Assignment - 3

Department of English,M. K. Bhavnagar University     

Name :-  Niyati Vyas

Roll No :- 16

Department :-M. A.English department

Semester :-  4

Paper Name :- Comparative Literature And Translation Studies

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC - Why Comparative Indian Literature - Sisir kumar Das

WHY COMPARATIVE INDIAN LITERATURE - SISIRKUMAR DAS

Sisir Kumar Das (1936–2003) was a poet, playwright, translator, comparatist and a prolific scholar of Indian literature. He is considered by many as the "doyen of Indian literary historiographers". Almost singlehandedly Das built an integrated history of Indian literatures composed in many languages, a task that had seemed to many important scholars of Indian literatures to be “a historian’s despair”.His three volume (among proposed ten volumes) A History of Indian Literature (Western Impact: Indian Response 1800–1910; Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy 1911–1956; From Courtly to Popular 500–1399) is credited for having devised hitherto absent methods necessary for situating diverse Indian literary cultures in history. Apart from this, another monumental work in Das’ scholarly oeuvre is the multi-volume English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, edited by him.

At the beginning of the century, some of the scholars tried upon the idea of Indian Literature emphasizing the unity of themes and forms and attitudes between the different kinds of literature produced in different Indian languages during the last three thousand years. It discovers the essential threads of unity in two ways.  

India is a Multilingual and Multiriligious country. “Coming back to the nature of Comparative Literature as taught in India, the epigraph by Sisir Kumar Das states the pressing concern of relationships that exist between Indian literature. It is also the comparatist’s need to move away from narrow geographical confines and move towards how literature across the subcontinent are to be understood in their totality.”(Das:96–97).

“For a country like India which has a history of literary traditions oscillating between script and orature, new methods of teaching and reading were to be envisioned. While dealing with the formal elements that go into the making of any text in India—which shares a similarity with African situations in terms of oral, written and indigenous sources” (Thiongʼo 1993)

recognizable proof of these techniques as shapes which help in the perusing of writing would apply. While talking about written works in the plural, the succeeding inquiries point towards the course in which these writings will quite often occupy an international area, in any case named a country, which is separated by limits, social, strict and etymological. While perusing any text, the worth stacked term 'public', 'worldwide' and 'native' set up any understudy chasing after writing.

"Developments, nonexclusive contrasts might happen, yet distinguishing these distinctions and perusing them as forms, rather than straight lines is what Comparative Literature decides to draw in with.While scrutinizing the possibility of an 'Indian writing' opposite 'Indian written works', he features the thoughts one joins to the word 'Indian' which could in itself be a pluralistic standpoint of life, wherein the idea of Indian writing as intrinsically near might be thought of. as per Das, the need of advancing a system when two unmistakable dialects/societies experienced was unavoidable. Das states in this regard:Arabic, Japanese with Chinese and Indians with the written works of Europe. This large number of contacts have brought about specific changes, on occasion minor, and at time very significant and unavoidable, in the artistic exercises of individuals included, and have required an augmentation of basic perspective‖" (S. K. Das 18).

“Das states how Warren Hastings, the first governor‐general of India, in his introduction of Charles Wilkin's translation of Gita (1785), advocated for a comparative study of the Gita and great European literature. I should not fear‘ he wrote, to place, in opposition to the best French version of the most admired passages of Iliad or Odyssey, or the 1st and 6th books of our own Milton, highly as I venerate the latter, the English translation of the Mahabharata” (S. K. Das 22). “Translation brought world-renown to a number of regional writers. In ―The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin argues that translation does not conceal the original, but allows it to shine through, for translation effectively ensures the survival of a text.” (Bassnett 180).

Das ascertains how Indian scholars in the ancient period did not endeavour to explore such connections between the two languages. Das has a clear insight into this phenomenon that may be owing to myopic tendencies and the lack of a framework to place literatures from two linguistic roots. Das forgets to mention that were no appropriate frameworks to study identity politics that went beyond the frontiers of language in a country strongly informed by caste hierarchies, the subjugation of women and the suppression of the LGBT.  And even when literature shifted from nation bases to identity bases it happened outside the discipline of comparative literature.