In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Sahitya Redux1
  • Ranjan Ghosh (bio)

Tom Cohen's grandiloquent misreading (mis-gaming, so typical of Trumpocene or Cohenocene) and misplaced exegesis, crafted almost in a teenage high-pitched tone, seem to have been drafted under the intoxication of "second guessing" and a neo-orientalist hangover. Cohen's acerbic and dismissive tone did render some service, though—it made me go back to the book to rescrutinize the efficacy of his scalding predilective observations. Cohen focuses on the writer, not the writing: christening me "evil genius," implicating my role as a manipulator, an upstart, an unreadable and nonthinking oriental, a Hindu fundamentalist who has deployed his Sokal-like stratagem to upstage Cohen's vaunted academe. He concentrates not on the book but, unfortunately, on its post-publication life. Cohen misses many things, but primary among them is the way I have extended sahitya beyond its Sanskritic origins and a settled well-received tradition of understanding and foundation into the premises of what constitutes the "world," worlding, mondialisation, cultural-across and other performativities of literature. His accusations are many: he calls me a vicious strategist who is using Hillis' iconic reputation to clinch this publication, for adopting some Asia-minor-major conceptual promotion and a tendentious East-West pathetic global colloquy. Here in "Sahitya Redux," I hope to defend myself against Cohen's moniker of "evil genius" and, perhaps, extend the ingenuity of sahitya-sacred with its appeal, application and affect. Becoming more than a "mega-App," it will perhaps throw open the fact that Cohen's seeing "vanilla" owes to his thinking "vanilla." I would like to offer Cohen his sub-titular phrase as a return gift—"without really trying": busy in Ghoshslander, Cohen does not really try to understand the book.

Sahitya redux (following on the verb reducere, meaning to bring or lead back) with its unmistakable postpositive efficacy, like Fortuna Redux, brings something home. The critical interest in using the word sahitya without italics was not to oversee any kind of neo-orientalist return which, again, is not, in Cohen's pungent parlance, a "post-post-colonial defunded and on the defense" programme. I was not pitching "Asian sacredness" (another instance of Cohen's subterranean racism)—my aim was to credit the depleting fund of comparative/world literature with a new accommodativeness, generating [End Page 523] fresh spaces through what I have called "intra-active transculturality."2 Sahitya, in this book, without being a non-thinking "mockingly new agey mot," (to pinch on Cohen's relentless vitrol) builds on the across, dilates the radius of cross-conceptual and transcultural hunger, introduces a separate critical perturbation which does not confine itself to an undifferentiated East-West dialogue. Sahitya redux is a re-turn, a condition for reverse thinking, an actualization achieved in thinking backward.

How does sahitya, with its compelling undertone to "connect," being-with, reframe its own domain through what I call the trans(in)fusion of humanistic thinking? Deeply embedded in what I have called the trans-(in) fusion-now3 I approached sahitya and hunger in a way that spoke about no finite Asia or Europe or America—self-contained, harmonically hermetic. I spoke about "across," our meditative singularities, evincing our presentness in a culture and tradition of thought that also gives "birth to presence." However, our position and transposition within trans-(in)fusion need not be, as I have clearly spelt out, a debilitating carnivalesque. Cohenecene inevitably jeopardizes its critical temper by failing to see that my approach never felt shy of the difference, the institutional performatics of knowledge, the specificities, the peculiarities of cultural and epistemological paradigms. Hillis and I knew the politics of walls but decided that there was "something that does not love a wall."

Sahitya, with its inherent "sahit," the power and possibility to connect and network ideas, thoughts and views, is more than just a translation of what we understand as literature. In fact, the whole book was conceived in the space of a "sahit," with Hillis and I coming together from two different continents, literal and figurative, of linguistic and philosophical cultures and bringing our different experiences in collusion and collision. The intent was not to see a mere...

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