This book redefines modern Indian literature from a cosmopolitan comparative perspective inclusive of literature in English from India and the diaspora, in native languages, and works by non-Indians. Its aesthetic approach of modern classics as well as popular, regional or minority texts treats Indianness as a world model in construction.
This book redefines modern Indian literature from a cosmopolitan comparative perspective inclusive of literature in English from India and the diaspora, in native languages, and works by non-Indians. It shows how, since the mid-19th century, Indian literary modernity pursued the conjunction of the sensuous and ethical/spiritual that characterized its three traditions (Sanskritik, Persian, and folk culture) while the encounter, both receptive and oppositional, with “the West” vastly expanded the Indian literary sphere. Aesthetics and ethics are not antithetical in the Indian cultural space, but the quest for an exclusive Indian identity versus universalist approaches offsets concerns for social justice as well as enjoyable embodied communication. The literary constellation, in many languages, now formed in and around India can be better apprehended as a virtual Cosmopolis, a commonwealth of elaborate emotions. The versatile figure of Hanuman metaphorically flies across this Ocean of Stories to make us discover new worlds of experience.
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction:
Indialab and the Wild Kromosome
Part 1 Sites of Literary Thought: Theorizing with India
Introduction:
Complexity as Cliché and as Field Extension
1 Indian Literature as a Comparative Exercise
2 World Literature: Home and/or the World?
3 Postcoloniality: Beyond and Besides
4 Rasa, Dhvani, Raga, Reading
Part 2 Versatile (Mis)understandings
Introduction:
Marabar Caves Forevera Mystique of Unknowing?
5 Firangi Visions
6 Divided Togetherness: Maitreyi and Mircea
7 Elusive, Liminal and Imagined Indiannesses
Part 3 Transmission, Transformation, Transgression
Introduction:
Indian Untranslatables and Transmission
8 Transnation, Translation, Heteroglossia
9 Transgender and Transgenre
10 Form and Metamorphoses in Poetry
Part 4 Fictional and Argumentative Aesthetics
Introduction:
Aesthetic Dimensions in Practice
11 Aesthetics of Disorder and Disaster
12 Aesthetics of Blood and Flesh
13 Participation and Embodiment in Arundhati Roys Non-Fiction
Part 5 Benefiting from Loss
Introduction:
Days of Future Past and Past Futures
14 Gods and Ghosts in Our Backyard
15 History into Fiction or Vice Versa
16 Comparative Exclusions
17 Unfulfilled Femininities
Postscript:
Vagrant Non-Endings: A Conversation with Dr. Gautam Chakrabarti
Work Cited
Index
Didier Coste is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne. He has taught in Belgium, Australia, France, Spain, the United States, Canada, and Tunisia and was twice a fellow of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His book Narrative as Communication (1989) has become a Narrative Theory classic. The collection Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (Routledge 2022) co-edited with Christina Kkona and Nicoletta Pireddu was awarded the René Wellek Prize 2023 of the ACLA for the best edited collection in Comparative Literature and is prolonged by the Migrating Minds Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism. Costes methodological sum A Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature: Against Origins and Destinations (Routledge 2023) laid the theoretical foundations for the present book. Coste is also a trilingual poet and novelist; Indian Poems, his latest collection, was published by the legendary Writers Workshop of Calcutta in 2019. As a literary translator, he was the recipient of a major French award in 1977.
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