Comparative Literature in Indian Languages

Summary

Abstract: In his article “Comparative Literature in Indian Languages” Anand Balwant Patil discusses developments in humanities scholarship in India. He posits that giving much space to “modern” Anglo-American aesthetics in university curricula is itself a politics of aesthetics. The changed political status quo after 1947 effected a change in the mediation of Anglophone aesthetics in humanities scholarship. For example, India has no school of postcolonial studies to offer a blueprint of the “postcolonial project” to counter balance the influx of Anglophone scholarship. Patil presents a discussion of the status quo of comparative scholarship in India, its theoretical underpinnings, and argues for the development of home-grown comparative scholarship in the humanities.

Introduction

The developments in Indian comparative discourse have taken place according to Lord Macaulay's (1835) predictions in the theory of downward infiltration of education in the Indian caste system. This history of hierarchical comparativism cannot be studied without a reference to the rigid frame of four castes and varna-s: the Brahman priestly caste, Kshatriya warriors, Vaishya tradesmen, and Shudra servants. Within this frame there are thousands of subcastes and tribals with separate cultures, crafts and neo-casteist classifications of literature (mainstream, rural, regional, dalit, and tribal, respectively) in the same language. This is one of the hurdles in making learning more dialogic and dwarfs development of, in Emily Apter's words, “democracy of comparison” (9).