Article Presentation

1. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN INDIA: AN OVERVIEW OF ITS
HISTORY
AN ARTICLE BY SUBHA C. DASGUPTA, JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY
MA SEMESTER 4
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, MKBU
PRESENTATION BY ANJALI TRIVEDI
KHUSHBU LAKHUPOTA
Email id: anjali.trivedi305@gmail.com
khushbu22jan93@gmail.com
TASK ASSIGNED BY PROF. DR. DILIP SIR BARAD

2. ABSTRACT
● An overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India.
● Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on World Literature and with a modern
poet translator as it’s founder.
● While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early
years, there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonizing process
and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity.
● Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence.
● Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted
from influence and analogy studies to cross cultural literary relations, to
focus on reception and transformation.
● The focus is on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary
relations.

3. KEY ARGUMENTS
● In last few years Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives,
engaging with different areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those
related to marginalised spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas
of non-hierarchical literary relations.
● A question of linking social and historical structures with aesthetics in order to
reveal the dialectic between them.
● Materiality of comparison, multi-dimensional reality of questions related to self
and the other and to arrive at networks of relationships on various levels.

4. ANALYSIS
● The idea of World literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth
century when in Bengal, for instance, translation activities began to be taken
up on a large scale and poets talked of establishing relations with literatures
of the world to promote, as the eminent poet-translator Satyendranath Dutta
in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy” (Dutta 124)
● Tagore used the word “Visva sahitya” and stated that the word was generally
termed “comparative literature”.

5. KEY POINTS IN ANALYSIS
● The beginnings
● Indian literature as Comparative Literature
● Centres of Comparative Literature Studies
● Reconfiguration of Areas of Comparison
● Research directions
● Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies
● Non-hierarchical connectivity

6. ● The comparitists work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and
that the task of the construction of literary histories, in terms of literary
relations among neighbouring regions and of larger wholes one of the primary
tasks of Comparative Literature today has yet perhaps yet to begin.
● In all its endeavours, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects
of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean
force.