Editor's Introduction

A JML article of a few years ago, in our Special Issue on the Short Story, edited by Maurice A. Lee (volume XX, number 1 [Summer 1996]), reminds us rather forcefully that our concept of world literature is more limited than we typically are willing or able to acknowledge—or perhaps even to understand—so that even a journal such as JML, which works hard to be as inclusive as possible within its scholarly framework, is inevitably missing out on vast bodies of significant national literatures about which most of us know nothing and about which we are unlikely ever to learn. In that article, Thomas Palakeel writes of the “very rich” regional literatures of India, noting, for example, that “In the case of the Malayalam language in southern India, all weeklies and even some daily newspapers serialize novels, several at a time. Both popular and literary journals print short stories. With circulations ranging from ten thousand to nearly a million readers in some cases, they produce a large quantity of both serious and escapist fiction.” Yet even “canonical works” in such languages are likely to be “overlooked . . . for translation.”

I write this in Calcutta, in the midst of a long-planned, often delayed, much anticipated and revealing trip to India. I am at this moment sitting on a verandah in the incredibly crowded and active southern section of the city, in the family home of a friend of many years, removed in every respect but one from the life outside: the traffic noise is everywhere. But for all the cacophony of horns, there is also a chorus of birds; I’ve counted four definite and two possible birdsongs over the past few minutes, coming from the trees which surround the house. I had somehow not envisioned either trees or birds here. My point is an obvious one: places about which we believe that we know something definitive may well surprise us with what we do not know. Everyone knows about the poverty here, but how many Westerners know that there are five hundred poetry magazines in Calcutta, most of them in Bengali, of course, but quite a few also in English. There is even a poetry daily. I doubt that there are as many in all of North America, even if we include Canada and Mexico.

Coincidentally, Indian newspapers this week have been reporting the death of the Assamese writer Syed Abdul Malik, author of more than one thousand short stories, sixty novels, eleven plays, and five volumes of poems. “He will be remembered for his contribution to Hindu-Muslim amity,” The Statesman of Calcutta reported (21 December 2000), noting also the many prizes which he had won over a long career and singling out his novel Dhanya Nara Tanu Bhaal, based on the life of the Vaishnavite saint Sankardeva. His works, the Bombay Indian Express commented, “have been translated into all the major Indian languages,” presumably including English. (There are fourteen nationally recognized languages in India, as well as some five hundred dialects.) Are any of his works available in the West, I wonder. How well would they work in a comparative modern novel course? Would his work or his life be of interest to readers of JML? What are his sources, and might there be influence or intertextual studies surrounding his work which we might benefit from? And what about archival studies? And how are we to learn about, or from, other Assamese or Bengali writers, or those from other Indian languages and dialects, or from those of other countries and cultures about which we know nothing, except perhaps for a few suspect generalizations?

JML will continue, to be sure, to publish every worthy, well written essay that we can on Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Hemingway, et al. But we affirm once again our strong interest in literatures other than American and British, beyond even those of Western and Eastern Europe and the countries of the former British Commonwealth. While I, personally, remain somewhat skeptical of some of the current approaches to the so-called Third World literatures (although not perhaps as forcefully as Professor Palakeel is), neither I nor this Journal has any reservation...