At the 2004 annual MLA convention, I attended a panel on “Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization” in which the ACLA draft report on the state of the discipline was being discussed. During the Q&A session, I asked Jonathan Culler, who was one of the panelists, why the turn toward the global in literary studies and the enthusiasm over “World Literature” in America had not generated as much interest in “world poetics” or “world literary theory”? Why, I asked, had W.W. Norton, the arbiter of American pedagogy, published an expanded anthology of world literature that included several “great works” of non-Western literature, but not a comparable anthology of world literary theory that included non-Western poetics, criticisms, or commentaries. Culler jokingly suggested that I should perhaps propose such a project to Norton. Meanwhile, someone in the audience brought up East-West studies and comparative poetics, mentioning the names of Earl Miner and Patrick Hogan. Before I could ask why the work of these outliers was not more widely debated, especially as literary productions from elsewhere were being voraciously consumed and rapidly curricularized into alternative canons across American campuses, Hogan himself recounted his experience editing a special issue of College Literature that focused on “non-Western literary theory before European colonialism.” Whenever he mentioned the project to his colleagues, he recalled, they invariably said, “Oh, you mean Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.” And when he insisted his focus was “non-Western theory before colonialism,” he was confronted with “looks of blank incomprehension.”[1] The “incomprehension” Hogan encountered reflects a widespread assumption that theory is the product of a uniquely Western philosophical tradition. From this perspective, the non-West may be a source of exotic cultural production but cannot be a site of theory. Even the one theory produced by the non-West—postcolonial theory—is, we are told, simply a response to the West. Furthermore, although scholars in comparative poetics and East-West studies have tried to challenge this assumption by drawing attention to pre-colonial textual traditions (Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Arabic), their work has had little impact on the practice of comparative literature or literary theory.

After returning from the MLA convention that year, I took up Culler’s suggestion in earnest. I contacted my Norton representative and wrote to the editors, pointing out the Eurocentric nature of the publisher’s current anthology of theory and criticism,[2] giving examples of some Indian and Chinese theories I use in class, and suggesting that Norton might consider doing a multivolume anthology of world poetics. Perhaps the project I proposed didn’t seem worthwhile or practical enough. Perhaps my letter wasn’t addressed to the right people. Whatever the case, I got no response. My sense of urgency faded and I went back to supplementing the Norton anthology with my own collection of criticism and theories from India and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, obituaries for Comparative Literature continue to be written apace. Some mourn the discipline’s demise while others try to bring it back in a new avatar. In the wake of globalization and the rise of postcolonialism and multiculturalism, a debate has ensued over reinventing Comparative Literature in the form of World Literature (Moretti, Damrosch, Coopan), World Bank Literature (Kumar), Globalit (Baucom), and Planetary Literature (Dimock, Spivak). As conducted in the pages of the PMLA, the ACLA reports, and other prestigious forums, the discussion is usually well intentioned, at times heated, occasionally xenophobic (Delbanco), shifting rapidly from whether to what to how different literary traditions are to be studied. Not surprisingly, the discussion has centered largely on developments within the United States, and, with a few notable exceptions (Bassnett, Totosy), commentators have seemed largely unaware that the discipline of Comparative Literature has a history, albeit problematic, outside Euro-America. The 1993 ACLA report called for Comparative Literature to move away from the old model of literary study according to author, nation, period, or genre toward a more cultural studies model that would embrace transnational studies of discourse, ideology, race, and gender (Bernheimer 41–42). Prominent American theorists have taken it upon themselves to construct grand sweeping metanarratives theorizing literary productions across the (third) world (Jameson, Moretti), while others have expressed skepticism and apprehension about projects that seemed to consolidate the rest in the name of the West (Ahmad, Baucom, Chow, Kumar, Kadir, Spivak). But few, even among the skeptics, have called for redefining theory itself as a way out of Comparative Literature’s Eurocentrism. The result is what we have today: world lit without world lit crit.

My essay aims to address this gap by proposing a new component to global literary studies called “world literary knowledges.” I use the term knowledges instead of theory, poetics, aesthetics, or criticism for reasons elaborated more fully below. Intended as both a critique of and a contribution to the field of comparative poetics, the notion of “world literary knowledges” outlined here aims to go beyond inducting a few token non-Western greats into theory’s hall of fame; rather, it asks us radically to re-vision the question of what counts as theory in the first place. The conceptual contributions of diverse cultural traditions across the globe, I contend, cannot properly be recognized or evaluated unless the domain of theory is extended beyond the formal explicit systematic meta-discourses of dominant, prestigious, textual traditions to include regional, subaltern, and popular epistemologies that may be “emergent” (more informally formulated; less fully systematized) or “latent” (embryonic; embedded in praxis).[3] This is not a call to abandon the study of formal poetics; rather, it is a call to expand the definition of theory and to relocate its study in the broader field of world literary knowledges. In my view, such an inclusive approach to theory can (1) promote greater understanding of diverse literary texts/traditions by enlarging the global repertoire of aesthetic epistemologies; (2) uncover cultural differences as well as common (possibly “universal”) features of our shared aesthetic nature by placing different conceptualizations of literature/literariness side by side; and (3) expose within and across literary traditions new historical networks of influence, antagonism, and affiliation that have been obscured by Eurocentric or nationalistic ideologies of comparison that rely on a Manichean opposition between East and West or colonial and national.

The first half of the essay surveys the disciplines of comparative literature, literary theory, and comparative poetics in order to show that, despite the good intentions of many scholars, all three fields continue to be Eurocentric pedagogical projects that reproduce colonial stereotypes and perpetuate a neocolonial division of labor between the knowing West and the known rest. My discussion also suggests that anticolonial nationalism and postcolonialism, despite their enormous influence, have only dented, not dismantled, Eurocentric practices of knowledge production. The second half of the essay delineates the notion of “world literary knowledges” with the help of three examples drawn from the multilingual terrain of (pre- and post-colonial) India. The first example focuses on how the revival of Sanskrit during the anticolonial nationalist period effectively marginalized and reduced to regional or local knowledge the sophisticated eco-theory of language/literature present in the rival classical tradition of Tamil. The second example identifies certain aesthetic innovations in the popular bhakti poetry of medieval India and shows how the poetics latent in bhakti subverts the dominant tradition of Sanskrit poetics. My last example showcases Dalit aesthetics as a “not-quite postcolonial” epistemology emerging at the unstable intersection of national, regional, and transnational literary networks in India today. The essay concludes with the claim that “world literary knowledges,” as conceived here, can potentially develop into a valuable ethical and epistemological ally of global literary studies.

World Lit without World Lit Crit

Comparative Literature 

The colonial model of cultural management was premised on a tripartite disciplinary division: Comparative Literature was the proper method for studying Europe, Orientalism for Asia, and Anthropology for Africa. As this model was restructured in the American twentieth century, Area Studies replaced Orientalism to meet the needs of the Cold War. Today, world literature is emerging out of the ashes of comparative literature to meet the needs of an America-in-globalization.[4] But if the model of world literature involves sampling texts from different parts of the world, the epistemologies used to interpret them remain predominantly Western or Westocentric. Assorted texts from the world’s literary traditions are not only sorted into genres identified and defined by the Western theoretical tradition, they also are interpreted and judged according to Western literary norms. From this perspective, postcolonial material becomes a reflection of current metropolitan trends—multiculturalism, theories of ethnicity and race, national allegories, magical realism, and the postmodernist aesthetic of the fragment—and there is often little or no awareness of how these materials are conceptualized or contested in their own sites of production.[5]

The very notion of comparison had been Eurocentric by exclusion when applied only to European literature and Eurocentric by discrimination when adapting evolutionary models to place European literature at the forefront of human development. These older forms of comparison may have lost their hold today, but the newer ones that have emerged are still anchored to a Eurocentric, nation-centered formulation of inter-nationalism that Rey Chow has labeled “Europe and Its Others”: “In this formulation, the rationale for comparing hinges on the conjunction and; the and . . . signals a form of supplementation that authorizes the first term, Europe, as the grid of reference, to which may be added others in subsequent and subordinate fashion” (“The Old/New Question of Comparison” 294). Even models of comparativism propagated by postcolonial studies have not escaped the “Europe and” formulation, for they perpetuate neocolonial geopolitics in the form of linguistic fields such as Anglophone, Francophone, and so on (Apter). Furthermore, postcolonial comparisons also risk “feminizing” the expressive cultures of the periphery in relation to the more “masculine” intellectual capital that broad conceptual categories and universalizing theories tend to acquire within the field of Comparative Literature (Lionnet 105).

The “Europe and” model of comparative literature, moreover, has also been adopted by many non-Western countries and frequently yoked to nationalist agendas, often with problematic effects. Susan Bassnett correctly points out that in India, China, Japan, and elsewhere, comparative literature arose not in antagonism to nationalism (as was the case in Europe and America) but rather as an expression or assertion of national cultural identity, typically constructed in direct opposition to a putative Western identity (5). Bassnett approvingly notes that just as Euro-American comparativists have often treated “Indian Literature” or “African Literature” in singular monolithic terms, so others are now deploying “European literature” or “Western literature” as an overarching category within which French, German or English get reduced to component “sub-national” or “regional” units (Bassnett 37–38). But if such inversions “invite re-examination of the old models that placed component literatures of the Western tradition in a position of international superiority” (Bassnett 38), by merely reversing the old neocolonial equation they nevertheless remain trapped within the “Europe and” model of comparison.

To the extent Bassnett seeks to learn not merely about but also from the practice of comparative literature in other parts of the world, her study represents a refreshing departure from the navel-gazing lamentations of much Western scholarship on the subject. But, unfortunately, when Bassnett goes beyond the frontiers of Europe to find a cure for the ills plaguing comparative literature, she often ends up uncritically endorsing the practices of anticolonial cultural nationalisms wholesale. “A fundamental task of Indian comparative literature,” Bassenett writes, “is the assertion of the importance of tradition and the creation of a literary history constructed upon Indian models” (39). This statement, which takes “tradition” and “Indian models” to be self-evident terms, simply echoes the goals articulated by the Indian Comparative Literature Association (founded in 1981): “to arrive at a conception of Indian literature which will not only modernize our literature departments but also take care of the task of discovering the greatness of our literature and to present a panoramic view of Indian literary activities through the ages” (Bassnett 39). A nationalistic undertaking to the core, the association’s project is driven by a desire to distill a quintessential “Indianness” from the country’s diverse literary traditions and to consolidate this sense of “Indianness” through contrast with the “West.” The agenda articulated in 1968 by the first secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, the premier literary institution of India, similarly focuses on “the multi-lingual and multi-regional character of modern Indian culture, and the roots of its inspiration in two major sources—the national, mainly embodied in the Sanskrit heritage, and the modern, which is imported from the West, derived from its European or American or Soviet varieties” (Kripalani 179). Here, the superiority of the national (equated with Sanskrit), as well as the necessity of the modern (equated with Western)—a paradigmatic feature of Indian nationalist discourse—is made axiomatic to the task of Indian literary studies: to consolidate the national by strategically deploying the modern (see, for example, Das, “Why Comparative Indian Literature” and S. Mukherjee, Idea).  The goal was to weave India’s many diverse linguistic/literary strands into a singular overarching category called “Indian literature” (ironically, in English translation), a category that would reveal the national unity underlying India’s multilingual diversity.[6] This dream project came to fruition in the Sahitya Akademi’s proposed ten-volume history of Indian literature (inevitably written in English), three of which have been published so far (Das, A History 1991; 1995; 2005). But in the wake of globalization and the rise of various social movements in India, such nationalistic literary projects have come under attack for replicating the exclusionary gestures of both colonialist and anticolonial nationalist historiography, as well as for marginalizing or assimilating various regional, linguistic, caste, class, and gender struggles into a nationalist literary agenda.[7] Bassnett, however, seems unaware of these developments, for she reassures her readers that comparative literature, although dead in the West, is alive and well in the non-West:

The way in which comparative literature is used in places such as China, Brazil, India or many African nations is constructive in that it is employed to explore both indigenous traditions and imported or imposed traditions, throwing open the whole vexed problem of the canon. There is no sense of crisis in this form of comparative literature, no quibbling about the terms from which to start comparing, because those terms are already laid down. What is being studied is the way in which national culture has been affected by importation, and the focus is that national culture.(8)

In treating the category of “national culture” as a given, this optimistic assessment of comparative literature in the non-West obscures the exclusionary gestures through which anticolonial nationalisms have often consolidated themselves in these postcolonial spaces, erasing in the process the myriad subnational, subaltern, and regional cultural formations fighting to assert their own identities there.

The development of comparative literature in China is similarly instructive. Haun Saussy points out that the Chinese discipline of bijiao wenzue was created in 1917 to address the following question: “what does modern China need to take from the cultures of the already modernized countries.” “The resulting discipline,” Saussy notes, “is strongly marked by the need to define what is properly, uniquely Chinese, through contrast with the ‘others’” (“Exquisite Cadavers” 29). Indeed, the rise of comparative literature in East Asia led to the emergence of a “Chinese” school of comparative literature (Chen). In opposition to the “French” school of influence studies and the “American” school of parallel studies, the “Chinese” school proposed its own methodology: the application of Western theory to Chinese texts. Although in principle this methodology promised to open up a new way of reading Chinese texts and examining the claim to universality by Western theory, in practice it became a simplistic and mechanical application of imported epistemologies on indigenous material. Sweeping generalizations were frequently made by reductively reifying “the West” and “China” into opposing categories. After the publication of Said’s Orientalism and the ascent of postcolonial theory, this form of East-West studies was (rightly) debunked for perpetuating the colonization of Eastern literary traditions by Western theory (Yokota-Murakami; Yu; Zhang). But since no viable alternatives have yet been proposed, the problem of how different literary traditions of the world are to be studied and what epistemologies are to be used to compare them remains an as-yet-unresolved issue both in the East and in the West.

Literary Theory 

Acknowledging that non-Western texts “present new challenges for teachers and scholars trained in the New Critical or historical schools in the United States,” Emory Elliott makes an interesting observation: “So far the solution to this problem seems to have been mainly to wait until scholars with the same cultural heritages can bring their personal knowledge of the cultures together with their professional training in Western criticism” (16; emphasis added). What Elliot’s statement inadvertently reveals is that “professional training in Western criticism” is still the key element that inserts the native informant into World Literature. Without Western theory, the world, it would seem, cannot be made visible.

A cursory glance at the contents of any standard anthology of literary theory commonly used in college courses across the United States quickly reveals that the field of literary theory is a resolutely Eurocentric high ground relatively untouched by the rising tide of globalization reshaping American academia. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is exemplary in this respect. As presented in this authoritative tome of over 2500 pages, the (his)story of high theory runs from Aristotle through Horace, Longinus, other neo-Classical and Medieval scholars, representative Renaissance critics, Enlightenment philosophers, English and German Romantics, British Victorians, nineteenth-century Continental thinkers, Modernists, Marxists, Russian Formalists, Structuralists, New Critics, Feminists and post-structuralists. This rich and complex story contains interesting detours and invigorating deviations, heated debates and profound disagreements. But because the cast of characters, as diverse and distinctive as it may be, is nevertheless overwhelmingly Western, the narrative presents literary theory as the product of cultural or epistemological changes taking place primarily within Europe.

In fact, out of the nearly 140 theorists on the Norton list, fewer than fifteen are “minority” or non-Western critics: W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Franz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo (et al), Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, and the postcolonial trio, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.[8] No non-Western critic or literary tradition is mentioned prior to the twentieth century—and this despite the fact that India, China, Japan, and the Arab world developed rigorous systematic theories of literature that produced long traditions of abstract and illuminating thought about the structure, function, effect, and origin of literature, traditions that are  comparable, if not superior, in clarity and sophistication to much pre-Romantic European literary theory (see Hogan and Pandit). Instead, every non-Western or minority critic included in the Norton collection falls under the now familiar rubric of East-West studies or race/postcolonial theory.[9] As a result, they become “in-house” critics whose dissentions once again return narcissistically to expand and enrich Western thought. The story of literary theory as told in the Norton can thus be summed up as follows: the West produces theory autogenetically; the rest do so only in response to the West.

The assumption that the non-West cannot produce any independent form of abstract thought is perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of Orientalism. William Jones, the first major British Orientalist and father of the Indo-European hypothesis, believed that his translations from the Sanskrit would infuse new life into Europe’s artistic/literary creativity and provide new material for European science/philosophy. But he could not imagine that the Sanskrit tradition might contribute anything of value to contemporary (European) science or philosophy (Jones 107)—a view that the colonial philologists who followed Jones held even more emphatically. The Reverend Robert Caldwell, who is credited with establishing Dravidian as a separate language family, claimed that the learning of “versified enigmas and harmonious platitudes” resulted in Indians developing a great capacity for patient labor and an accurate knowledge of details, but also prevented the development of the “power of generalization and discrimination” (qtd. in Cohn 52). Similarly, the German philologist Max Muller categorically claimed theory for Europe by arguing that Hellenic thought had developed in Europeans a unique capacity for abstraction and generalization, while Indian thinking, lacking the benefit of Hellenic influence, had remained trapped in a particularistic mode (qtd. in Wilson 92).[10] The story is repeated elsewhere with reference to Chinese, Arabic, and other non-European traditions of the world (on China, see, for example, Chow, “Inscrutable Chinese”; Longxi, “What Is Wen”; and Shih).

Why did literary theory become such a highly valued commodity in the Western world, and how did the Western theoretical tradition emerge as the privileged marker of cultural superiority the world over? As regards the English literary tradition, Terry Eagleton has shown that literary criticism came to be recognized as an area of study only after land ceiling acts during the eighteenth century had created sharply divided class structures. As a result, literary criticism emerged as a tool for social protest and acquired the status of a valued class possession in England (Eagleton 26–27). But it was not only class conflict that gave value to English literary criticism. It also acquired significance because in order to educate colonial peoples in the finer points of English literature, it became necessary to export a large number of critical commentaries on English writers (on British India, see Viswanathan). In fact, G.N. Devy believes that “the steady decline in the philosophical substance of English criticism” from Shelley’s Defense to F.R. Leavis’s text/author based assessment may be ascribed to “the rising need in the colonies for critical commentaries on authors and texts” (104). And as natives became acculturated through education in English literature and English literary criticism, they came to accept it (and by extension, European/Western theory) as an index of cultural superiority. Even today, it is the Western tradition of literary theory and criticism, frequently filtered through the medium of English, which is widely circulated and studied all over the world. Professional training in Western criticism continues to legitimize non-Western scholars, even when speaking of their own literary texts and traditions.

Comparative Poetics

If the dominance of Western theory has been questioned at all, it has been done only within the marginalized and underdeveloped subdiscipline of comparative poetics. Following the pioneering efforts of Horst Frenz, Rene Etiemble, and Rene Wellek to draw Arabic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as African and other (little-studied) Asian literatures into the orbit of comparative literature, scholars such as C.D. Narasimhaiah, Li Zehou, Karatani Kojin, Earl Miner, Patrick Hogan, Lalita Pandit, Zhang Longxi, Nabil Matar, Ashmita Khasnabish, and others have tried to argue for the inclusion of non-Western traditions of poetics on the basis both of their intrinsic merit and their historical impact on Western thought.

Scholarship in comparative poetics is of two main types: sequential and parallel. Sequential studies, which deal with historically related literary traditions and focus on issues of influence, have explored such topics as the role of the Arab Aristotelians in shaping the ethical concerns of Western literary theory, the influence of Indian philosophies on Romanticism or poststructuralism, and the impact of Chinese thought on Modernist poetry.[11] These kinds of influence studies are valuable in so far as they restore to the historical record the contributions of the non-West in the formation of the West. But in so far as they retain Europe as the central category and deal with the influence of non-Western traditions on the West rather than on one another, they remain tied to a “Europe and” frame of reference. Parallel studies, which focus on similarities/differences between historically unrelated traditions (Hogan, “Ethnocentrism” 5–6) likewise seem to rely on Eurocentric or Orientalist practices and methods. Although Haun Saussy has argued that comparative literature has not imitated comparative philology and mythology in making linguistic diffusion and differentiation the basis of comparison—choosing, instead, “the universality of human experience” as “another basis” for comparison (“Exquisite Cadavers” 13)—when comparative studies venture into the non-Western world, universality inevitably disappears and “omnipotent definitions” make their appearance (Said, Orientalism 156). That is, although universal features may be acknowledged, it is difference between the East and the West that often becomes an obsessive and myopic focus of analysis.[12]

There is yet another fundamental limitation inhibiting the growth of comparative poetics. Scholarship in this field has, for the most part, concentrated on expanding the canonical Western tradition by comparing or complementing it with classical non-Western theory—Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. While this focus is both understandable and necessary, it nevertheless perpetuates the ideology of “masterpieces”—or “masterpoetics,” as one might say in this case. A few prominent Asian and Arabic traditions are admitted as tokens into the exclusive club of theory, while other lesser-known traditions continue to be ignored—marginalized as others to the Other of the “Great” Asian/Arabic civilizations.[13] As a result, alternative conceptualizations of literature and literariness, whether they are latent in literary praxis or emergent in subaltern, popular, and regional notions of literature, are rarely recognized for their conceptual value, and poetics or theory continues to be defined in highly exclusionary terms as consisting only of the sort of explicit systematic, written, and abstract thought that only some cultures have produced and in only some periods. Such a confined and confining conception of theory excludes significant swathes of the globe (Africa, for instance) and sizable populations of the world (women and other minorities) whose epistemologies may not be articulated in formal, explicit, textual, or abstract modes of expression. Perhaps now is the time to move away from this older model of “comparative poetics” toward a more open-ended and inclusive understanding of theory.

World Literary Knowledges

In recent years the term knowledges (in the plural) has emerged as a way of notating various local or indigenous epistemologies that have been marginalized by the universal claims of Western high theory (Smith). With the goal of challenging and reversing the “epistemic dependency” of the rest on the West, scholars in different parts of the world are today engaged in the difficult task of recuperating and reactivating diverse indigenous knowledges appropriated by coloniality/modernity (Mignolo 110). In keeping with this trend, I would like to propose as a new component to global literary studies the category “world literary knowledges,” the purpose of which is to open up the canon of literary theory and criticism to alternative ways of conceptualizing and analyzing literary production. This means that regional, subaltern, and popular traditions, whether latent or emergent, may be studied, analyzed, and evaluated as epistemologies of literature/literariness alongside the traditions of poetics that currently constitute both the canon (Euro-American) and the counter-canon (Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese) of literary theory. This also means that conceptualizations of literature/literariness may be approached as historically and culturally situated knowledges (or ideologies)—but  without foreclosing the possibility that an open-ended, cross-cultural study of literary knowledges from around the world might at some point disclose certain literary or aesthetic features that characterize our shared humanity. What follows is a tentative and modest attempt to initiate such an epistemologically inclusive and methodologically open-ended study of “world literary knowledges.” My examples, which come mainly from the multilingual Indian context with which I am familiar, are therefore intended to be more emblematic than exceptional.

Example 1: Alternative Explicit Literary Knowledge

Although the Indian subcontinent represents a rich multilingual literary terrain, only the Sanskrit tradition has commanded substantial scholarly attention (European as well as Indian) and so provided the basis for a pan-Indian poetics. Nourished on the Sanskritocentrism of British Orientalism, nineteenth-century Indian cultural nationalism identified this ancient brahminical language as the primary source and symbol of national identity, effectively rolling back centuries of struggle with other rival languages. In accordance with the linguistic hierarchy of colonial comparative philology, which ranked the Dravidian family of languages to which Tamil belongs below the Indo-European family to which Sanskrit belongs, the Tamil literary tradition came to be regarded as essentially regional in scope despite its antiquity and influence. While concepts from Sanskrit poetics (rasa, dhvani, vakroti) were applied to Indian texts, and, on occasion, to Western ones, concepts from Tamil poetics were either rarely studied or applied only to Tamil texts.[14] But in fact, the Tolkappiyam (5th century A.D.), which constitutes the central text of Tamil/Dravidian linguistics and poetics, contains rich possibilities for global literary theory, especially the concept of tinai or landscape.

Deeply rooted in an ecological view of language/literature, tinai envisions a biome-based social order integrating land, man, and god. There are five basic tinais or landscapes recognized in the Tolkappiyam: mountain (kurinji), forest (mullai), riverbelt (marutham), seacoast (neithal), and desert (paalai), each with its indigenous natural and human communities, its appropriate mode of resource use (gathering, hunting, cultivation, trade, and herding), and its appropriate style of cultural expression. Language, culture, customs, behavior, thoughts, and feelings (and hence literature) spring from the habitat or environment, which incorporates not only natural flora and fauna but also sociocultural features, including humans, gods, dance, and music. Since language, in this view, is profoundly conditioned by context, every tinai generates its own fables, stories, poetry, and folklore—all of which are influenced by the immediate concerns of the people in the region and partake of this ecological orientation. 

Just as Aristotle’s Poetics is based on Greek drama, so the typology of landscapes set forth in the Tolkappiyam (including the term tinai) is derived from the practices of ancient Tamil poetry, commonly referred to as Cankam literature (200 B.C.–250 A.D.). As such, it is generally taken to refer to purely conventional landscapes that are connected with certain themes and images internal to Tamil poetry (see, for example, Ramanujan). Although some scholars claim that the landscapes described in Cankam literature actually reflect the pre-historic geographical realities of the Tamil region, they also concede that after the Cankam period (possibly by the time of Tolkappiyam’s composition) these landscapes became “depleted literary devises” that no longer served as “a mirror of life” (Sivathamby 34). Whether understood as allegorical and conventional or mimetic and realistic, however, tinai could become a valuable theoretical tool with applications beyond the narrow, specialized field of Dravidian linguistics/literature. Thus, for instance, the Tamil typology of landscapes could be used to isolate different generic conventions through cross-cultural comparison with other traditions (such as the Japanese) that exhibit similar patterns. Furthermore, the Tamil mode of reading literary production in terms of landscape could provide the basis for an alternative (third-world-based) ecologically grounded approach to criticism—one that could conceivably enter into a productive dialog with what is currently a West/North-based ecocriticism.[15]

Example 2: Latent Literary Knowledge 

The (his)story of modern literary theory in India tells of how the great hegemonic tradition of Sanskrit thought was displaced by Western thought under the impact of colonialism. This storyline infused a strong revivalist flavor into modern Indian literary criticism from its inception in the nineteenth century. The long history of exchange and tension between the marga, or metropolitan traditions, and the desi, or popular regional subcultures, metamorphosed, under the aegis of anti-colonial nationalism, into a battle between Indian high culture and the West. As a result, few Indian critics recognized that the heterogeneous regional linguistic/literary subcultures of India might be rich sources of criticism and epistemology. For instance, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (1872–1950), an important and influential theorist of the Bengal Renaissance, wrote a series of essays (The Future of Poetry) in which he employed Sanskrit poetics to implicitly indict English Romantic poetry for lacking the visionary intensity of the Vedas and the Upanishads. He concluded his argument by rejecting the Romantic idea of the poet as creator in favor of the Vedic conception of the poet as seer. But, as G.N. Devy has demonstrated, because the structure of The Future of Poetry bears a striking resemblance to Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, it ironically reveals the Indian critic’s reliance on the very English critical tradition he wished to overcome (112–16). [16]  Furthermore, although Sri Aurobindo knew several Indian languages and was well acquainted with some of the sub-continent’s regional literatures, he relied mainly on Sanskrit and English literary terms since, to him—and others like him—only these two systems of abstract philosophical thought qualified as theory. As a result, Sri Aurobindo and other nationalist scholars who followed in his wake (Narasimhiah, for instance), remained blind to the epistemological and aesthetic alternatives embedded in the popular multilingual bhakti or devotional literatures that had risen up in waves from the medieval period onward to challenge the Sanskritic tradition, question religious beliefs, reform social attitudes, and reshape literary expression all over India (Devy 42–43). Composed by cobblers, weavers, cowherds, shepherds, untouchables, and women (among others), bhakti poetry drew on the oral traditions of folksong and epigram to articulate an incandescent iconoclastic vision of spiritual liberation.[17] 

Important strands of bhakti literature emerged in self-conscious opposition to Sanskrit literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit religious texts, which are described as sruti and smrti (what is heard and what is remembered), the Kannada Virasaiva bhakti poets of south India called their compositions vacanas (what is said). A.K. Ramanujan has pointed out that

Vacana, as an active mode, stands in opposition to both sruti and smrti: not what is heard, but what is said; not remembered or received, but uttered here and now. To the saints, religion is not a spectator sport, a reception or consumption; it is an experience of Now, a way of being. This distinction is expressed in the language of the vacanas, in the forms the vacanas take. Though medieval Kannada was rich in native Dravidian meters, and in borrowed Sanskritic forms, no metrical line or stanza is used in the vacanas . . . . The vacana is thus a rejection of premeditated art . . .(37–38)[18]

Vacana involves both a sayer or speaker and a listener, with each supplying half of what is said (V. Narayanaravku, qtd. in Hart 165). Dialogic participation between speaker and listener, writer and reader, is therefore an important component of the praxis of bhakti.  The bhakti lyric is thus, at the most fundamental level, an invitation to the listener to share the speaker’s experience. Unlike the disembodied visionary in Vedic poetry, the speaker of the bhakti lyric is an embodied figure shackled by the social categories of caste, class, and gender. Indeed, the paradigmatic speaker/devotee of bhakti is feminine. For example, Mahadeviakka, a twelfth-century south Indian Virasaiva poet who composed her vacanas in the local “substandard” or “vulgar” dialect of Kannada, repeatedly complains of the restrictions placed on women both by the stifling demands of parents, husbands, and in-laws and by the fierce opposition to her works from pundits and priests. In many of her lyrics the speaker finally breaks free of worldly restrictions by means of shocking images of fornication, adultery, and prostitution. The conventional structure of love—longing, separation, and union between devotee and divine—set forth in Sanskrit poetics becomes, in effect, nothing more than a flimsy veil for a more subversive message about social transgression and spiritual transformation (Krishnaswamy “Subversive Spirituality”).

Moreover, although the structure of the bhakti lyrics replicates the gendered hierarchy of patriarchal society—the divine is always masculine and the quintessential bhakta or devotee is imagined in feminine or feminized terms [19]—it nevertheless inverts that hierarchy on the psycho-spiritual and literary levels where even male bhakti poets must assume or take on femininity in order to experience the divine. Thus Basavanna (1106–1167 C. E.), one of the greatest (male) Virasaiva poets, often speaks in the voice of a woman and uses feminine alienation in patriarchal society as a metaphor for the saint’s sense of spiritual abandonment in the material world: “I went to fornicate / but all I got was counterfeit / I went behind a ruined wall, but scorpions stung me.” The speaker then points out that, instead of coming to her aid, “The watchman who heard my screams / just peeled off my clothes.” And when she goes home in shame, her husband, instead of comforting her, “raised weals on my back.” The final blow is dealt by the king, the ultimate embodiment of worldly masculine authority: “All the rest, O lord of the meeting rivers,” the speaker laments in the concluding line, “the king took for his fines” (Speaking of Siva 75). The female speaker in a bhakti poem, however, is not always so vulnerable, helpless, or conventionally subservient even in her appeal to or longing for the male deity-lover. In the padam, another south Indian genre of bhakti poetry, the female-devotee is typically a bold and independent courtesan, who on occasion even withholds her favors from the god-customer if insufficiently compensated. Thus, in a padam composed by the male bhakti poet Ksetrayya (1600–1680 C. E.), the female speaker asks the god-customer, “Prince of playboys, you may be/ But is it fair/ To ask me to forget the money?” And she boldly declares, “I earned it, after all/ By spending time with you.” So “Put up the gold you owe me,” she commands, “and then you can talk” (When God Is a Customer 69). In padams such as this it is the woman devotee who has the upper hand. Taken together, these lyrics suggest that bhakti poets not only conceived of gender as a constructed or performance-based category, but also associated femininity with the experience of ananda, the Sanskritic notion of bliss that Ashmita Kashnabish has recently linked to Lacan and Irigaray’s conceptions of jouissance.

The bhakti movements did not, however, produce a comparable body of explicit poetics. This is not an accident of literary history; rather, it represents a conscious move from the brahminical text-based philosophical tradition toward a more spontaneous, performance or praxis-centered approach to life and literature. Because bhakti literature lacks an explicit poetics, the aesthetic innovations and conceptual contributions latent in it have rarely been elevated to the level of theory. Yet to do so would not only deepen our understanding of the craft of bhakti poetry itself, but also provide a basis for comparing different (related and unrelated) mystic traditions based in protest. To do so would also throw light on a form of cultural expression in India that cannot be explained solely in terms of nationalism and postcolonialism,[20] as well as lead to a better understanding of one of the most pressing cultural questions of our times: how does religion become a means for fundamentalists, resistors, and revolutionaries alike to express social, economic, and political conflict?[21]

Example 3: Emergent Literary Knowledge

Alongside a vibrant multilingual Dalit literature, a new discourse dealing with “Dalit aesthetics” is emerging in India today. “Dalit” is the self-chosen name of the so-called untouchable castes that, following B.R. Ambedkar, reject the Gandhian designation “Harijan” as uppercaste patronizing. The term “Dalit,” which means “broken” or “downtrodden,” implies militancy and alliance with other disenfranchised groups, including peasants, workers, and women. Drawing on anti-racist movements in the United States and elsewhere, the post-Ambedkarite Dalit movement has sought to link the category of caste to race in an attempt to globalize its dissent against discrimination. Dalit writers therefore aim not only to expose or challenge India’s hegemonic literary traditions but also to critique or deconstruct its dominant aesthetic categories.

The growing popularity and prominence of Dalit literature has not been without controversy, however. While the (upper-caste) literary establishment in India has readily acknowledged the social value of Dalit writing, many scholars and critics have questioned its literary merit. Dalit literature, they have argued, is “artless” because it lacks aesthetic qualities. They also contend that literature is not simply another arena of affirmative action in which Dalit writers can demand equal representation even when they do not exhibit equal talent. They further charge Dalit writers with being divisive and sectarian, with using disrespectful and offensive language towards Hindu divinities and revered figures, and with engaging in distortions of pre- and post-independence Indian history. Dalits, in turn, insist that their writing has a particular purpose and audience, both of which have an important bearing on literary/aesthetic decisions, and that their work should not be assessed by “universal” criteria, which in India carry the markers of caste and class. Furthermore, because Hindu religious literature has nourished the unequal caste system, Dalit writers deliberately reject the use of religious symbols except to deconstruct them or infuse them with new meaning and purpose (Limbale 34). The need for an accompanying Dalit aesthetics was first expressed in 1988 by Sharad Patil, who, drawing attention to Dalit reliance on brahmanical poetics, challenged Dalit writers to forge their own theoretical “weapon” (Patil 6; Limbale 113). Taking up this challenge, Omprakash Valmiki, Sharankumar Limbale, Raj Gowthaman, and other Dalit writers are trying to theorize Dalit writing as a distinct and different stream of Indian literature: an “artless art” that offers novel experiences, a new sensitivity, a distinct vocabulary, a different protagonist, and an alternate vision. In his pioneering work on Dalit aesthetics, Sharankumar Limbale asserts that modern Indian literary criticism, which is based primarily on Sanskrit or Western literary theories, cannot do justice to Dalit literature (106). In Limbale’s view, Dalit literature does not adhere to classical Sanskrit aesthetics, according to which the purpose of art and literature is to give pleasure by evoking different emotions and feelings (pity, love, joy, fear, and anger, for instance). If pleasure provides the basis of the aesthetics of uppercaste literature, then pain or suffering, Limbale contends, is the basis for the aesthetics of Dalit literature: “it is a literature that is intended to make readers restless or angry” (115). Raj Gouthaman similarly describes Dalit aesthetics as characterized by protest, anger, roughness in language, and an attack on the icons and practices that marginalize Dalits. In its attempt to destabilize hegemonic literary discourse, Dalit literature, he suggests, ruptures both content and craft. It negates literary traditions, violates standardized grammar, and practices an aesthetic of violence—linguistic, generic, and narratalogical (Gowthaman 7–8). And when an artistic creation disturbs in this way, Limbale argues, “either its lack of artifice will become a minor issue or it will have to be acknowledged that this quality of ‘artlessness’ is, in fact, its artistic value” (108). Limbale also dismisses the efforts of some Indian theorists to accommodate the different experiences and emotions represented in Dalit writing by adding two new rasas—“revolt” and “cry”—to the traditional nine in Sanskrit poetics (love, laughter, compassion, fury, valor, horror, disgust, wonder, and tranquility). In his opinion, these efforts are “simply tantamount to proving the incompleteness of the rasa theory” in the first place (115).[22]

If classical Indian theory (Sanskrit poetics) cannot deal adequately with the peculiarities and particularities of Dalit writing, postmodern cultural theory, which is preoccupied with the instability of individual identity, seems even less applicable to a literature devoted to claiming and asserting a collective identity (see Krishnaswamy “Globalization”; and Mukherjee). Yet, as Alok Mukheree notes, Dalit literature’s commitment to collective identity cannot also be decoded as simply a “national allegory,” because even though its protagonists tend to be representative, the life stories and struggles of these protagonists “do not engage exclusively with colonialism and imperialism but also with Indian society’s internal contradictions” (Limbale 17). Theories associated with subaltern studies and postcolonial studies have not fared much better in their attempts to analyze or evaluate Dalit literature, in part because these theoretical models are dominated by the binary colonizer and colonized, and in part because they are overly reliant on a (postmodernist/poststructuralist) terminology of mobility and hybridity. Dalit literature complicates the binary world of colonizers and colonized by focusing on caste divisions within Indian society, exposing how a subjugated society can simultaneously be a subjugating society and how that subjugation can continue in a postcolonial independent India (A. Mukherjee 17). In fact, instead of categorically denouncing westernization and colonialism, Dalits have often selectively embraced modernity and sought colonial intervention. Dalit leaders such as Phule and Ambedkar did not give their support to the anticolonial nationalist movement automatically or unconditionally; instead they were quite prepared to enter into strategic conversations with the colonial rulers in order to obtain remedies for centuries of caste oppression. As a result, both bourgeois liberal and Marxist nationalists accused them of complicity with the colonial power during and after independence. “Postcolonial thought, of whatever ideological hue,” Alok Mukherjee observes, “has found it difficult to come to terms with this two-pronged move” (6). Because they refused to abide by the binary of Indian/national vs Western/colonial, it might seem that Ambedkar and other Dalit leaders were seeking the hybridity and mobility that uppercaste nationalists had access to and that postcolonial theory now celebrates as subversive and liberatory. But they were forced to remain within the prison house of caste. So, in drawing attention to the persistence, even proliferation, of binary forms of (caste) identity under conditions of uneven globalization in India, Dalit literature is implicitly questioning the optimistic claims of hybridity and mobility in contemporary cultural theory.

According to leading Dalit theorists, what gives Dalit literature its unique power and force is “Dalit chetna” or Dalit consciousness (Limbale 116–17; Valmiki 31). Rooted in Ambdekarite thought, Dalit chetna infuses literature with a social purpose and a commitment to justice. As Limbale puts it, “that work of Dalit literature will be recognized as beautiful, and, therefore ‘good,’ which causes the greatest awakening of Dalit consciousness in the reader” (117), a consciousness that, according to Valmiki and Limbale, defines and differentiates Dalit literature from other literatures.[23] Thus, they insist that, despite the revolutionary intent, bhakti literature and the fact that many of the bhakti poets were Dalits, bhakti literature neither expresses Dalit consciousness nor destroys (as does Dalit literature) the caste system. The spiritual terms and otherworldly concerns of bhakti poetry, Limbale contends, ultimately undermined its social criticism, gradually diluting its revolutionary message, which could then be domesticated and assimilated into dominant Hindu ideologies (49–51). In contrast, the aesthetics of contemporary Dalit literature, even though it originates in bhakti, is materialistic (Limbale 116). A more appropriate parallel to Dalit literature, Limbale believes, can be found in African-American literature: the first expressions of both were spiritual in form (87); both consider literature as an important weapon in the effort to achieve freedom and so give primacy to revolt (98); and because both literatures originate in social inequality, they require a form of criticism that includes sociological perspectives (99). Comments such as these expose new and different literary affiliations that go beyond simplistic oppositions between East and West or colonizer and colonized; indeed, they point us toward a transnational comparative study of apartheid narratives that may provide the basis for articulating an aesthetics of discrimination and dissent.[24]

New Beginnings 

The case for expanding the field of literary theory to non-Western poetics, criticisms, and commentaries, for moving away from the received notion of explicit poetics toward an alternative conception of “world literary knowledges” that includes “latent” and “emergent” epistemologies, obviously goes far beyond the pressing practical problems of pedagogy in world literature classes. After all, critical standards derived from one literary tradition may or may not be applicable to another (even though this has not prevented anyone from applying Western standards to non-Western literatures); criticism of particular writers and texts may or may not be meaningful to those who cannot read them in the original language, and so on. But there can be little doubt that at the level of epistemology the comparative study of different literary traditions can expand our common storehouse of aesthetic concepts and produce important insights about the nature of literature/literariness and the ways in which different societies/cultures view these categories. It also may lead us to discover what aesthetic concepts are universal, what concepts are limited to certain cultural traditions, and what concepts are unique to a particular tradition. We may likewise find that some literary features are common or shared by all languages, that some are limited to literatures written in certain languages, and that some are unique to a particular linguistic or literary tradition. These and other (unforeseen, unforeseeable) discoveries may further enable us to craft a more thoughtful response to the question of universals than the one we have at present (a hasty abandonment of all universals as always already oppressive and an equally hasty embrace of cultural relativism as always already emancipatory).[25] In a new field where basic research and scholarship is yet to be undertaken, it makes good sense to start out with an open mind about methodologies, at least until we are in a position to make more informed choices. As such, we may well have to entertain the possibility that the study of “world literary knowledges” will support projects grounded in positivistic, empirical, materialistic thought, as well those grounded in more anti-positivitistic, deconstructive, or hermeneutical thinking. When pursued in this open-ended and egalitarian way, the study of world literary knowledges could globalize the field of literary theory in a way that would also make the study of world literatures both intellectually rigorous and ethically grounded.

San José State University

Notes

An earlier version of this essay was presented as a plenary talk at the 5^th International Conference of the United States Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, April 8–11, 2009. I thank the audience for helpful feedback, and also the anonymous readers of Comparative Literature for insightful suggestions and constructive criticisms. Finally, I thank my father, N. Krishnaswamy, for explicating the finer points of the Tolkappiyam and for hunting down important references.

[1] For Hogan’s own account of this experience, see “Ethnocentrism” 1–14.

[2] These comments relate to the 2001 (first) edition of the Norton anthology only.

[3] My terminology (“dominant,” “emergent,” “latent”) is obviously drawn from Raymond Williams, although I use it more suggestively than systematically. Among the suggestive corollaries left unexplored here are the possibilities that both “emergent” and “latent” epistemologies may be either “alternative” or “oppositional,” that “latent” theories could be “residual,” and so on.

[4] For a helpful analysis of different practices in world literature courses, see Lawall.

[5] On the methods by which Rushdie’s magical realism is assimilated into Western theories of postmodernism, see Sangari, and Krishnaswamy “Mythologies of Migrancy.” On the ways in which Jameson’s theory of allegory reductively reads the third world in terms of the first, see Ahmad. Spivak discusses the problem of assimilation in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

[6] For an extended discussion of the vexing problem of “unity in diversity” as it relates to (comparative) Indian literature(s), see Ahmad, and Dev.

[7] For a Dalit critique of this project, see Satyanarayana; for a feminist critique, see Tharu, and Tharu and Lalita. Another useful analysis can be found in Trivedi.

[8] It is also worth noting that only twenty-five are women, and only two of these appear before the twentieth century. Norton has of course published a separate anthology of feminist theory and criticism, but it is likewise dominated by the West; only toward the second half of the twentieth century do names of minority/third-world critics begin to appear on the list.

[9] In the second edition of the Norton anthology (2010), which appeared just after this essay was completed, the editors have tried to expand the non-Western component by adding four more theorists to the modern period: C.D. Narasimhiah (India), Li Zehou (China), Kojin Karatani (Japan), and Paul Gilroy (“Black Atlantic”). While this is indeed a welcome move, these additions still fall into the predictable (and contemporary) categories of transnational black/race studies, nationalistic revivals of indigenous classical traditions, and East-West studies.

[10] Reacting to this kind of thinking, the nineteenth-century Indian Sanskritist R.G. Bhandarkar commented caustically: “there are very important branches of Sanskrit literature which are not understood in Germany and Europe . . . it appeared to me that works in the narrative or Puranic style and the dramatic plays were alone properly understood in Europe, while those written in the style of discourse or works of philosophy and exegesis were not” (qtd. in Staal 86–87).

[11] Examples include Ludescher, Matar, Longxi, Pan, Pandit, and Lehmann, as well as all of the essays in Hogan and Pandit; see also Krishnaswamy, “Nineteenth-century Language Ideology.”

[12] As Patrick Hogan shows (“Beauty” 6–8), several essays in the Dimock et al collection indulge in this kind of contrastive analysis. Pandit’s attempt to link the Sanskrit concept of dhvani  (suggestion) with Lacanian theory ("Dhvani and the ‘Full Word’") and Kashnabish’s attempt to synthesize Irigaray’s jouissance with Sri Aurobindo Ghosh’s ananda in order to define the “political sublime” stand out as refreshing departures from this trend.

[13] Responding to the Bernheimer report, Rey Chow argues that if we “simply substitute India, China, and Japan for England, France, and Germany,” the concept of literature is still “strictly subordinated to a social Darwinian understanding of the nation: ‘masterpieces’ correspond to ‘master’ nations and ‘master’ cultures. With India, China, and Japan being held as representative of Asia, cultures of lesser prominence in Western reception such as Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Tibet, and others simply fall by the wayside—as marginalized ‘others’ to the ‘other’ that is the ‘great’ Asian civilization” (109). This process is at work not only at the international level but also at the intra-national level, as my discussion of the Indian context here confirms.

[14] For the application of Sanskrit poetics to Western texts, see Pandit “Patriarchy and Paranoia” and “Non-Western Literary Theories.” For an attempt to compare Sanskrit Poetics and New Criticism see C.D. Narasimhaiah. Ramanujan’s application of terms from Tamil poetics (akam/puram) to ancient Tamil poetry is an instance of this kind of restricted application (262–69).

[15] Indeed, a few Tamil scholars (Pannikar; the essays collected in Selvamony, Nirmal, Nirmaldasan, and Rayson) draw on the concept of tinai to theorize the global and the planetary. Linking tinai with oikos  (habitat), Selvamony attempts to develop a form of ecocriticism or “oikopoetics” (“Oikopoetics” in Selvamony, Nirmal, and Nirmaldasan).

[16] For an extended discussion of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh’s literary criticism, including his use of Sanskrit poetics, see (in addition to Devy) Narasimhaiah. Whereas Narasimhaiah praises Aurobindo for reviving Sanskrit poetics, Devy argues that Aurobindo is a “colonial critic,” whose attempt to synthesize the High Sanskrit tradition with English Romantic aesthetics in order to inaugurate a new system of poetics is motivated by an elitist form of nationalism (112–16).

[17] The undifferentiated cultural formation commonly referred to as “bhakti” not only spans centuries but is also ideologically diverse. On the one hand, it includes texts that are composed in Sanskrit and quite conservative on matters of caste and gender (the Bhagavad Gita, for example). Aspects of (Ram) bhakti have also been co-opted by Hindu fundamentalism in recent years. On the other hand, there are also texts within the larger Sanskrit tradition (Vedantic works like the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad; the Yoga Sutra) that contest social hierarchies, even though the Sanskrit Ritual School tends to be quite rigid and conservative. In this essay I focus rather selectively on certain oppositional strands of bhakti in order to identify their literary practices as latent sources of literary knowledge.

[18] Ramanujan also notes that vacana means prose, for poetry was associated with the Sanskritic status quo (37).

[19] This and other aspects of bhakti may be fruitfully compared to other mystic traditions including Islamic and Christian ones.

[20] Bhakti poetry remains the bedrock of popular cultural consciousness and artistic expression in all the regional languages of India, and no classical Indian musician’s or dancer’s repertoire is complete without the compositions of the bhakti poets. Although important bhakti works were composed in the colonial period (the nineteenth-century compositions of Annamayya, Thyagaraja, and others are central to Carnatic music), they cannot simply be explained in terms of colonialism/nationalism.

[21] Gita Hariharan retrieves the oppositional literary politics and liberatory erotics of medieval bhakti to critique present-day Hindu fundamentalism and its distorted cultural politics in her recent novel In Times of Siege.

[22] Thatte, Jawdekar, and others, however, contend that there is no reason for rasa theory to be discarded when it can be revised and improved to account for Dalit aesthetics.

[23] For an extended analysis of the origins of Dalit chetna, see Zelliot; for Dalit chetna within literary criticism, see Brueck. For a heated debate over whether “Dalit” denotes an essential identity based on birth and the experience of untouchability (i.e., only Dalits can produce Dalit literature and Dalit chetna) or represents a critical perspective that even non-Dalits can consciously adopt (like feminism), see Ruwat and the essays in Rao.

[24] Ashis Nandy has suggested that suffering could serve as the basis for an ethical transnational­ism or cosmopolitanism (440-60). Dalit literature, along with other trauma/apartheid texts, could provide a literary archive for such a project.

[25] Breaking with the deconstructive mode of much postcolonial criticism, Satya Mohanty draws on the Chomskyan notion of universal grammar to argue that “unless we come up with some common criteria by which to judge or evaluate right and wrong, good and bad, in cultures and literatures, we may avoid ethnocentric errors, but we have also by the same logic precluded . . . disagreement about the way the world is or about the right course of action in a particular situation” (Literary Theory 144). Building on Mohanty’s ideas, Esha Niyogi De has suggested that, despite a strong “strain of male nationalist nostalgia,” Rabindranath Tagore’s concepts of milan, samanjasya and sahit—concord, harmony, and harmony building—contain the seeds for a universalist poetics (48).

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