Comparative Literature: Ways to Decolonise the Discipline

Comparative Literature was introduced in 19^th Century Europe as a discipline of literary study crossing the monolingual nature of national literature. Prior to the Second World War, the French influence dominated the discipline and the major thrust was on factual contacts, the influence of notable writers abroad. After the Second World War a new impetus to the discipline was given by the American school which promoted parallel study of various literatures. This model received a major blow with the emergence in the 1960s with the dominance of critical theories that supplanted literature with theories. Today we can sense that even after the so-called ‘decolonisation’ of countries from their erstwhile rulers, colonisation of mind and academic disciplines still operates. Such is the status of Comparative Literature. Eurocentric hegemony has enveloped the discipline so much so that its transnational image and humanised agenda have been challenged. We are so much caught up within the razzmatazz and hullabaloo of Euro-American developments that we tend to forget that it has a separate existence outside also. It is true that Comparative Literature was an offshoot of European project. It got a major boost from comparative anatomy or comparative zoology. It also got a major fillip from the organic theory of nature proposed by the Romantic poets who saw a kinship existing between the outer nature and inner nature. The present task of a comparatist is to harbour a more inclusive approach.

       Among the various problems thwarting the fullest development of Comparative Literature the chief one is monolingualism or, to put it more specifically, the dominance of English language. In spite of being the 'lingua franca’ of the world we need to remember that it has become a hegemonic imposition upon the lives of people. Ngugi Wa Thiang Wo in his Decolonising the Mind observes how in Kenya colonial masters banned the use of Gikuyu in schools and students were punished if caught speaking Gikuyu. This was a part of cultural genocide through a calculated approach:

   The domination of peoples’ language by the language of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of mental universe of the colonised (2003:16).

 We are reminded of R. Parthasarathy’s opinion in The Rough Passage,

        ‘That language is a tree

         Loses colour under another sky.’ (1977:17)

Truly Parthasarathy has presented the symbiotic relationship between a culture and a language. A language is the expression of a cultural ethos of a community. Amiri Baraka once made a remark, ‘‘European language carries the bias of its inventors and users. You must be anti-black, speaking in their language, except by violent effort.”(1972:60) In order to whittle away at hegemony of English language special care need to be taken to read non-English texts in the original language. Herein the task of a comparatist becomes more important because of his command over many languages.

           Globalisation has also wiped out the heterogeneity from our life and attitude. It is a hegemonic imposition of the same system that is prevalent everywhere. Wide spread of Internet, advanced telecommunication system, upgraded transportation, ease of trade have augmented the process making the world a ‘global village’. However, the craze for globalisation is a double-edged sword. In the name of globalisation western cultural values are circulated and exalted all over the world. Minority culture is being engulfed. Spivak in her book Death of a Discipline protested against the global perspective. She prefers the word ‘planetary’ to ‘global’ as the former refers to the specis of alterity. She writes in the concluding paragraph:

      The “planet” is, here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous—an experience of the impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question “How many are we?” when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction—the toughest task in the diaspora (2003: 102).

Through promoting and valorising Comparative Literature we can trace the occluded cultural practices.  

        Another drawback for Comparative Literature is the dominance of national literature. The genesis of the discipline of Comparative Literature can be traced in a context that put a kibosh on nationalist propaganda. The ACLA report of 1993 demanded a transnational studies of ideology and discourse that would run counter to the erstwhile model of study according to author, nation. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines we find how our cartographic identities give birth to fissiparous selves. Thamma was a victim of primordial nationalism who while travelling to Bangladesh, was nonplussed about not finding a literal border. Meenakshi Mukherjee in her essay ‘Anxiety of Indianness’ articulated the dilemma of Indian novelists who in order to steer clear of the ‘sin’ of writing in the coloniser’s language generally succumb to such grand narratives as nation, language et al in their writings. Even the syllabus of most of the colleges and universities in India is at fault. Certain texts have got canonical status and are included in the syllabus of most academic disciplines which function as ideological apparatuses that safeguard and promote the values of nation. Makarand Paranjape’s Another Canon tries to excavate certain texts that have been occluded by the grand narratives of nation. Certain texts such as Raja Rao’s Comrade Kirillov are seldom known while his Kanthapura has eked out a prestigious position for having dealt with the national image of India. So our task should be akin to that of a Neo-Historicist to open up, in Louis Montrose’s words, ‘historicity of texts and textuality of history.’ For example, during anti-colonial movement classical Sanskrit literature was revived to posit the cultural ethos of India. However, Tamil, the rival classical literature, was pushed to the margin. This alternate traditions need to be excavated.

           Since the 1960s we have seen an influx of critical theories that have dominated every discipline. Comparative Literature is no exception. However, the methods and approaches have always been chalked out by the western scholars. Western pundits chalk out the way of literary practices of non-western countries. For example, the west has always treated the non-west as a reservoir of artistic achievements. Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality(vol1) distinguishes between the occidental and oriental version of sexuality as ‘scientia sexualis’ and ‘ars erotica’ respectively while it need to be taken into cognizance that oriental discourse on sexuality also admits of the status of ‘scientia sexualis’. This presupposition of identities should be shaken off by the method of ‘decolonised’ Comparative Literature. Similarly, we should not always judge a postcolonial text with western theories. That would be a straitjacketed approach. For example, we cannot consider Obi Okonkwo as a tragic hero in No Longer at Ease with the Aristotelian model disregarding Igbo ontology. Likewise, Willy Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman is not a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense yet he is a tragic hero par excellence considering the context in which the play is situated (for example, Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression of 1929). So it is pertinent to formulate alternative aesthetic and critical tradition to counter the inundation of western critical theories.

          The empowerment of Translation Studies can play a vital role in decolonising the Euro-Us hegemony of Comparative Literature. ‘To translate’ means ‘to carry across’. We carry across not only language but also culture. Translation Studies provides a sort of solid foundation to Comparative Literature. It has in fact valorised the discipline. However, it also needs to be seen that Translation Studies has also been dominated by Eurocentric prejudices. Today in a post-colonial world we are yet to imbibe a postcolonial mentality. In a postcolonial country translations are being done from the regional languages into, mostly, English. We need to expand the frontiers of translation. The ‘cannibalistic’ nature of English which consumes other languages needs to be challenged. For example, in India the emergence of Dalit autobiographies has been a remarkable phenomenon that has come as a bomb-shell upon the settled citadel of caste-based hierarchy. These Dalit autobiographies are written in multiple Indian languages like Tamil, Hindi, Bengali etc. But there is a seldom attempt to translate one Tamil text into Bengali or vice versa. However, there has been an influx of translations into English with some added subtitles (for example ‘Joothan: a Dalit’s Life) that simultaneously reveals the longing for reward and recognition from the West and fetishisation of Indian products in the West. If practised in this way, Translation Studies will get suffocated and become a one-way traffic. So to decolonise Translation Studies is essential for decolonising Comparative Literature. Rizio Yohannan Raj in his article Beyond ‘Other Words’ puts much emphasis on Translatology to revitalize Comparative Literature:

              Yet, most contemporary Indian writers whose names are known

around the world are writers of English. This surely has as much to

do with the politics of literary transmission and reception as it does

with the intrinsic quality of their work. This imbalance in Indian

literature can only be changed from within, by translators who can

find an English that matches, step for step, the linguistic charge and

syntactical challenges of the great works of other Indian languages.

Towards that end and many such, Translatology should awake and

arise. (2012:90)

 Comparative Literature is still limited by its insistence on the primacy and ‘foregrounding’ of literature. It goes without saying that in order to have a separate existence and autonomy, Comparative Literature prioritises literature. However, for being relevant in a changing world, the discipline demands transcendence beyond literature into other discourses. Spivak in her book Death of a Discipline talks about various ways in which Comparative Literature as a traditional discipline is dead and how a new Comparative Literature can emerge with its alliance with Area Studies, with comparatists learning new languages outside European ones etc. Yet she hardly goes beyond ‘literature’ in her discussion. It is high time that Comparative Literature did expand its frontiers. That is why inclusion of Performance Studies and Film Studies can make the discipline ‘open up’. We should study performance as a text, as a kind of signifying system that can dismantle the hegemony of literature. As a method of study, Comparative Literature should take under it’s purvey different behavioural patterns in everyday life.

Deconstruction of Patriarchal Myth in Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night

The Thousand Faces of Night is a scathing criticism of the way the women are compelled to perform the subordinated roles as decreed by the patriarchy. Through the help of various myths all of which descended from patriarchal tradition the male world try to subjugate the women and instil into them a false consciousness. Devi, the protagonist of the novel, sees through the falsity of mythical stories and the so-called grand-narratives of patriarchy. Like Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, the various accounts of trials and survivals given by the women characters in the novel ranging from the earlier narration by the grandmother to the misery of Mayamma open up a discursive space for women to initiate a feminine discourse.

  From the beginning of the novel we see how Devi is denied the choice of her own and is subjected to go through the demands of man-made order. Devi ends her desire for Dan, a person with whom she forged bonds of friendship while studying in America as it does fit in with her tradition. She comes back to India to find herself hedged in with the traditional roles assigned for the women. Her mother arranges a swayamvara for her that shows how marriage is the posited as the raison d'être in a traditional Indian family.  We are reminded of Judith Butler’s notion of gender construction of the female in terms of performative acts which inscribe neutral body with social constructions.

According to traditional view, Gandhari is an exemplum of a sacrificing wife who, seeing the plight of her husband, blindfolded herself. However, for Devi’s grandmother Gandhari’s act is not an act of sacrifice but an act of protest. Gandhari married her husband without having seen him and after marriage found him to be blind. She tied up her eyes out of intense anger. Equally interesting is the myth of Amba, ‘the princess who shed her womanhood through her dreams of revenge and become a man’ (35). The grandmother tells about the myth of Amba in connection with the misery of Uma who could not channelize her ill treatment into an act of protest. This filled Devi with great courage as she says:

 Close to death, she made me a gift of the ultimate fantasy: a woman avenger who could earn manhood through her penance. (40)

  That motherhood is not simply about giving birth to and feeding the child but also about performing rigorous practices continually is shown by the story of Ganga. While walking alone near the Ganga, king Shantanu came across a beautiful damsel and fell in love with her. She reciprocated his proposal with the condition that he would not stop her from doing whatever she wanted. The king agreed only to find her throwing her new born babies into the waters of the Ganga year after year. When Shantanu, unable to tolerate this, urged Ganga to stop when she was about to throw her eighth child into the water, she said, ‘Then take him and be father and mother to him. I shall not free him from life (88).’She did all this to protect her sons from a curse. Through this myth the grandmother teaches Devi that ‘to be a mother at all, you have to earn the title, just as you have to renew your wifely vows every day (89).’

Parvatiamma, the mother of Mahesh, stands as an ardent feminist who does not buckle under the onslaughts of patriarchy but rejects them to uphold a space of enunciation. Devi learns about her from the maid-servant Mayamma. Parvati, as Mayamma tells Devi, relinquished her motherhood and embraced spirituality as means of way-out. According to the traditional myth Parvati is the helpmate of Shiva and she helped Shiva attain the status of yogi by taking charge of the household activities. ‘But’, observes Sarita Prabhakar, ‘in the novel Parvati turns the story upside down as she gives up the life of a householder (57).’

  That the novel is not only about the narration of variegated patriarchal myths but also about survivals from those myths through resilience is shown clearly towards the end of the novel. We find the women in The Thousand Faces of Night tearing apart the network of myths to eke out a space for themselves. Mayamma no longer faces the threat of a drunken husband or a tyrannical mother-in-law. Devi escapes her husband’s indifference and her own nonchalance into her mother’s world of music. Sita also asserts herself by renewing her contact with the world of music that offers her a creative individuality. The music of the veena signals the end of chaos in the mind and a beginning of a life where women will have a room of their own.

  Spivak in her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ talks about the ventriloquisation of women’s voices by the British colonizers and the Indian leaders. According to Spivak, this act of ventriloquisation suppresses the real voices of women which lie hidden. Hariharan in her novel The Thousand Faces of Night tries to retrieve the lost voices of women by showing how they stand opposite to the traditional modes of representation and the novel becomes a gynocentric version of the Mahabharata. Through reworking of old myths, reshaping personal dilemmas and offering new vistas for women Hariharan joins the bandwagon of modern Indian women novelists in English. Thus Jon Mee aptly remarks:

In many respects it also marks a coming-of-age of a certain kind of women’s fiction in English in India, one that is written undisguisedly in ‘a woman’s voice’, a condition - of-woman novel. (228)

Diasporic Elements in Naipauls' A House for Mr Biswas

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. (173)

 Such kind of experience is so rife among the writers of the twentieth century, such as Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Kafka. Two World Wars, decolonisation, cold war have made this century a century of exile. Home has become an ever-elusive signified for this estranged generation. The encyclopaedic the experience, the intense the concept of home has become. This experience is more enriched by the advent of postcolonial thinkers who use their memory of dispersion to de-territorialize the history of slavery and re-territorialize an identity devoid of the trauma of exploitation and indenture.

   Displacement shapes the life of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, known as V. S.Naipaul. He was born in 1932 in the British colony of Trinidad, displaced from Indian indentured labourers brought to work the island’s sugar plantations following the abolition of slavery. Naipaul was an alien in his homeland as his Hindu roots thwarted a total assimilation with the multiracial Trinidadian society. In an antique land away from home his forefathers attempted to maintain their identity. However, they failed completely to do so because the project of colonial hegemony has annihilated the roots and instilled into them a fragmented identity. Naipaul depicts this culture in his The Middle Passage thus:

                 A peasant-minded, money-minded community, spiritually cut off from its roots, its religion reduced to rites without philosophy set in a materialistic colonial history: a combination of historical accidents and national temperament has turned the Trinidad into a complete colonial, even more philistine than the white.(MP 89)

  This aversion to the Trinidadian society prompted him to depart for London though his experience in London was no better either. His aspiring dream to start his publishing career ended in a fiasco. His maladjustment in London was a corollary of his maladjustment in Trinidad. In his autobiographical work Letters Between a Father and Son we come across numerous episodes of his sense of unhomely in London.

  This sense of placelessness shapes the framework of Naipaulean fictions creating in his protagonists a sense of non-belongingness. Mr Biswas in A House for Mr Biswas, Indar in A Bend in the River, Santosh in In a Free State   and Willie in Half a Life search for an identity in a fluid universe. A House for Mr Biswas is an attempt to retrace the roots in a derelict land and create a universe out of chaotic world. ‘Biswas’s perpetual quest for a house as home, conceptualizes the challenges and anxieties experienced by the diaspora. A house of his own, in this sense, constitutes for him a sense of belonging. This disturbing sense of exile, alienation and uprootedness are the malaise originally experienced by exiles like Naipaul and his father. In an extended sense, the feeling presages the many journeys undertaken by Naipaul himself and his arrivals at no fixed destinations.’(Ormerod)

 Mr Biswas’s quest of having his own house starts off with the death of his father which results in a dispossession of his ancestral house. As the security of the house is dispossessed, Mr Biswas is forced to live with strangers sans maternal guidance. The effacement of ancestral lineage haunts Mr Biswas when he goes to school and finds that the world has carried no witness to his birth. When Lal insults him by saying ‘you people don’t even know how to born’ he presents before us the legacy of non- belongingness inherited from his indentured father. Kavita Nandan writes,” Biswas's story, although unique and fictional, represents the post-indenture diasporic subject's efforts to protect himself against destitution. This predicament is reinforced by the fact that he has to struggle against a history of homelessness which was a legacy of his parents.”

 His humiliating experiences as a neophyte at Pundit Jairam’s house, depressing encounter at his sister’s house are a mere prologue to his further deprivation at the Tulsi household. His momentary infatuation for Shama forces him to marry her by virtue of which he finds himself ensnared within the colonial structure of Hanuman House; a bastion of totalitarianism which bears strong resemblances with the patriarchal world of Ayemenem House in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things .The power structure of Hanuman House comprising Mrs Tulsi; the matriarch, her right –hand man Seth and Govind the policeman encroaches upon the individuality of Mr Biswas. They always remind him of his non-entity. Unable to sustain the soul crushing system, he bursts into such sporadic rebellious acts as dumping his food on Owad, calling Mrs Tulsi as the ‘old she fox’ etc.

It has been pointed out by critics that Naipaul explores landscapes in order to provide characters with a real home, a true place of belonging. Against the slippery and fluid universe his nomadic characters try to seize upon something to give permanence – Biswas’s desire for a house, Mr Stone’s scheme for the aged, Ganesh’s desire for the goals of education and religion. Through the likes of Biswas, Naipaul tries to resurrect the roots that have been erased in the Caribbean culture channelizing the feelings of exile and loss into an enchanted vision. Bruce king, thus, in West Indian Literature rightly remarks that A House for Mr Biswas “has a reputation as a New World epic celebrating the struggles of an immigrant towards acculturisation and success.”

Thematic Analysis of Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Salman Rushdie in his essay Imaginary Homelands talks about the homogenizing tendencies of the narratives of nation and pitches the notion of imaginary homeland against the all-encompassing grand narratives of a unified national identity. He categorically writes that India, despite those panoptic nationalist views, was ultimately came into existence by the power of imagination. This anti-essentialist view of place overcoming the barriers of state- sponsored demarcating lines pervades Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines which raises serious questions regarding the validity of the concept of nation. Ghosh’s narrative, through various convoluted time-shifts, lays bare the fragility of drawing borderlines to separate one nation from another. It goes without saying that the concept of nation has been instrumental in the emergence of new countries earlier subjugated by colonial rule. It bolstered the vision of a country fragmented and mutilated by the colonial administration. However, the concept of nationalism has also been a pretext for sowing the seeds of separatism, communality and racism in postcolonial countries. Edward Said in his Culture and Imperialism is critical of the notion of post-nationalism which advocates a complete rejection of imperial cultures and spreads the desire of difference. According to Said, this notion is circumscribed by the reiteration of the colonial discourse.

           Ghosh in his The Shadow Lines has documented the man- made barriers and prejudices which have given birth to fissiparous identities. The title is evocative of the shadowy qualities of barriers. However, there are instances galore in the text that authenticates the fact that cultural ethos cannot be made divisive in spite of the drawing of these arbitrary lines. Though the novel presents sporadic references of partition in different parts of the narrative, Ghosh’s aim is not to chart the cataclysmic horror that followed partition immediately. His concern is much deeper as he confronts such questions as what constitutes freedom and how dominant nationalist discourse constructs borderlines for political interests. He calls into question the basic rubric of modern nation states that simultaneously advocate freedom and separatism.

Against the official version of the concept of nationalism, Ghosh offers us his idealistic version of internationalism which aims at bridging the gulf between various nations. In that idealised world borders would be non-existent and nationalism an invalid discourse. The mutual relationship between two families from India and England over three generations is suggestive of this view-point. The friendship between Justice Chandrasekhar Dutta-Chaudhuri and Lionel Tresawsen in Calcutta in 19 ^th century survives even after the independence of India. In post-independent India the cordial relationship is manifest in the form of love affair between Tridib and Mary. Moreover, when Tridib is killed in an accident, the narrator finds a moment of bliss in the arm of May indicating how relationships transgress the territorial limitations of nations.

        The critique of narrow nationalism is seen in Ghosh’s presentation of the grandmother who stands as a staunch supporter of militant nationalism. She harbours the idea that only clear cut tangible boundaries will eliminate tension between communities. She is highly critical of Ila who is enamoured of western world. She is also contemptuous of Tridib who, according to her, plays ducks and drakes with his father’s money and is nothing but a loafer and a wastrel. Thamma also cherishes romantic notions about nationalism. She remembers the incident during her college days when a young reticent young man was arrested and deported to the Cellular Gaol in Andaman Islands. She is fascinated by that incident which shows her desire to be a part of the militant group.

That violence cannot be checked by demarcating lines is seen in the incident of the theft of the hair of the seer Mohammad, called ‘Mui-Mubarak’ in 1963. Though the incident took place in Srinagar it created tumult even in East Pakistan. It created so much an impact that Karachi labelled 31 December as a ‘Black Day.’ The violence in Dhaka in 1964 that took the lives of so many people including Tridib was an offshoot of this communal disharmony. The total episode of the theft of the hair and the resultant violence that engulfed people crossing borderlines indicate that lines are arbitrary and mirage-like. At a single provocation the tremor of violence can cross borders with in a twinkling of an eye.

     Ghosh complicates the issue of merely critiquing nationalism in his presentation of Ila. Hers is a story of failed cosmopolitanism. She denies any importance to the role of imagination to produce her own version of imagined community. Her psyche is shaped by the ‘world -wide string of departure lounges.’ Though she had the wherewithal to travel to many places crossing the borderlines she did not use this opportunity to invent her version of borderlines. That is why Tridib and the narrator criticise her:

       I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more nor less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all. (Ghosh, 21)

Shrieking any association with India she becomes enamoured of western cultures. Her choice of Nick as husband also shows her penchant for imbibing westernized values. In order to give validity to her life she holds on to other people’s invention. She becomes obsessed with the idea of getting recognition in the western world. She is ineffectual to bridge these two systems into an association and ends up prioritising the western enlightenment as a superior system.

     The ugliest feature of nationalism is its communal frenzy. Some fanatical zealots, mistakenly constructing the idea of nation along religious lines, indulge in torturing the people of other religions. Public archives are generally silent in documenting such shameful incidents lest the idea of nationhood promoted by the state should receive a setback. That is why the death of Tridib in communal riot received hardly any mention in the leading newspapers at that time. The narrator experienced a fearful traumatic moment of having his school bus attacked and being pursued by the crafty mob. Ghosh excavates such buried stories annihilated under the Juggernaut of nationalism.

Through various episodes of the novel Ghosh deconstructs the doctrine of nationalism by calling into question the statist version of history upon which the idea of nationalism is ensconced. To avoid the pitfalls of nationalism Bill Ashcroft proposed the concept of ‘Transnation’ that exposes the difference between the inhabitants of the nation and the administrative structures of the nation which is called the state. Transnation, according to Ashcroft, is the process of transgressing outside of the state that starts with the nation. Ghosh in his novel similarly advocates a transnational identity for the individual to overcome the circumscribed boundaries of nation state. Through Tridib’s notions of space and the illogical nature of arbitrary lines Ghosh enjoins upon the architects of states with boundaries to rise above centripetal outlook, fanaticism and parochialism and envision a world sans any border, a world where would be no division between the self and the other. Moreover, Ghosh’s narrative overcomes the ‘anxiety of Indianness’ (as Meenakshi Mukherjee uses the term) by not presenting a simplistic, all-encompassing, homogenized idealization of nationalism as a compensation for writing in English, the language of the coloniser. On the contrary, by delineating the ‘temporality’ and ‘locality’ of culture, as Homi k Bhabha advises, the novelist prioritizes the small narratives over grand narratives to reconstruct a national consciousness not defined by the entrenched representation of statist ideology.