Beyond English

World Literature and India

Bhavya Tiwari

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501334658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Honorable Mention, Harry Levin Prize, 2022 (American Comparative Literature Association) Beyond English: World Literature and India radically alters the debates on world literature that hinge on the model of circulation and global capital by deeply engaging with the idea of the world and world-making in South Asia. Tiwari argues that Indic words for world ( vishva, jagat, sansar ) offer a nuanced understanding of world literature that is antithetical to a commodified and standardized monolingual globe. She develops a comparative study of the concept of "world literature" ( vishva sahitya ) in Rabindranath Tagore's works, the desire for a new world in the lyrics of the Hindi shadowism ( chhayavaad ) poets, and world-making in Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Chemmeen (1956) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). By emphasizing the centrality of "literature" ( sahitya ) through a close reading of texts, Tiwari orients world literature toward comparative literature and comparative literature toward a worldliness that is receptive to the poetics of a world in its original language and in translation.

1

Why World Literature?

In 1905, the British partitioned Bengal into two halves—East Bengal and West Bengal—on the pretext that the state had become unmanageable. In those days Bengal comprised the present-day states of Assam, Bihar, Orissa, and West Bengal of India, as well as the entirety of Bangladesh. The British wanted to divide and rule Bengal on the basis of religious and linguistic identities concentrated in various pockets of the state. Consequently, a strong wave of patriotism hit British India. There were widespread protests against the British, and a strong ideological divide emerged among the “moderate” and “extremist” members of the Indian Congress on the issue of addressing and responding to the partition. Though Bengal was eventually reunited in 1911, Bihar and Orissa became separate states. Delhi was announced as the new capital of the British Empire in India. Kolkata was no longer the capital of British India. The fact that today the official state languages of Bihar, Orissa, Assam, and West Bengal are Hindi, Odia, Bengali, and Assamese (respectively) is a striking reminder of the extraordinary linguistic, literary, and cultural diversity that the British were encountering in various parts of India. Clearly, politically and socially speaking, a great deal had happened between 1905 and 1911 in British India. It was during these times, exactly a year and a half after Bengal was partitioned, that Rabindranath Tagore was asked by the National Council of Education (NCE) to give a series of lectures on comparative literature, where he inaugurated the concept of vishva sahitya, or world literature.

It is uncertain whether the lecture series was on the discipline of comparative literature, or on the act of comparing literatures in British India. Considering that NCE’s goal was to subvert the British education model in India, it could certainly have been the latter. Tagore’s lecture on vishva sahitya, however, operated as a double-edged sword, for it was just not about the act of comparing literatures in the immediate imperial world, but also about the purpose of a discipline like comparative literature, which he chose to translate as vishva sahitya (world literature) in Bengali. Here it would be helpful to recall that the NCE’s function was to provide a channel for modern education outside of the curricula and system shaped by British interests, thereby resisting efforts by the governor general of British India to separate wealthy Indians from their native traditions through English education.¹ Indeed, a number of acts and laws were passed in the years leading up to the NCE’s establishment. For instance, the Vernacular Press Act was passed in 1878 that created a huge unrest in British India. The purpose of the act was to curb Indian vernacular newspapers from criticizing British policies. Important to note here is that the law did not apply to English newspapers published in India. Though the law was repealed in 1881, the reverberations of mistrust in the British administration only continued. As a result, in 1904, when the Indian Universities Act was passed, the most urgent concern of the NCE had become protecting education in vernacular or bhasha² traditions. Further, a number of indigenous educational institutions had opened up in the beginning of the twentieth century in the cities formerly known as Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. These institutions imparted education that was anti-Macaulay in spirit while also encouraging nationalist sentiments. The Vernacular Press Act, the Indian Universities Act, and the partition of Bengal in 1905 created distrust among Indians for even the most liberal and progressive British officials serving in India.

Moreover, by early 1900s, the social reforms brought by Brahmo Samaj³ —a theistic movement within Hinduism that discarded the authority of Vedas and meaningless rituals, and believed in the universal spirit, Brahman—had started to bear fruit in Bengal and beyond. Tagore’s family had played a central role in the Brahmo Samaj movement, which was founded in Bengal in 1828 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy. In fact, Rabindranath Tagore himself became an active member of Brahmo Samaj in the early twentieth century. Brahmo Samaj’s liberalism and universalism appealed to Tagore’s worldview. It was during these times that Tagore, for the lecture series, spoke on topics that ranged from world literature and literary creation to the sense of beauty in literature. These lectures (along with others) appeared in Bengali magazines, journals, and periodicals, and were later anthologized in 1907 as Sahitya.⁴ They inaugurated Tagore’s position as a literary critic and scholar of a multilingual culture in British India.

Accordingly, in this chapter, I examine the significance and purpose of vishva sahitya or world literature for Tagore, and his defiant act of translating “comparative literature” as “world literature.” The act of translating “comparative literature” as “world literature,” I argue, has roots in Tagore’s beliefs in the ānand (joy) and ātmīyatā (empathy) of the vishva mānav (universe/universal/world-human/man)⁵ in world-making the universe, world, or vishva in sahitya. While in the vishva sahitya essay Tagore does not directly speak of translation’s role in conceptualizing world literature, this chapter emphasizes that by translating “comparative literature” as “world literature,” Tagore imagines a world literature where translation and vishva mānav go hand in hand to experience different worlds of literature. I explain this later in the chapter by pointing out that for Tagore the word “vishva” in vishva sahitya is not jagat or sansār—words that could all be translated into English as “world.” Tagore’s careful choice of the word “vishva” over other synonyms for the word “world” available to him in Indian languages and his complete abandoning of the word “tulnātamak” for “comparative” suggest that Tagore considered vishva sahitya beyond nations, authors, humans, and history. For him, the transcendent nature of vishva sahitya echoed the principles of Brahmo Samaj, where humanism and spiritualism came together to engage with the universal spirit.

Yet, as I indicate in the following pages, it was in the realization of vishva sahitya that a slice of a world (jagat, and sansār) in literature of a specific time and place could be understood by the vishva mānav. By contextualizing Tagore’s lecture-cum-essay “Visva Sahitya”⁶ in its immediate sociohistorical milieu, by putting it in conversation with his other essays on literary criticism, and by doing a close reading of the text, this chapter then offers to readers Tagore’s purpose of world literature, and his methodology for doing world literature in a multilingual world, where the act of translation and comparison is centered on the kinship of vishva mānav and world-making the vishva in sahitya.

Vishva Sahitya

Apart from his vocation as a creative writer, Tagore wrote several political essays in the last decade of the nineteenth century.⁷ In 1880, he wrote his first political pamphlet, which he later disowned.⁸ In 1898, he also addressed the Bengal Provincial Conference, where he spoke against the Sedition Bill. From 1893 to the first decade of the twentieth century, Tagore had written approximately thirty-five major political essays that were collected in books with titles such as Ātmāshakti (Self-empowerment), Swadesh (Our Country), Bharatvarsha (India), and Raja Praja (Rulers and Subjects).⁹ He had also given a lecture in 1895 at the annual meeting of the Bengal Academy of Literature, titled “Bengali National Literature,”¹⁰ and in his 1904 essay “Swadeshi Samaj”¹¹ he had asked people to set up parallel governments on their own in villages instead of begging Britishers for freedom. Tagore’s political and social essays, his position as a peerless creative author, and his family’s cultural influence in Bengal made him a fitting advocate to speak for the NCE’s aims. Before Tagore lectured for the NCE, he had also engaged in the political world through his writings. Further, in 1901, Tagore had also started working to establish his university, Visva Bharati, at Shantiniketan. He later founded this university in 1921, using his Nobel Prize money.

As the director of the Bengali Studies of the NCE, and an important member of the Brahmo Samaj with a keen interest in education and an array of political and creative writings behind him, Tagore must have seemed the perfect choice to give lectures on comparative literature, literary criticism, and education in British India. For Tagore, lecturing at NCE while he was actively working to establish his own university presented a perfect opportunity to reiterate his educational ideals and comment on the purpose of literary studies in a world that was rife with comparisons between native and British education.

Suitably, at the inauguration of the NCE in February 1907, Tagore introduced the idea of vishva sahitya or world literature to his audience. Though vishva can be translated as “universe” or “universal,” and some scholars and translators¹² have used these terms in the past while translating Tagore’s vishva sahitya essay from Bengali into English, the most common practice is to interpret vishva sahitya as world literature. In recent years, the original title of Tagore’s essay has often been left untranslated in the body and title of the English versions of the essay, as well as in scholarship on vishva sahitya. This perhaps says something about the contestations one has to make when speaking of world literature in English. To return to Tagore’s 1907 lecture, as if to tease those who had invited him to speak on comparative literature, Tagore chooses to translate the English phrase “comparative literature” as world literature by declaring: “You have called the topic I have been entrusted to discuss as ‘Comparative Literature’ in English. In Bangla I shall call it Visva Sahitya (world literature).”¹³ Tagore’s decision to use the Bengali nomenclature vishva sahitya for comparative literature—which translates as world literature in most Indian languages, including English—is significant.

Tagore’s twofold desire to rename and re-translate comparative literature as vishva sahitya reflects a change in his own political and spiritual positions. In addition, the translation of comparative literature as world literature also acts as an indicator of what Tagore did to Gitanjali while self-translating it, which I address in detail in the next chapter. Most importantly, however, the translation of comparative literature as vishva sahitya in Bengali, first, suggests Tagore’s conscious distancing from the word “tulnā”—a word that is prevalent in many Indian languages for the word “comparison”—when it came to doing literary studies in British India, where the fervor of nationalism was fomenting. Second, the renaming and re-translating of comparative literature as world literature highlights translation in vishva sahitya as dependent on the kinship of the vishva mānav, and world-m...