Abstract
This essay tries to position Rabindranath Tagore’s little-known essay “Visva–Sahitya” (World Literature) in cross-cultural articulations of such an idea. Considering the circumstances leading to Tagore’s text, it explores the origins of comparatist literary studies in eighteenth century Europe and to colonial context in India. The attempt is to locate Tagore’s ideas of the world literature in the wider circulation of texts across different cultural milieus and the webs of power within which such texts are situated. Though Tagore comes to the world literature only at the end, his essay is an important statement of his view of man, the purpose of human life, and the role of art in its fruition; indeed, we might consider the essay to be a concise formulation of Tagore’s esthetic philosophy itself. What Tagore meant by the world literature was the essential unity of human experience and therefore of human creativity. But more than that, it signified to him the ever-evolving, never-complete edifice of the best and most authentic expression of human creativity, fashioned by so many hands, spread in so many parts of the world, but still part of the one narrative of the human race. He also believed that we reveal ourselves in the literature more profoundly than in mundane activities of self-interest and self-preservation. Moreover, it is only by giving ourselves to others that we can know or express ourselves. Such self-giving is effortless and joyous because in it lies the realization of our own nature. Everywhere, the universe revels in such joyous self-giving which exceeds any functional requirement or necessity. It is this plenitude or surplus that is beautiful and joyous; the artist in his self-giving is thus a part of a fundamental tendency of nature itself. We may call this the surplus value of art theory that Tagore believed in and which he enunciates so eloquently in this essay.
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Notes
- 1.
All quotations from this text refer to the new translation by Rijula Das and Makarand R. Paranjape. Buddhadev Bose’s summary of the same lines in Tagore’s text is as follows: “I have been called upon to discuss a subject to which you have given the English name Comparative Literature. Let me call it World Literature in Bengali” (cited in Sisir Kumar Das 26). An earlier version was published in Journal of Contemporary Thought special number “Punctuated Renewals: Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century” edited by Debashish Banerji (cited in Paranjape M.R).
- 2.
These remarks of Spivak’s are available on http://tagore150toronto.ca/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-tagoretribute/ (accessed July 29, 2011).
- 3.
As a companion piece to this essay, the entire text of Tagore’s speech is provided in a new translation. The essay was published in an English translation in Sukanta Chaudhuri’s edition of Tagore’s Selected Writings on Literature and Language (2001: 138–150). Given its importance, we have tried to offer a new translation of the essay. In our translation, we have, for most part, retained the more accurate rendering of Tagore’s words, which Swapan Chakravorty (Das and Chaudhuri 138–150) has often rendered into more idiomatic English paraphrase. Similarly, we have tried to retain Tagore’s somewhat complicated syntax, rather than simplifying his sentences into “plain” English. We have also avoided gender neutral alterations, translating manush as “man” rather than “human” mostly because such usage was characteristic of Tagore’s times. Tagore almost certainly included the woman in his notion of man, though in specifically speaking of woman in one section of his essay, he acknowledges that much of the other references referred to masculine roles and occupations; at the level of abstraction, then, “man” may be understood as human, but in its practical application, Tagore was quite aware of its gendered implications.
- 4.
Indeed Albert Schweitzer called Tagore “the Goethe of India” (Kripalani 295).
- 5.
I owe this insight into Shri Samik Bandyopadhyay who has worked on the 1,450 paintings of Tagore from this period which have never been seen because they were locked up in the vaults of Visva-Bharati, the university that Tagore founded. These paintings show Tagore’s strenuous efforts to liberate himself not only from the tyranny of words but to step out, as he himself desired, out of the khyatiprangan, to liberate himself the arena of fame in which he found himself trapped.
- 6.
Bose’s translation of the same passage reads as follows:
Now is the time to say the actual thing—that is, we diminish literature by containing it within the constraints of time, nation and individual. If we understand that literature is universal man’s attempt to express himself, then alone can we discern what we ought to within literature. Where the writer has been seen as mediator, there his writing has been limited. Where he has felt the emotions of all mankind, expressed the whole extent of human pain, there his work has attained its place in literature. Then, we must see literature thus—a builder of global standards is engaged upon constructing this temple: writers from many countries and many periods are workers engaged upon this construction site. None of us have the entire plan of the building before us, it is true, but the portions that do not cohere with it are broken and rebuilt again and again; each worker has to work according to his contribution, becomes part of that invisible plan, and it is in this that his genius is expressed-which is why he is not paid the meagre wages of a labourer, but earns the respect of the expert.
(http://www.complitju.org/World%20Literature/WorldLiterature.html).
- 7.
Bose’s translation of this passage is as follows:
If we want to understand man as revealed in action, his motivation and his aims, then we must pursue his intentions through the whole of history. To take isolated instances, such as the reign of Akbar or queen Elizabeth, to merely satisfy curiosity. He who knows the Akbar and Elizabeth are only pretexts or occasions; the man, throughout the world of history is incessantly at work to fulfill his deepest purposes, and to unite himself with the All—it is he, I, say, who will strive to see in history not the local and the individual, but the eternal and universal man. His pilgrimage will not end in observing other pilgrims, or he will behold the god whom all pilgrims are seeking. (Cited in Sisir Kumar Das 26)
Interestingly, just over a hundred years later, Salman Rushdie writes The Enchantress of Florence (2008), a novel that links Elizabeth and Akbar in a sort of fictional attempt to unify their then separate worlds.
- 8.
Ahmad, for instance, says:
The idea of world literature in the traditional sense, a la Goethe, remains deeply canonical, even Arnoldian: all the best that has been thought and written is now to be culled not from this or that nation but from the world. If you think about it, this way of reading “great books” produced in the various continents in the world, assembled in a canonizing way, is perfectly reconcilable with the intensified integration of the upper classes of the world into something resembling a world bourgeoisie. It is very easy for world literature to represent this global integration and arrive at an easy, even very glossy capitalist universalization. In this area, we have to question the very idea of literature and we have to be very suspicious of all texts, certainly including the ones that arrive from the Third World, insofar as they display the slightest potential for canonicity. We have to begin, in fact, with a great suspicion of the very fact that the category of world literature as a pedagogical object is arising in the core capitalist countries, whereas the poorer countries have no means of their own to constitute such objects.
Such remarks reflect a larger mistrust with homogenizing and universalizing projects.
- 9.
Dev says: “if you want me to define world literature I may say it is the sum total of texts available to me at this moment, translations included. And it is not imperative that we all have the same world literature. As they say in any lucrative offer, terms and conditions apply, here too politics obtain. We shall all be fools of time to say that world literature is one and the same everywhere. If it were so, there would be no need of comparative literature” (12).
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Paranjape, M.R. (2015). Tagore’s Idea of “World Literature”. In: Banerji, D. (eds) Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 7. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2038-1_5
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