Introduction

In accepting the invitation from Professor Thomas O. Beebee in 2013 to edit a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies (CLS) on comparative South Asian literatures, we were fully aware of the challenges involved. Among other things, we were responding to a region that is comprised of seven nations with a population of over two billion people of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, who speak hundreds of languages that include nearly two dozen major living literary traditions. Calling major Indian languages “dialects,” as some folks in the West do breezily, only betrays ignorance. While for many scholars, “vernacular” (from Latin, vernae, domestic slaves) is still an acceptable term for South Asian languages, others would remind us of its condescending connotation in British colonial history that implicitly obviated the substantive literary trajectory of the subcontinent's regional languages. Both of us, the guest editors, hail from India, which forms a huge part of South Asia, with our respective mother tongue domains of Punjabi and Tamil set apart geopolitically from each other by 1,500 to 2,000 miles in India and Pakistan in the Northwest for Punjabi and Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka in the South for Tamil. Ironically, we were not able to attract serious contributions for CLS focused on either Punjabi or Tamil. Incidentally, these two languages belong to two distinct language groups—Indo-European and Dravidian, respectively—which have little in common other than some shared Sanskritic influences through Hindu scriptures and religious practice.Also, we have both lived in the United States for long years and been situated within the academy in similar but distinctive ways—with a range of intellectual interests in both South Asia and North America. As teacher-scholars of literature, we have both been involved in praxis and advocacy for the inclusion of South Asian and South Asian American writings in US curricula—both from within and outside an organization such as the South Asian Literary Association (SALA). Like other South Asianists, we too have been guilty of using Indian English texts to represent all of India in our courses and academic discourses. So, is our deliberate choice to focus this CLS special issue almost exclusively on bhasha literatures (South Asian literatures in languages other than English) an act of penance? We view it instead as an attempt to bring the much-needed balance, a corrective, to our understandings of South Asia and its diverse cultures and literatures. Imagine all of Europe (or even Western Europe) as one country with a dozen national languages and you barely get a glimpse of the chaos and excitement India represents to its residents (and others) linguistically and culturally on a daily basis. Yes, Indians at home too experience the tensions between English and bhasha literatures in creative, readership, and pedagogical contexts, similar to the ones experienced by self-conscious members of the diaspora in North America and elsewhere. However, such tensions at home have a very different affect and effect because of the richly nuanced and widespread patterns of bilingualism and multilingualism among writers, scholars, and ordinary citizens.As indicated, the linguistic diversity of South Asia is mind-boggling indeed, and yet communication issues among its seven nations (including the three major ones, viz., India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) have never been hampered by that linguistic complexity. If in Bernard Shaw's famous quip, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language,” South Asian peoples at home and abroad are often brought together by the many languages and cuisines they have in common. At the same time, while many essays chosen for inclusion in this special issue analyze literatures in languages such as Urdu and Bengali that cut across national borders in South Asia, almost all our essays are by and large examples of how comparative literature is practiced within the Indian context, including the context of British Colonial India which included what is South Asia today within one political unit until 1947. Thus, in the discussions we offer suggestively in our editorial essay and in greater depth in the eleven essays that follow, our contributors and we speak primarily to the Indian cultural situation and metonymically to the larger South Asian context (Auritro Majumder's cross-border consideration of Bengali literature in West Bengal and Bangladesh is one exception in this volume). And while some of the issues raised in this volume will surely find meaningful parallels in Sri Lanka, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, we have no intention of minimizing the considerable differences that mark each national context within South Asia.Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam—these are just some of the major languages spoken and written in India and all of them have thriving literary cultures that go back a thousand or more years. Each of these eleven literatures has arguably the heft of literary expression and history in any one major European language. The Indian Constitution recognizes 22 scheduled languages and the 2001 Census records 122 major languages and 1,599 other languages. Additionally, oral and literary traditions thrive in almost all South Asian languages in the diasporic communities across the globe—be it Bhojpuri in Mauritius, Hindi in Fiji, Punjabi in Vancouver, British Columbia, or Southall, London, or Tamil in Toronto or Singapore. Yet, within the Western academy and literature departments in particular, there are very few programs that focus on languages and literatures of South Asia. Many students seeking to learn South Asian languages and housed in area studies programs might be more focused on language fluency for purposes of field work or intelligence gathering rather than literary and aesthetic aspects of any South Asian language. In addition, Anglophone Indian literature (Indian English Literature) has had a strong presence in English department curricula in India and across North America and Europe. The emergence of postcolonial studies as a field and its institutionalization across Western academia in the last thirty years, coupled with the flow of graduate students from South Asian nations for language and literary study, has further contributed to South Asian Anglophone writing becoming overrepresented in scholarship and curricula.1Even back in India, English occupies a vexed position. Nearly seventy years after the British left the Indian subcontinent and despite growing chauvinisms of many varieties, the English language remains an important and integral part of Indian life. After experiencing significant setbacks in the 1960s and the 1970s in some parts of India such as Bihar and Gujarat, interest in learning English as the business language has revived significantly as a result of the globalization phenomenon. While some estimates suggest that over 20 percent of India's population are conversant with English at some level, it is reasonable to assume that at least 5 percent of the population (almost seventy million people- that is, double the population of Canada and three times that of Australia) have considerable, even near-native, fluency in English. Even more remarkable is the continued energy and diversity of contemporary Indian writing in English at home and in the diaspora. The success in 1981 of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, often noted for its magical realism, has been repeated many times over by writers as different from Rushdie as one writer can be from another. Consider, for instance, the enthusiastic response in India and elsewhere to Arundhati Roy's lyrical God of Small Things or Vikram Seth's intricately realistic A Suitable Boy. With the expanding circle of South Asian diaspora in many parts of the world, it would be difficult to generalize about the phenomenon of new South Asian writing in any simple, formulaic terms. Apart from the fact that most such works fulfill a certain Western yearning for the exotic and some of them get included in the curriculum to serve multicultural/cross-cultural goals, these writers have very little in common. Some of these writers would be, in Parminder Bhachu's phrasing, “twice-born migrants,” having arrived in the United Kingdom or North America, for example, after their family's sojourns for a generation or two in Africa, Fiji, or the Caribbean.2In considering the apparent pervasiveness of English in India today, many would argue that Thomas Babington Macaulay did succeed in India in his colonial project (laid out in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education”3) of creating “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” As a result of his fiat for Indian education, which he couched in pseudo democratic terms, upper class and caste Indians were systematically educated in English language and literature at the expense of their education in native languages. Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest4 traces the evolution of literary study in the imperial context to emphasize that literary study became one of the ideological state apparatuses by which English imperial control expanded on the subcontinent. We face the consequences of that effective colonial policy to this day. For many contemporary bhasha writers, the glamor and global reach of English language writing as well as the awards and book contracts given to Rushdie, Roy, and Seth, speak to the continued hegemony of English and raise concerns about the persistence of colonial legacies and attitudes. In noting that the dominance of Indian English writing on the global stage is not just because of awards and publishing advances, Mahesh Elkunchwar, an eminent Marathi author, writes: “The reason for this bias [against bhasha writers] is simple. Marathi (or any other Indian language, for that matter) although spoken by eighty million people, is like all Indian languages, an unimportant language in the world order. Bhashas remain unimportant not because literature of any merit is not produced in them. They are unimportant because the people who speak them are unimportant.”5This debate between Indian English writing and bhasha writing has raged since the 1940s and reached its peak in the 1970s and the 1980s.6 Of course, Indian English writing too has not always had a position of privilege on the Indian literary scene. Arguably, and who writing in the had to for until study Indian in English to this of writing as significant and of In the 1960s and like and about there a national cultural in regional literatures in languages, an that its distinctive expression in essay on in this in Indian to and to works in Indian literature of the language in which they were of which are in and in such as and The and in India and The on Indian in English the for Indian and literary to focus on the between the regional and the that can As he their to the of a regional literature, its to its by the this literature have from languages and literatures the of in our literary our have the history of literature in And that might have from English language and too in the essay for this of the in to by the to a national that as its literature is one written in many The debate included concerns about English a language, not an Indian who lived in India and in English such as and with the that English is not an Indian language and with that Indian English writers were out of with Indian For of the English the language of Indian As his in The in India, had a new language, with its and its did not have to in a Western just as he from the for as between bhasha and Indian English writers at home has been in the three by the dominance of South Asian writers in the diaspora and more in the In among the of that the of for both India and Pakistan, Salman Rushdie a special issue of which the of Indian by Rushdie and In the Rushdie a very “The writing in this by Indian writers in English is to be a and more important of work than most of what has been produced in the languages of India and this still literature represents the most India has yet to the world of Many literary writers and bhasha writers were by this by a writer who little in any Indian language. They in Rushdie's an of the colonial by Macaulay in the In Macaulay had to the learning at the of the have never one among them who that a of a European the native literature of India and However, Rushdie in very to find and the bhasha literary works in and but such were not to find and he not to new In in an with Rushdie it that in he in fact other Indian and writers to do to this serious of and a to that there are no writers in other languages. aware that it is a that will raise and that people will with them do is that this arrived at not and not for some to languages but on the of the writing that it would only that with the them together And both in our and exclusively on Indian English writing would a of South Asia and South there is an to more such as of the and over the years by such as Indian Literature of South Asian South Asian and very little of the very in bhasha writing the of in English to this the same time, with the of globalization and as well as the of from to the language debate has to a different in the last or With English as the language of global and cultural both Indian English and bhasha writing have to over national in the face of As South Asian nations have globalization in and in their they have in their to national linguistic and religious In India, for example, some and have the to their of and to and with and Thus, to Western and forms to in many forms and even as the population that English language fluency as a to and global to at the same writers in India and Pakistan including and have their to the of globalization in their has a that has significant as well as in English but not of an for literary only has the South Asian class of the new and for they have including works by and India and Pakistan have a of literary in their that large to most parts of the world, the has many that the and of in a a of the and an in a or an or or in the of an such as a to raise a in India, this has a long history of that raise the of and and and While would us to find parallels between the history of and in North America and in South Asia, the between the in India and in the United States are The arrived in India not as but as and and the with an for India over by the British the and At the same time, the large population of India (and South today is almost of and who had to to the of the Hindu caste that for as or in this volume for one of caste in contemporary India's literary in the Indian subcontinent has been as by the and of the colonial and postcolonial as by and between and As us, the as a colonial that state control in the of religious to is a of the is that the have more than its with the between the two by and were by such who had his of the in his essay are together not only by the we to a common and by the blood that courses through our but by the of the common we to our Hindu we are one because we are a a and a common In in his to the of the Hindu in be today to be a and but on the there are two nations in the and the In the and had to a for that the by to his for with the that like would experience in a Hindu India, the too the for a in his on Pakistan over has over the cultural that of language and in to Urdu and as in the and of the literary who in the essays by and in this In essay a glimpse the in colonial British India that in many of India outside the domains of Hindi and Urdu languages to and on language and West Pakistan and Pakistan, on and language had to as as the in the emergence of Bangladesh as an The still in to apart in the West Pakistan its of Urdu as the language of Pakistan, population Bengali language and In India, the to linguistic but his to a linguistic state in the to and in the state in the and In the political on how the in on the of Punjabi and Hindi in the and on have the for the challenges of and the region in the and in have had major consequences for the never had the that essays we for this special issue would all of the we had in we our work as in We essays from in South Asia and in North America work focused on South Asian literatures from to the We essays that would with to any national literature and others that would cut across national comparative literature and in we contributors to literary texts in South Asian regional languages, the bhasha literatures, in to one and including literary and of as well as of religious and We contributors to literary Literary in and the between English language and literary South Asian languages and diasporic and We were that we did not an essay a serious of the important work with the of Of the we chosen for inclusion in depth and with the many and challenges of comparative literary work in South Asian languages, often using of view from bhasha as many South Asian languages are with substantive literary traditions all their the writers in these languages a common of and which the writer for example, has in many of his essays and and which he in his and and which as the in at in an almost on the issues of and and by on from the Hindu and and by a of that between an and a Hindu Among other things, the of two in and the of the in the context of contemporary political as the of the of essay many on language and even as it us that the of has and across South Asia and in its diaspora and how the with literary and oral texts in many languages across With of we from to a of linguistic in his in to how the of languages such as Hindi and Urdu never a that it part of a of colonial policy and other Indian languages and of such how and literary of and Hindi through their The essay an of India's cultural despite its linguistic the to a more to comparative literature in South Asia. in essay “The the and the in a very different the and tensions that the between Urdu and Hindi do find a in essay in both is primarily with of and across linguistic traditions. in Bengali, and Urdu, Hindi of as the of like the Bengali For a for a new Indian rather than the Hindu Bengali and Urdu a to the of However, this remains within the of the since the of the is by the of Hindu essays by and are more with and in than with and ideological of literary discourses. on the work of and essay that the in South Asia not as an from but rather as the of and as a of a distinct the as a in colonial India because of its to of view and to the British on two Urdu and of how such as the to colonial this to represent one of the in which bhasha the as a to with the challenges and of the colonial In and the on Hindi literature, in on the of literary and in the and two writers who were part of the and As writers of and and it is to common in their work and them in a While had how on the and Urdu of the in its of to out a for debate and in the in and Salman Rushdie's as a of a or to Rushdie's of in his within an Urdu challenges the of Rushdie that his to the of American writers such as and that Rushdie's of the and the be as For us, Roy's an between Indian English and bhasha writers, both of to find and in traditions. In that we in its of is a to Midnight's two essays in the of this special by and have to do with literary works that reach their through and with the of as writers and issues of and on the challenges of from literature English and between two of suggest that is more because of shared cultural this by on the and English of and In essay of the of literature, which is becoming to South Asian and global primarily through in of the between English language and Indian English and bhasha literatures. a comparative of two writer and the more of a them as of that a and of and its that these Marathi and Bengali language texts an effective to the Anglophone and postcolonial literary and cultural that often focus on the essay with its of postcolonial of an for us a special on the are contemporary South Asian In this we have three each on Odia, and and on the and challenges of any and all bhasha literatures As we South Asian literatures in home and in the considerable in courses on and global literatures. a work of bhasha literature English find a in such The three scholars, and this within the context of the Hindi and in Indian English literature, and contemporary Bengali literature little for between Hindi literature and even as he us of the serious among Indian to with this issue through and that has significantly our of the of in the writings of the As he the between the colonial and in to writers such as and the of in and praxis in to bhasha literatures. that literature in both West Bengal and Bangladesh has been a significant for South Asian and in the of Bengali and aesthetic such as and magical realism, as well as and to the intellectual history of its and in the and writers within and outside India, of language and literary the ideological and on writing and literary the and challenges of and the (or of bhasha literatures, with and in South Asian literatures were some of the issues we had on our as guest of this CLS We had to these issues of comparative South Asian literature the of globalization experienced by the and at home in South Asia and in the growing South Asian diaspora. We remain with the dominance of South Asian Anglophone writers in cultural at home and even more in the As we are by how South Asia to be by Indian English and diasporic texts in our curricula in North America and elsewhere. We this gathering of essays will new on all these issues and is an to the of and South Asian languages the of a state in area to and that are of literary and history by bhasha writers and and to the of to a of South Asian language literatures and a more of We to from all of and and

Art · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Ignorance · Language contact · Languages of Asia · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Population · Sociology · Tamil · Vernacular · Anthropology · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

• Language, Religion and Politics in North India

  Paul R Brass•Language, Religion and Politics…•2005

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• The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India

  Gyanendra Pandey•The Construction of Communalism…•2012

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• Masks of Conquest

  Gauri Viswanathan•Masks of Conquest•2014

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• Imagining Otherwise

  Sangeeta Ray•Comparative Literature Studies•2013

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