian and Serbian poetry, all in French or German translations,
together with poems by Pierre Jean de Béranger in the original” (Damrosch
2014, 4). Goethe’s world literature is established in the context of his voracious
reading in “a surprisingly wide range of foreign literatures”; through Goethe’s
conversations with Eckermann, Damrosch says, “we gain a nuanced picture of
[his] manifold encounters with foreign texts”. Such a contextualization places
Goethe’s notion of world literature firmly in the world and of it; transcending
boundaries and nations, encountering “foreign texts”, but circulating within
the world. “World Literature is the blue-chip moniker”, Apter says, “benefit-
ting from its pedigreed association with Goethean Weltliteratur” (2013, 41);
but what prevents it from associating instead with Rabindranath’s pathbreak-
ing formulation? Perhaps Tagore isn’t blue chip enough. Spivak asks straight
on: “Why should we endlessly quote Goethe? A magisterial writer but histori-
cally undoubtedly informed by that imperialist anti-imperialism which I already
cited as the Bloomsbury Fraction” (Damrosch and Spivak 2011, 472). What
Spivak identifies in Tagore’s essay as “the singularity of literary production”
is read by her in relation to Genet’s question about the essence of art –
“What remains of a Rembrandt, torn into four equal pieces and flushed
down the toilet?” What remains in the four pieces: “the politics of identity,
voting blocks, Melissa Williams’s view of multiculturalism, systemic grids, com-
peting cultures” belongs to current world literature studies’ vision of literature
in the world and of it, against Rabindranath’s “ethics of alterity” in which “we
can imagine the other … as singular, universalizable, but never universal”
(468). “Universalizable but never universal” – she repeats – this rethinking is
hard, she maintains.
Rabindranath crucially ends his essay by reminding his audience that world
literature is not an addition of parts and therefore not reducible to “systemic
grids” or “competing cultures”. In conclusion he says:
All I wanted to say that just as the world is not my field and your field and someone
else’s field, so too literature is not my writing, your writing and someone else’s
writing – that is a very provincial way of knowing the world – ordinarily, we
view literature in this provincial way. (Tagore 1961, 773)
He does not add here that this provincialism emanates from Europe, although
he has said that on other occasions. What he would ask for, rather, is to “free
............................
ourselves of this narrow provincialism” and aim to “see the world of man
(viśvamānab) in the world of literature (viśvasāhitya)”. Supriya Chaudhuri
(2016), in her reading of the essay, is quite right to say that he focuses here
“wholly upon the nature of literature itself”, putting forward an ideology
that “converts a question about literature of the world to an assertion of
the ‘worlding’ of the self through literature” (82–3). In conclusion, Rabindra-
nath suggests that accomplishing this would involve seeing in each writer’s
work an “accumulation”, a “convergence” or “coming-together” (“sama-
gratā”) and finding in all the expressions of man that connection or “relation-
ality” that for him indicated a renewal of man’s connection with the world.
This is not a universalist statement, despite the notions of convergence and
relations between all men in this part of the sentence; it is, rather, what
Spivak again usefully calls “singularity in a collectivity”, where “‘singularity’
doesn’t necessarily imply single texts”, but “simply implies that what is singu-
lar in any text is the universalizable” (Damrosch and Spivak 2011, 478).
Earlier, reacting against “sytemic grids”, Spivak had defined “the ethics of
alterity” as that which “imagine[s] the other … as singular, universalizable,
but never universal” (468), offering an antidote to formulations such as
“singular universals” or familiar claims such as that for Tagore, literature
“serves to express universal humanity” (Chaudhuri 2016, 81). Placing
Tagore alongside Rembrandt and Bach, Spivak repeats that we need to
speak for them as “universalizable but never universal” – that is, the
problem and delight of confronting literature or art as a world, rather than
of it as manifested in the attempt to frame the world in a grid. “Literature
of the world” is rejected in favour of an understanding of “literature as a
world”, or between thinking of world literature in terms of contexts and cir-
culation to world literature as something to be found in the particular or the
part in relation to the world rather than grasped holistically. This overturning
of how we do literature in the world – that is, confronting literature as a
world, rather than of it – is the fundamental contribution made by Rabindra-
nath to the debate on world literature.
This notion of world literature being irreducible to time-place-thing (deś-
kāl-pātra) is exactly what is conventionally not present in studies of world lit-
erature today. Moretti apart, it might suffice to say that most work in this
genre is historicist in nature, including Mufti (2016) and Bhattacharya
(2016), who have questioned the manner in which world literature has
ignored colonial histories, bringing William Jones and the colonial project
into the picture, viewing literature as a conceptual “plane of equivalence”
established through Orientalist philology. Pheng Cheah, however, does
discuss the temporal dimension that is integral to the understanding of Weltli-
teratur, pointing out that Auerbach had stressed the point that the humanism
of Goethe’s concept is “historicist”, it is related to “the past and to the
future”, to world history. “The universal history of the human spirit” is
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................
facilitated by a “vision of the achievements of the human species organised

into a narrative of universal progress” (Cheah 2016, 24, 25). Regardless,
most approaches inevitably map worlds or track, as Damrosch says,
“devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems” in readings which are not
overly concerned with what is within the text itself, or the world – “a
world” – created within the text. For such readings, it is Goethe’s Weltlitera-
tur that is established as the core methodological text, formulated as it was in
the context of his voracious reading in “a surprisingly wide range of foreign
literatures”. This is world literature understood as time-place-thing, but the
paradoxical approach that Rabindranath gives us in his essay is the claim
that world literature is not an addition of parts; it is not an addition of,
say, French, Serbian, Persian, German and other national literatures.
“Do not think for a moment that I will be the one to show you the way in
this World Literature – we will all have to carve out our own paths according
to our individual abilities”, Rabindranath said in his concluding paragraph of
the essay (Tagore 1961, 773). The metaphors he uses, of world literature or
the literatures of the world understood as the self in relation to the other, as
an emanation, as a site permanently under construction, as a world, are
anti-historicist, predicated upon an understanding privileging fragmentation
rather than the whole, the resistance of the untranslatable rather than the
market circulation of translatability, of the epiphany of the everyday rather
than what Hegel called the prose of the world.
Speaking of the establishment of “Literature” in the French context in
Writing Degree Zero, Barthes (1968) writes of the moment of the birth of
“Literature”:
as soon as the writer ceased to be a witness to the universal, to become the incarna-
tion of a tragic awareness (around 1850), his first gesture was to choose the commit-
ment of his form, either by adopting or rejecting the writing of his past. (3)
Barthes spoke of 1850 in France as precisely “the time when Literature (the
word having come into being shortly before) was finally established as an
object.” “Modern poetry is a poetry of the object”, he says, but the unex-
pected object here is “each poetic word” (3). Rabindranath may not have
been making a point about modernist formalism, but the uncanny similarity
in phrasing to Rabindranath’s understanding of what literature is, when
Barthes says this “Hunger of the Word” is “full of gaps and full of lights”,
“filled with absences” and “without stability of intention” is worth noting.
“The bursting upon us of the poetic word then institutes an absolute
object” and here, for Barthes, the object cannot have any “resort to the
content of the discourse”, it is not about the subject matter, because it
“turns its back” on both “History” and “social life”. Apter discusses
Badiou’s notion of hyper-translation in conjugation with Cassin’s ultimate
............................
goal of “consequential relativism” (Apter 2013, 27) to understand untranslat-
ability in a similar way. Badiou, as she points out quoting Kenneth Reinhard,
“sublimates Plato’s text, in Lacan’s sense of sublimation as ‘the elevation of an
object to the status of a Thing’ which is precisely to de-familiarize it, to bring
out its strangeness”, so that one does not in “any way privilege the aura of the
original” (22–3). This anti-historicism is something found also in Rabindra-
nath’s emphatic assertion in his last essay: “Dū r hok ge tomār itihās” – to
hell with your history – insisting there too that literature was a specific kind
of discourse, distinct from the discourses of history, politics and ethics; reiter-
ating, referring to himself in the generalized third person, that “in his own
field of creativity Rabindranath has been entirely alone and tied to no
public by history” (Guha 2003, 81).
Barthes’ rejection of the markers of History and social life is reminiscent of
Rabindranath’s definition of world literature, and so too as are the reasons for
which both thinkers abhor those categories, which are to do with their rejec-
tion of Narrative. Rabindranath spoke in Viśvasāhitya against understanding
literature as an artificial construct (krittim racanā); narrative, the way Barthes
reads it (as well as what structures world literature studies currently in aca-
demic readings) is just that:
the ideal instrument for every construction of a world; it is the unreal time of cosmo-
gonies, myths, History and Novels. It presupposes a world which is constructed, ela-
borated, self-sufficient, reduced to significant lines, and not one which has been sent
sprawling before us, for us to take or leave. (1968, 30)
Speaking of the “serial story” of those “long recitatives”, the Novel and
History, Barthes called them “plane projections of a curved and organic
world of which the serial story … presents, through its involved compli-
cations, a degraded image” (29). At a particular historical moment in the nine-
teenth century, the function of the narrator, the preterite, and the third person
“exploded reality to a slim and pure logos, without density, without volume,
without spread, and whose sole function is to unite as rapidly as possible a
cause and an end” (31). The order of Narrative brings coherence and a struc-
ture of relations to reality; thanks to it, Barthes points out, “reality is neither
mysterious nor absurd” anymore, “it is clear, almost familiar, repeatedly
gathered up and contained in the hands of a creator” (31).
It might be too much to ask that discussions of world literature disassociate
themselves from the markers of whatever we understand to be the “world”;
still, the remarkable congruence of these theories with the novel form or Nar-
rative needs noting. Theorists of world literature by and large seem beholden
to the rationale of the Narrative, “whose sole function is to unite as rapidly as
possible a cause and an end”, and in doing so, subscribe also to the pedago-
gical imperative of connecting the world to History, and thereby of imparting
Rosinka Chaudhuri
............................
to it the second-order appearance of a constructed artefact of the sort Rabin-

dranath warns it should not be. It could also have been he who wrote these
words that seem reminiscent of the status of world literature today (though
it is Barthes I quote again):
But just as, in the present state of History, any political mode of writing can only
uphold a police world, any intellectual mode of writing can only give rise to a
para-literature, which no longer dares to speak its name. Both are therefore in a com-
plete blind alley, they can lead only to complicity or impotence, which means, in
either case, to alienation. (Barthes 1968, 31)
Writing in 1956, Buddhadeva Bose, Bengal’s most important critic and writer
after Rabindranath, and founding member of the first Department of Com-
parative Literature in India at Jadavpur University, put down his reasons
for the inception of the discipline in an essay called “Comparative Literature
in India”:
But in an age when philosophy is regarded as a method, history as a social science

and criticism is often cramped with technical jargon, the need for something more
spacious is all the more keenly felt. Comparative Literature, essentially an eclectic
study, is a corrective to the excess of esotericism which now prevails in academic
circles. It is an effort to liberalise literature and re-humanise the humanities. (Bose
2018, 206)
Cheah, sixty years later, said something similar when he observed that what
“is especially striking” about the “recent revival of world literature to earlier
attempts to selectively appropriate and transform Goethe’s idea of Weltliter-
atur in the post-World War II era, such as Erich Auerbach’s exemplary essay
“Philology and Weltliteratur” (1952)”, is “the hollowing out of the humanist
ethos that had been world literature’s heart and core” (2016, 24). Regret
about “the hollowing out of the humanist ethos” sounds as if it comes from
the same place that Bose’s plea to “re-humanise the humanities” does.
What is startling is the difference, methodologically speaking, between the
two professors – Bose a mid-twentieth-century writer–craftsman–critic,
Cheah a contemporary academic whose prose belies his intent. That is, if it
indeed be his intent to show how inadequate the “theorists of the new
world literature” are, because for them, “it is a matter of how literature oper-
ates as a real object of exchange and circulation in the world and constitutes a
world of its own that transcends national boundaries and operates with its
own specific laws and logic” (27). He points out, quite rightly, that this
“analogy between world literature and the circulation of commodities in a
global market unwittingly has the opposite effect of diminishing literature’s
worldly force and, therefore, its causality in relation to the world
............................
globalization creates” (28). Politically, world literature studies seems to have
taken, like much of the world’s politics, several steps backward from some of
the gains made by one of its predecessors, postcolonial studies, with which it
shares its often sociological and theoretical orientation as well as its obsession
with the minutiae of what it itself is constituted of, and done not a great deal in
overhauling the limitations and curtailments its predecessor had put in place
in relation to the “literary”. Doing world literature today is not synonymous
anymore with an interest in the literatures of the world or in the relation of the
self and the other, or in the particular and the whole. In a context in which
literature no longer matters, perhaps that is entirely appropriate.
Acknowledgements
The title and content of this essay mostly come from my keynote address as
the first Mellon Professor of the Global South at Oxford University on 7
March 2018, as well as a preceding paper entitled “The World Turn’d
Upside Down: Reflections on Rabindranath’s World Literature” at a work-
shop on world literature organized there by Peter McDonald. The phrase
“The World Turn’d Upside Down” was taken from the event poster
quoting John Taylor’s seventeenth-century tract/poem/pamphlet title: The
World Turn’d Upside Down: or, A Brief Description of the Ridiculous
Fashions of these Distracted Times (London, 1647). I am grateful most of
all to Peter McDonald, Amit Chaudhuri, Elleke Boehmer, Stefan Helgesson,
Pablo Mukherjee, Robert Young, Francesca Orsini and others whose com-
ments have enriched this essay.
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International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

ISSN: 1369-801X (Print) 1469-929X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20

The World Turn’d Upside Down

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Self-evidently, world literature also seems to follow a similar logic.

an arena of possibility also in having recourse to a language and literature in

Or again, towards the end: “The Dictionary aims to constitute a cartography

Nevertheless, that is the road chosen, as

Moreover, they go on, “Notwithstanding concerns about the global hege-

falls short as anti-capitalist critique is because it insufﬁciently questions what it

The subtitle of Apter’s book, On the Politics of Untranslatability, captured

Tagore’s universalism had an outward as well as inward-looking use; a few years

The translation by Openshaw (2002) adds “people” in the English where it

He wanted true-to-life representation. Only he wanted it more true to life”

“The uncertain intimacy open to ethical alterity is ‘wasteful’”, she continues,

When man expresses himself as man-in-the-world [viśvamānab], when he breaks

facilitated by a “vision of the achievements of the human species organised

to it the second-order appearance of a constructed artefact of the sort Rabin-

But in an age when philosophy is regarded as a method, history as a social science

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