'Complayt, Comp. Lit or Complete' Or 'What the *#$% is Comparative Literature and Why are They Saying such Awe(Ful/some) Things About It?

The word 'complayt' is a colloquial Gujarati word which signifies perfection and completeness of the job done or to be done as in 'kaam complayt'.  The word, of course, is borrowed from English. I noticed the pun on 'Comp. Lit' and 'complete' ( in the sense of being finished), in the sly word-play of Jacques Derrida in his lectures delivered at Yale University in 1979-80 published as ' Who or What Is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation' in the Winter and Spring 2008 Issue of Discourse (translated by Eric Prenowitz). Derrida astutely points out the hackneyed and facile binary of' 'life' and 'death' seems to haunt the theoretical discussions on comparative literature. This was well two-and-half decade before Derrida's translator and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak declared Death of the Discipline in 2004 and Susan Bassnett's contention that the emerging discipline of translation studies will eclipse comparative literature. Haun Saussy report on the health of the discipline in America in 2006 declares,"Comparative literature has, in a sense, won its battles. It has never been received in the American university ". Reports of the death or rebirth or renewal of the discipline are rather tedious, as is the agonized navel gazing regarding its own methodology. The skepticism regarding its foundations is as old as the discipline itself. Derrida's critique is aimed at the universalist- imperialist ambitions of comparative literature as manifested in its 'encyclopediac' nature, which he compares with the figure of Prof. Pangloss, an optimistic scholar, in Voltaire's Candide.

The earliest attempts to establish 'Comp.Lit' were often met with dismissive hostility. Rene Wellek cites Lane Cooper of Cornell University who said that Comparative Literature was a “bogus term” that “makes neither sense nor syntax.” “You might as well permit yourself to say ‘comparative potatoes’ or ‘comparative husks.’” Croce in 1903 saw it as a non-subject and the efforts to establish it as a separate discipline were futile. Croce saw it as methodology which was part of the effort to arrive at complete explanation of a literary work in the context of the 'universal literary history'. If something is a methodology, it cannot be a discipline in its own right. The skepticism regarding the discipline has persisted throughout the period of what Rene Wellek called the 'Crisis' of comparative literature. 

Personally, I don't think 'Comparative Literature' is either a distinct discipline or a distinct methodology. It is rather an alternative conception of literature. Instead of the mono-literary studies which see a single literature as something organic, static and autonomous, 'comparative literature'  conceives literature as essentially heterogeneous, dynamic and open ended cultural phenomenon, which can be understood only in the context of a complex network of historical relationships which cut across cultures, languages, places, periods and even media. Though comparative literature may be struggling to find itself as a distinct discipline, this alternative conception of literature has gained wide acceptance in serious literary research, thanks to the explosion of 'Theory' in the later half of the twentieth century. It is is in this sense, that Saussy feels that comparative literature has won its battles. Saussy feels that comparative literature is selfless, meaing that it has no unique or distinct identity as well as in the sense of its generosity. It doesn't, for instance, demand a small tax from English literature departments, every time they quote Spitzer, Auererbach, Wellek, Spivak or de Man. This discipline, Saussy thinks, is an 'anonymous universal doner' to mono-literary studies.

In the Indian context, scholars like Sisir Kumar Das, Amiya Dev, Chandra Mohan, GN Devy , Sujit Mukherjee and Avadhesh Kumar Singh have tireless promoted 'Comp. Lit' as the only true way of studying Indian literature in a multillingual and multi cultural context such as ours. I believe this is the only way you study ANY literature, not just 'Indian Literature', meaningfully in our country. Even when the Birje-Patils and V.Y. Kantaks of the yore wrote about Shakespeare, they were reading Shakespeare as Indians- they couldn't possible read him as native speakers. Consciously or unconsciously, they were already practicing comparative literature. When we 'teach' Jane Austen to the undergrads, we are actually doing comparative literature. How else can the things 'coming out' or 'curtsy' in Jane Austen make any sense to the Indians? Is not teaching of literature in India, an inherently comparative practice?

This year, when we at the Department of English of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda are introducing comparative literature as a core paper at the post graduate level for the first time, you-know- who will be the instructor. Susan Bassnett says that people start in different people but soon find themselves moving towards 'comp.lit' . Though my  journey towards 'comp. lit' as a discipline officially began with my doctoral research in translation studies at the beginning of the new millennium, I was already 'doing it' when I was translating excerpts from Macbeth and Savitri during my undergrad years. I was already 'doing it' when I was reading Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, Sherlock Holmes and Adventures of Tintin as an Indian teenager, from a specific cultural, historical and social location. Though it was unconscious, the location had distinctly shaped my perception and reception of these texts.  It was during my doctoral research into translation, where I translated poetry of a great Gujarati poet of the fifteenth century- Narsinh Mehta into English for my thesis-by-translation that I was 'self-consciously' a comparatistic. I remember Prof. Kimbahune who recommended Dionyz Durisin, a major Slovak comparitist and gifted me a photocopy of Durisin's important book Theory of Literary Comparatistics (1984). Prof Kimbahune believed, and quite rightly so, that the theories of the East European scholars like Durisin are more relevant to the Indian context. Durisin's notions of 'interliterariness' and interliterary processes provide a critical and more useful alternative to the influential positivist French School framework of ' influence studies' based on the 'binary' system.

Bassnett believed that translation studies would eclipse comparative literature. I, however, believe that translation studies should eclipse all literary studies in India . After all, I think, we as Indians are essentially translated people,living in a translated culture, eating translated food, wearing translated clothes, watching translated movies, studying translated texts and using translated ideas. Translation studies as a inter-discipline investigating the complex phenomenon and the processes  of intercultural transfer and transformation would be one of the most important disciplines in the age of globalization where the global and the local are continuously translating each other at a rapid speed. This rapid and mutual transformation would be resulting in a 'world culture' probably which would neither be fully global nor local  and connected by information technology networks and satellite media. Translation studies will be able to tell us how this world culture is shaping up and why.

Consider the case for the word 'complayt' in colloquial Gujarati. It is an example of what JC Catford in his famous A Linguistic Theory of Translation (1965) calls ' transference' , and a form  lexical borrowing which though is used in more or less same semantic field but in an entirely different register and context. These are the processes which make our languages. Languages, after all, are our cultures and are who we are. And then they are also who we can be.

In an era where the mourning for 'death of Indian languages' is quite intense, translation studies will demonstrate how new languages are being born everywhere. These new languages will be our languages of the future. As academicians mourn the death of Marathi or Gujarati or Bengali, newer and newer Marathis and Gujaratis and Bengalis are being born  outside the academia. What is translation, after all, but creation of a new language, a language which is neither the 'source/original' nor is it 'target'. As newer and newer languages are born ' between' languages- translation studies will provide us with tools to study contemporary cultures. I don't think the cultural studies will swallow translation studies, I am afraid, it will be the other way round. Translation studies will have to 'complayt' the work started by cultural studies,literary studies and comparative literature.........

Watch my video on comparative literature as research method

A Pun on the Present

Kolatkar's famous poem ` The Butterfly' in Jejuri is a metaphor for time which vanishes in front of your eyes. The butterfly,

It has no future.
It is pinned down to no past.
It's a pun on the present.
.....
it opens before it closes
and it closes before it o

where is it?

I experienced something similar. Its three years already since I joined the MS University in 2006. Time has vanished like Kolatkar's butterfly.

My life has changed for sure as the entries in the blog will show.

Love Songs for Amogh

Love Songs for Amogh

Sachin Ketkar

I

Torment of thirty five worlds

Falls away

With your smile

A resplendent star

In the evening

Of my hazel eyes

You have fathered me, Amogh

Before I die

II

I haven’t come across yet

Love poems from fathers to their sons

Probably

It is not manly enough

To write a one

But here I am

Looking at the blank paper

In front of me

Remembering

The paper white purity

Of your skin

When the nurse placed you

In my hands for the first time

Your first dark faeces

When I changed your diapers the first time

Injecting cow’s milk

From a needless syringe

Into your mouth

I remember your ceaseless howling

On the second night

When your mother had not started lactating

Do father lactate?

They may

For they are females too

This poem for instance

Oozes out of the nib

Instead of my nipple.

III

I absolutely had no idea

My elf

That all along

You were hiding

In some obscure corner of my mind

Playing your usual peek a boo

Though I could feel

That you probably reached out

With your palm

When I tried to hear

Your somersaults

And flying kicks

Inside your mom

I remember

How you wetted

My umpteenth pajama

When I used to rock you on my laps

Sitting cross legged

(Yes, you could fit into the frame then)

During midnight hours

I also remember trying to put you asleep

On my shoulders

When you were bent on staying awake

With your mischief

Yes, fathering a father

Can be a tough job

But you did it pretty well.

IV

I don’t know exactly why

We decided to name you `Amogh’

Your name means the infallible one

An unfailing weapon

But I know now

That I aimed my arrow

At my aging agony

It hasn’t really missed its mark.

V

I have hardly anything on me

To pass on to you

With joy

The books I read

Are as dark as the ones I write

My genetic records

Are not commendable either

They haven’t isolated

The Asthma gene yet

Probably

It has latched itself on to you

Neither do I think that they can ever identify

The gene for poetry

Which is probably as bad

Or even worse

For it means

To be condemned forever

To live alone

Like a man with an extra pair

Of testicles

Hiding his shame

In the shadows of the world

VI

In these hands

I have held the ovaries

Of my aged mother

Floating in a flask

Where seeds of suffering were first sown

I have seen my wife

Writhing and bleeding in her labors

I have seen eyeballs

Of my friends father

Who was quite fond of me

Extracted and bottled

For posterity

I have been overrun

By asthma

In the Oxford Botanical Gardens

Where I thoughtlessly went

And spent rest of the evening

Floating in warm water of the bath tub

As if in amniotic fluid

Thousands of kilometers away from home

I have sat up wheezing

Any number of nights

From past two and half decades

Clutching the stubborn old darkness

Under my belly

For support

I have seen family friends

Swindle my father of his hard earned money

I have cremated dozens of old skulls

And heard them crack in their pyres

I have seen madness of love

In the woman’s eyes

I know the feeling of oneness

When I make love to her

But it is so different

From the feeling of love I have

When you sleep in my arms

Dreaming of innocence

I kiss your small white shoulders

Feel the fragrance of your fingers

Playing with my ear lobes

Agreed

I haven’t seen much of life

But I haven’t been entirely ignorant of death

But to catch a glimpse of love

And to be touched

By the beauty of the whole world

Is sufficient

To make a prematurely graying man

Without youth or childhood

Smile

VII

Amogh, for you

I have attempted the impossible

-writing a poem on happiness

But who cares if I fail

As long as your paradisal beauty

Lights up

The fading lamps of my eyes

24 Oct 2007

11 15 pm