You are cordially invited to join us for a presentation by:
PROF. PREETHA MANI
“Comparative Worldings: The Case of Indian Literatures”
Through the juxtaposition of the Indian-English, Hindi, and Tamil literary spheres, this talk argues for a focus on how writers and texts perform acts of “worlding,” rather than defining which texts belong in the global literary canon, as contemporary scholarship has done. Such acts mobilize “world literature” to define certain texts as “literary,” while simultaneously concealing other existing literary processes and social relations.
Exploring how prominent writing circles in London, North India, and Madras “worlded” Indian literature reveals not only that the national language question engendered multiple politics of literary translation, but also that a theory of translation underpins any conception of world literature.
What a comparative worlding approach offers, then, is attention to the political stakes in framing relations between region, nation, and world. More specifically, it shows how processes of worlding — whether at the scale of the regional, the national, or the global — elevate some texts and exclude others from the category of the “literary.”
The unique approaches to translation and Indian literature that these writers formulated in response to the national language debate illustrate multiple and varied acts of worlding, offering alternative avenues through which to understand the categories of Indian and world literature.