INTRODUCTION

Two thousand years or two hundred? That is the question. Indeed, one may wonder whether the history of Comparative Literature goes back about 2000 years to the Greek times or the nineteenth century should be considered the starting point. In their introductions to the discipline, Western (American and European) comparatists, usually opt for the first alternative. Without any doubt, comparison as such has always existed, and it will be demonstrated by some famous examples in the following chapter. However, our concern here is to trace the emergence of Comparative Literature as an academic discipine in order to better understand the theories and methodologies adopted by the European comparatists, especially those in France and Germany, and the challenges they face in their pursuits today.

The Forthcoming of Comparative Literature as an Academic Discipline

If we consider comparison a general mode of understanding, as used by the French philosopher Descartes, who declared that we come to know the truth only by comparison, we may actually go back to Aeschylus. His earliest play, The Persians, deals with the Battle of Salamis. In order to describe the Persian defeat, the Greek playwright adopts the point of view of the Persian royal court. After the Greek era, we see the orator Cicero, who introduced Greek philosophy to the Romans, thus leading to the creation of a philosophical Latin language. Dante is another significant reference in the history of the largely conceived notion of comparison as a mode of understanding.

Yi-Fu Tuan, an American geographer, propounded the concept of Literary Geography. ‘Literature is a source material for geographers, and literature provides a perspective for how people experience their world. In geography, it includes the topographical poem and the regional novel as well as the works of academic geographers’ (Tuan, 1978). Creative literature profoundly reflects the temporal and experiential dimensions of the space it portrays. In this aspect imaginative literature and its sources are ideal for studies focussing on the environment and sociocultural dimensions of the landscape of a region.

Literature serves the geographer by throwing light on: (i) possible modes of human experience and relationship, (ii) overview of social space, and (iii) environmental perceptions and values of a culture.

India is a vast country with a wide variety of physical and cultural landscapes. Poets and writers in various languages have described the unique regional structure of the different areas in the country. Geographers can discover this uniqueness of the region and the description of such unique features which, as Richard Hartshorne emphasizes, is the fundamental core of geographical research.

Hardly any attempt was made by geographers in India to learn geography from poetry and the regional novels.

INTRODUCTION

Studies in literature normally involve two processes, one determined by a centripetal spirit and the other by a centrifugal one. In the first instance, scholars prefer to study literature as an entity in itself, as a single, coherent, self-contained, self-existent art. They choose to study a literary work within the frontiers of a single, self-sufficient national language. Such centripetal approaches not only tend to deny literature its freedom to cross international borders, both artistically and intellectually, but also restrict it from intersecting with other forms of art and knowledge. The second approach to a literary study is powered by a centrifugal spirit. For instance, under the aegis of Comparative Literature, the study of letters has become progressively more interdisciplinary as well as inter-literary. Through this important development in modern scholarship, literature is being restored to its pristine position as a central cognitive resource in society as its most faithful and comprehensive interpreter. It is an art yet more than art, for literature extends outside itself to forms of human experience beyond disciplinary boundaries, making it evident that the rigid separation of disciplines by myopic specialisations can in the long run lead only to counterproductive and paralysing isolation (Barricelli & Gibaldi iv).

Defining Comparative Literature

Henry Remak's definition of Comparative Literature (1961) lent authenticity to an important function of the discipline. He foregrounds the teaching and practice of Comparative Literature in relation to other arts and social sciences.

INTRODUCTION

In everyday communication lately, verbal text comes seldom unaccompanied. From power point presentation to SMS, our interactions have ceased to be purely verbal. Pictorial elements intervene routinely – photographs, video clips, graphics, charts and emoticons. Till even a decade back, visual images merely supported text as in book illustrations, reinforced familiar brands as in advertisements or indicated public utilities and services. Now, however, image is being worked into text seamlessly, powered by technology that drives a globally expanding market for communication gadgets such as internet-enabled computers and cell phones. The new image-embedded text (text-image) is impacting diverse societies outside its parent zone with an overwhelming appeal that is as instant as it is rapid and wide.

In a globalising India, the proliferating text-image has consequences on a scale unprecedented and yet to be charted. It would be tempting to sit back and ascribe to this nascent experience stand-alone virtues, as is customary with all that happens at the advent of a new century, in this case a new millennium to boot. In fact, through much of human history, image and word (spoken or written) have come together, as in ancient Greek and Roman reliefs that depicted Homeric tales and here in India, scrolls and temple murals that illustrated epics and folktales. Word-picture confluence surely has many such hoary precedents from the distant past, enough for comparison to suggest itself. A scrutiny across such a grand time scale, however, is unlikely to yield any more than the broad generalisation that pure text itself is but a relatively recent, post-fifteenth century interlude, triggered by printing technology and the current text-image is a natural relapse.

When I first began research on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian languages as a postgraduate student in 1975, North East India was a huge informational vacuum. Not that there was that much information to be had on Tibeto-Burman languages in general, but for the North East we had only the tantalizing snippets of the Linguistic Survey of India and a handful of colonial-era jottings. Of course, many years earlier the publication of the <I>LSI made North East India better documented linguistically than many other corners of the earth, and made early comparative work on Tibeto-Burman possible. But time moves on, and while the fragmentary and primitive documentation provided by the LSI and the efforts of enthusiastic but untrained missionaries and authors fueled the pioneering work of Konow and others, by the time I entered the field there was little more that could be done with the superficial documentation available. And this seemed likely to be the situation for the foreseeable future, since the region was generally inaccessible to outsiders at the time, and almost nothing was being done locally. For those of us outside India the valiant efforts of intrepid Indian linguists like K. Das Gupta and I. M. Simon gave us only tantalizing glimpses of the linguistic riches that someday might be available to the world of linguistics.

China's strength alone will not be sufficient, and we shall also have to rely on the support of international forces … this adds to China's tasks in international propaganda and diplomacy

– Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung, p. 214.

Deliberately creating misconceptions for the enemy and then springing surprise attacks upon him are two ways – indeed two important means – of achieving superiority and seizing the initiative

– Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung, p. 239.

Adopt a sober perspective; maintain a stable posture; be composed; conserve your strength and conceal your resources; don't aspire to be the head; do something eventually

– Deng Xiaoping's statement, June 1989, cited in D.M. Lampton, The Three Faces of Chinese Power, p. 16.

China's record as a citizen of the world is strikingly threadbare

– Economist, March 21, 2009, p. 13.

This chapter examines the character and scope of changes in China's approach to Asia-Pacific since the late 1990s. The theme is that China's policies towards the region, and the pattern of power and relationships in the region are in a flux; they are not in disarray but they are unsettled and changing constantly. Has China abandoned it strategy (long term tactics) to divide and demoralise its rivals in its declared policy of a peaceful rise? Has it abandoned its strategic aim to form a China-centric hub and to form a structure of dominant-subordinate relationships in Asia?

INTRODUCTION

Gayatri Spivak's provocative title to her 2000 Wellek library lecture series on Comparative Literature speaks of the ‘death’ of the discipline as traditionally understood in the Euro-American academy. This is in fact a call for the discipline's revitalisation by an alliance with Area Studies towards a ‘planetary’ consciousness. Almost a decade ago, Susan Bassnett had written of Comparative Literature in similar terms: ‘Today, Comparative Literature in one sense is dead [….] but it lives on in other guises.’ Some of these ‘guises’ identified by Bassnett included a reworking of disciplinary boundaries through the insights of Gender and Cultural Studies and the possibilities of intercultural transfer offered by Translation Studies (Comparative 47). Even a cursory examination of literature on the state of Comparative Literature as a discipline and its methodology reveals that neither Bassnett nor Spivak are calling for doing away with Comparative Literature but rather asking us to make it more relevant to our times.

This brief history is meant as a prelude to some of the battles I witnessed as a newly appointed specialist in Postcolonial Literature at a large public university in West Texas and the only one in the region which has faculty specialising in Comparative Literature. The irony of teaching Postcolonial Studies at a public university in the Lone Star State is obvious. The region's history of territorial control over land that was once part of Mexico, its stringent border policing to stop Mexicans from crossing over into territory they originally owned, and the dubious distinction of educational institutions in Texas as being the last few anywhere in the world to recognise the importance of Postcolonial Studies are some facets of the irony.

Some Famous Mappilla Personalities

Justice M. Fatima Beevi – The First Woman Judge of Independent India

Fatima Beevi, a Mappilla Muslim, was born in 1927 in Pathanamthitta, in Southern Kerala to Meera Sahib and Khadeeja Bibi. She was awarded her Law degree by the Government Law College, Trivandrum and was enrolled as an advocate in 1950. Later she rose to the level of the District and Sessions Judge in Kerala in 1974. In 1989, she was the first woman judge appointed to the Supreme Court of India following the controversy over the Muslim Women's (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act. She was not only the first Muslim woman to be appointed to any higher judiciary but also the first woman Judge of a Supreme Court of a nation in India and Asia. She has also served as the Chairman of Kerala Commission for Backward Classes (1993), member of National Human Rights Commission (1993) and the Governor of Tamilnadu (1997). She is a recipient of several awards such as the Honorary D. Litt Degree, the Mahila Shiromani Award and the Bharat Jyoti Award. She now resides at her ancestral home in Pathanamthitta.

Vaikkom Mohammad Basheer: A Freedom-Fighter and a Famous Writer

Vaikkom Mohammad Basheer was born in Travancore to a poor Muslim family. He was educated in an English-medium school in Vaikkom. While at school, he was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and participated in the Vaikkom Satyagraha (1924). He joined the Indian National Congress, moved to Kozhikode and took part in the Salt Satyagraha in 1930.

The Chipko movement is popularly recognized as the most famous and successful environmental movement in India's history. The term ‘chipko’ is commonly translated from Hindi as ‘hug’ or ‘embrace’ and it refers to a method of protest in which one embraces a tree in order to prevent its felling (Right Livelihood Awards (RLA), 1987; Karan, 1994). The contemporary Chipko movement is best known for a string of protests that began in the 1970s, which most prominently involved an increasingly large number of peasant women. The majority of these protests occurred in the Himalayan foothills in the region of Uttarakhand (Fig. 26.1). A majority of the Indian Himalayas lie in this region, which borders both Nepal and Tibetan China. As two of the most heavily forested states in India, Uttarakhand (formerly Uttaranchal) and Uttar Pradesh have long been relied upon for their supplies of natural resources, which have been regarded as critical to national economic development (RLA, 1987). While organized resistance against restrictive and unjust economic devel- opment and environmental policies have occurred elsewhere in India, the materialization and manifestation of the Chipko movement reflects the specific multi-scalar social, political and ecological processes which constituted social life in the late 1960s Uttarakhand, and which was itself later reshaped by these distinctive patterns of struggle.

This case study examines Chipko movement activity at the specific regional scale of Uttarakhand in order to examine how social movements emerge from spatially-embedded power relations and social contexts.

INTRODUCTION

The famous Orientalist and explorer, Sir Richard Burton wrote: ‘It is generally said that the sun does not rise upon a land that does not contain a man from Hadhramawt.’ (Burton 58)

This essay might be considered the preliminary phase of a comprehensive scheme to study Arabic literature in diaspora. Here, I deal with the literature of Hadhrami Arabic, the variety of Arabic spoken in Hadhramawt vis-a-vis the regions to which the Hadhramis migrated and settled. The term Hadhramawt (also spelt Hadhramout and transliterated Ḥaḍramawt), as used in this literary historical study, refers to the territory known as the Qu'aiti and Kathiri Sultanates in Southern Arabia prior to 1967. It comprises the coastal region and the interior, which is also known as Wadi Hadhramawt.

In this essay, we will try to examine the impact of the Hadhrami diaspora in South Asia in terms of language and literature. We shall also try to consider an example of the interaction between the diasporic literature and the political scene in the homeland.

Historical Preamble

South Arabians, in general and the people of Hadhramawt in particular, boast of having a legendary history reflected in the past of their region as a seat of an ancient civilization. Hadhramawt had been one of the Southern Arabian kingdoms along the trade routes of the ancient world. Commodities like frankincense, myrrh and resin gums which were produced in Southern Arabia were used in the Near East and the Mediterranean world for religious and medicinal purposes.

In terms of “the rise of China” and its “implications for India”, the title of this book, the Sino-Indian territorial dispute represents an immediate arena in which India is having to face the uncomfortable implications from having an increasingly stronger neighbour. For India, the ability of China to deny India's hopes of territorial settlement on India's terms has become even clearer in the wake of China's rise in military power in and around her disputed territory, which remains the biggest amount of land still in dispute in Asia. As such,

Here, the judgement over a century ago, of Lord Curzon, British Viceroy of India 1898-1905 still seems relevant:

There is no end to the wars in this segment of the ‘anthropocene epoch’, the age of the humans, a term coined recently by geologists for the period that began with agriculture.

Our own recorded history bears witness to this phenomenon. And because of what and who we are, wars will not end. Armies will continue to be raised, trained, nurtured and deployed. Old conflicts are carried into the new century. We are not too far off the mark from the ‘Hundred years war’ in Europe's history. Conflicts which began more than 65 years ago are still festering; ideological, economic and border issues that might have been settled continue with more belligerence or ferocity than ever creating the tense situation in the Indian subcontinent. We need all our protection forces to guard against every kind of anticipated and unexpected hostile situation. Therefore, there is no question of not having well-trained and well-equipped security forces as well as standing armies.

In the finance budget of 2010–2011, a sum of Rs 14,7344 crores (US$31 billion) has been allocated towards defence, much of which would go towards the proposed modernization of the Forces. The science compoment represented by the DRDO in the previous budget got seven percent (Rs 9,809 crores) of the allocation to run its 51 laboratories, where 5,000 scientists and 25,000 technical and other personnel are employed (www.idsacomments/budgertryfor India's Defence 2010).