Beyond English

Bhayva Tiwari’s new book Beyond English: World Literature in India offers a fresh look at some of the core concepts that structure the field of world literature, moving “beyond English” to defamiliarize the languages through which Anglophone academia defines the “world” in world literature. We might say simplistically that the “world” of world literary studies is divided in two. One version approaches the world as a space of economic circulation, wherein literary works both register this reality memetically and participate in it as commodified objects of exchange. Famous champions of this approach include Edward Said (1993), Pascale Casanova (1999), Sara Brouillette (2007), and Lisa Lowe (2014). The other common approach treats the “world” as a philosophical or temporal unit that literature helps to sustain through its imaginative engagement with otherness. This is the version promoted by Pheng Cheah (2016) and Debjani Ganguly (2016), among others. Tiwari makes two critical moves that deftly weave together these approaches in a way that moves “beyond” the European epistemology of these ideas of the world.First, Tiwari associates the political and philosophical poles of world literature to Bangla and Hindi words with specific analytic purchase in the Indian literary sphere. Jagat (living world) and sansar (mortal world) trace the temporal and material globe in which the author and text circulate—world literature one, so to speak. Vishwa (conceptual world or universe), on the other hand, is the world imagined by and in the text—world literature two. While each of these concepts engages the “world” as a transnational frame, Tiwari also uses them to facilitate transregional comparison between neighboring Indian languages. This dual focus decenters the nation-state and national language traditions as the comparative object through which a world literary canon is typically established.For Tiwari, in order for each of these worlds to manifest in a given textual object that object must emerge from and recirculate into translation. Translation has long been a premier site of metaphorical engagement with the idea of world literature or global literatures. Even the Latin etymology of the English word “translation” (to bear across) has been imbued with extraordinary symbolic power by Anglophone scholarship. Here, too, moving beyond English opens up the potential to consider the act and implications of translation from a new vantage. Tiwari begins by centering the Hindi concept of anuvad (translation), in which translation is not a spatial movement, but a temporal one: to say again. Accordingly, each chapter is organized around the location of these various concepts of worldliness in the aesthetic strategies of specific Bangla and Hindi writers. This organizational schema allows Tiwari to track how these aesthetic strategies emerge from and merge with the circulation of other literary traditions from around the world.In a refreshing departure from most studies on world literature, Tiwari mostly eschews the study of novels in favor of a variegated collection of poetry, lectures, and essays. The book includes two chapters on Tagore (one as an essayist, the other as a poet), two on the Chhayavād poets, a group of modernist Hindi-medium writers, and a final chapter on South Indian novels. Or, to put it differently, the first three chapters focus on male writers, the last two on women and on gender as a salient category through which both vishwa and jagat are negotiated.Following a short introduction, Beyond English opens with a theoretical chapter that proposes Tagore’s concept of vishwa sahitya (world literature) as a guiding principle. Tiwari illuminates how Tagore used the term as more than a renomination or strictly faithful translation of “world literature.” This is because the Bangla here clarifies a distinction between a conceptual world (vishwa) and a material one (sansar)—the key opposition of her own analytical framework. Tagore’s term further associates the conceptual world of literary study with the idea of vishwa mānav (world-making). Bhavya deftly illustrates how Tagore’s lectures also offer a fresh take on the political stakes of comparative literature—one that replaces the economic and political competition of sansar with a conceptual capaciousness in vishwa.Having established the utility of this perspective on world literature, the second chapter examines its application in the global circulation of Tagore’s Nobel-winning English and Bangla poetry collection, Gitanjali. Tagore imagined Gitanjali as, quite literally, a “song offering” to distant readers, an explicit world-making project. This chapter blends sensitive readings of the poems and their various translations (their internal vishwa) side by side with the book’s experience of jagat, the conditions of its peregrinations in Europe and later in Argentina and other parts of Latin America. The third chapter turns to the concept of the lyric, another rich area of debate in the scholarship on world literature. Transnational considerations of the lyric in an Indian context have almost exclusively centered on Urdu poetry—the tension between its “hermetic” symbolic vocabulary and the possibilities of its political world-making in different historical moments. Tiwari asks, instead, how the Anglophone- and Western-centric debate on these terms potentially occlude the worldly orientations of Chhayavād poets. In contrast to Tagore’s explicit consideration of other audiences and worldly engagements in his “song offering, ” the Chhayavād poets’ modernist lyric risked framing them as parochial and egocentric, unconcerned with the wider world. Indeed, for many Hindi readers, this felt like a natural conclusion within the political landscape of overtly engagé “progressive” poetry that was ascendant in India in the same period.The fourth chapter focuses on the Chhayavād poet Mahadevi Varma, weaving together discussions of the internal world of her writing (vishwa) and its publication history (jagat). In doing so, Tiwari illuminates how the lyric and the “personal” as generic descriptors overdetermine the worldly interventions of female poets. The fifth chapter continues the attention to women’s writing through the figure of Arundhati Roy and the genre of the love story. One of the strongest in the book, it offers a fascinating comparison between the international reception and translation history of Roy’s bestselling first novel The God of Small Things and one of its intertexts, the mid-century Malayalam novel Chemmeen by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, both of which hinge on erotically charged inter-communal romances. Tiwari’s readings deftly illuminate how such world-making (vishwa) gets differently politicized in its circulation (jagat). This includes various translations that emphasize or deemphasize the politicized eroticism of each text, and the way that such eroticism defies conventions for prestigious literature in a global literary sphere.Tiwari’s approach in Beyond English is useful for the way it derives terms organically from the archives of the writers themselves. Often openly polemicizing with the orthodoxy of postcolonial theory and comparative literature, Tiwari emphasizes a deeply necessary reorientation toward literary writers as theorists of their own experience. Perhaps most essential, her core investment in linguistic defamiliarization undoes a seemingly intuitive connection between what world literature might mean, and the historically and linguistically specific meanings of “world” in English. Her attention to vishwa (which is used to mean both world and universe) unsettles a relationship with Anglophone concepts like “universe” in the sense of a historically idiosyncratic European idea of “universal humanism.” Sansar and jagat likewise defamiliarize the Christian concept of the “world” as a place of fallen material concerns awaiting redemption.Yet, these new terms also carry their own social resonances through their links to Sanskrit and Hindu cosmology. As Tiwari writes, “‘sansār’ and ‘jag’ are physical spaces where maya or illusion manifests” (69). They suggest the phenomenal world is nothing more than a screen for the underlying truth revealed in Hindu and Buddhist enlightenment. These views on the meaning of the world are not shared by South Asians of other religious communities, nor does the pathway to Hindu enlightenment look the same for Dalit writers as it does for those who are caste-privileged. What might change about our India-centered conceptions of worldliness if we consider other, arguably more common Hindi words for the world like duniya (realm, from Arabic) or jahan (living world, from Farsi)? The different etymological origins of these terms remind us that Sanskrit is not merely a passive historical source for languages like Hindi, but rather Sanskritization was an active process of “purification,” one which links Modern Standard Hindi’s aspirations as the language of anticolonial nationalism with a more uncomfortable history of religious nationalism in South Asia. Tiwari’s monograph is engaging and convincing in its demonstration of what doors may be opened when we decenter not only Western ideas of the “worldliness” of world literature, but also the very language of that concept—its etymological and historical baggage. When we walk through the door to theorizing world literature “beyond English,” we must also consider that new vocabulary may carry difficult histories of its own

Linguistics · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Translation Studies and Practices