Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

(for Sisir Kumar Das and for Meenakshi Mukherjee—who took the “less traveled” roads to make “all the difference”)

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.

Unity in Diversity: Many Languages, Shared Culture

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...