Introduction: Comparative Literature

Why should Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East have an issue on comparative literature? Will not any study of literature included in a journal that announces itself as having a comparative perspective need to be comparative by definition? But such a justification seems to beg the question, what is meant by a comparative study? The essays included in this special section on comparative literature in these three regions attempt to address this question in different ways: by exploring the nature and scope, formation, and boundaries of the discipline as it is practiced in these specific locations; by presenting case studies located within or across language-literature systems in the region that foreground the use of comparative methodology in the study of literary and oral cultures that flourish here; or by using a comparative methodology to understand how certain literary cultures have been represented to the world at large, and how different areas of these regions have been made to fit into literary and cultural categories used for academic analysis outside the regions themselves. Our hope is that such an enterprise will provide some suggestions for formulating methods of studying cultural phenomena in the region by theoretical categories and methods formulated within the region. Taken together, these varied ways of "doing" comparative literature in the regions demarcated by the journal's title also indicate the efficacy of certain conceptual structures and methods of analysis that may be developed to study the literary cultures produced here. This exercise, we would like to think, will open the way for developing a repertoire of concepts and tools that will aid us in such study. Our aim, therefore, is to suggest the outlines of a comparative method for the study of literatures and cultures in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

But when the very discipline of comparative literature has been declared moribund in certain quarters,¹ does going back to its methodology serve any purpose? The second question, we believe, addresses issues that are not of our concern. The state and fate of comparative literature departments and programs in Anglo-Saxon academia are really not of much moment to us as practicing comparatists, since most of us who have collaborated on this issue, and some whom we have not been able to take with us, are either physically or conceptually located outside the mainstream concerns of Anglo-Saxon academe. Hence, the diagnosis and the cure become global phenomena only by virtue of the form and fanfare with which the argument has been presented and circulated.² In other words, the death of the discipline in the West is only marginally our concern: at the most it will fetch fewer fellowships and grants for us and our students. The more pertinent question is, of course, what is meant by comparative method? At the outset we may say that the comparative method conceptualizes culture, which includes literary culture, as a process. It attempts to place a particular text within the process, broadly as well as with temporal and spatial specificity. The cultural process is a broad framework for the study of a text, but within this cultural process is the literary process itself. A text is located in culture, which means that it is also the map of a moment in a literary system that is shaped by and is part of the broad process of culture itself. The comparative method studies the formation and reception of the text within these two interlinked processes: first, its formation and reception in its own time and second, its transmission and reception across time, and also across cultural and geopolitical boundaries effected through reception across time.

How, then, is comparative literature different from cultural studies? There are marked differences. To begin with, though, comparative literature, like cultural studies, is a method of reading texts; its conception of both text and method are different from the inclination in cultural studies toward the theoretical panoply of continental philosophy and various niche philosophical discourses arising from it.³ The aim of comparative literature is to understand the process of creation and the locus of...