The World Turn’d Upside Down

Abstract

Picking a single influential book, this essay asks whose world it is that occurs in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature and speculates on what the argument looks like when seen from Calcutta/Kolkata. From there, crucially, it engages in a close encounter with Rabindranath Tagore’s Viśvasāhitya (1907), contrasting it with Goethe’s Weltliteratur, not just because it originated in a colonized country from a position without comparable status or authority in concept formation, but to see if Rabindranath’s was a fundamentally different reading of World Literature to Goethe’s. His advice here, to find the world in the self, is one that may, perhaps, be mined for its emphasis on particularity and attention to the individual as it exists in relation to the whole.

• Apter, Emily
• Europe
• India
• literary studies
• postcolonial studies
• Tagore, Rabindranath
• world literature

Acknowledgements

The title and content of this essay mostly come from my keynote address as the first Mellon Professor of the Global South at Oxford University on 7 March 2018, as well as a preceding paper entitled “The World Turn’d Upside Down: Reflections on Rabindranath’s World Literature” at a workshop on world literature organized there by Peter McDonald. The phrase “The World Turn’d Upside Down” was taken from the event poster quoting John Taylor’s seventeenth-century tract/poem/pamphlet title: The World Turn’d Upside Down: or, A Brief Description of the Ridiculous Fashions of these Distracted Times (London, 1647). I am grateful most of all to Peter McDonald, Amit Chaudhuri, Elleke Boehmer, Stefan Helgesson, Pablo Mukherjee, Robert Young, Francesca Orsini and others whose comments have enriched this essay.

Notes

1 Casanova’s globe, of course, is always turned to Europe, which is where the world literary space “first appeared”, as well as being “the most endowed with literary heritage and resources” as the “first to enter into transnational literary competition”.

2 A Bengali writer is usually referred to by his first name, a practice which also tethers Rabindranath to a more local situationality. I use Tagore only in the Anglophone context in my discussion here.

3 The question Damrosch asked here: “Just how American, in short, is our view of world literature?” is followed by a discussion of how Americans have traditionally foregrounded European, not American literature in its comparative literature programmes in the United States in contrast with a country like India, which discusses its own literature more robustly and in greater volume in a journal such as the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature. Apart from the obvious right of inheritance argument, it could be ventured that Indian departments like Jadavpur have traditionally lacked both the personnel and the resources that US universities have had of a great many European language experts and materials, turning (no doubt also nationalistically, in a formerly colonized country) to rich local cultural fields instead, so translating lack into plenitude.

4 Every reference to the text of Rabindranath’s essay here is from quotations translated by Buddhadeva Bose in his 1959 essay, “Comparative Literature in India”. There is no reference to the Bengali essay itself or any other Bengali-language work here.

5 For a detailed discussion, see Chaudhuri (2014).

6 For a detailed discussion, see Chaudhuri (2016).

7 The essay was published immediately after the lecture in the Jan.–Feb. 1907 number of the revived journal Bangadarsan that Rabindranath was editing at the time with Srishchandra Majumdar. It appeared again in the collection of five essays titled Sahitya (Literature) published by Visva Bharati Press on 11 October 1907. A translation by Swapan Chakravorty is available in the Oxford Tagore Translations series (Chakravorty 2001). This has been collected by Damrosch (2014).

8 All translations from the Bengali are mine unless otherwise indicated. Differences in emphases and choices in relation to words and phrases translated in that essay are what compel me to use my own translations. A change in a word can lead to a change in emphasis and thereby to a changed reading – my own translations are no doubt predicated on the way I read the text.

9 “The Vedas declare that reality (Brahman) is pure Existence (Sat or Satyam), Consciousness (Cit or Jnaanam) and Infinite (Aananda or Anantam).” See http://www.practicalphilosophy.in/2014/11/23/satyam-jnaanam-anantam-brahma.

10 The calit bhāshā or spoken language Rabindranath uses in this essay is also a remarkable innovation in 1907 from the literary language or sādhu bhāshā in which the literary was encased till then.

11 In the Chakravorty translation: “It is nothing but knowing others as our own and our selves as other.”

12 The word pātra can mean self or object – colloquially, it means vessel or pot – in this sentence (sāhityake deś-kāl-pātre choto kariyā dekhile thikmata dekhāi hay nā) it refers to the context of literature, and would therefore be translated as object or thing.

13 For a detailed discussion, see Chaudhuri (2012).