By Sheldon Pollock
A grand synthesis of remarkable scope, Literary Cultures in historical past is the 1st finished background of the wealthy literary traditions of South Asia. jointly those traditions are unequalled of their blend of antiquity, continuity, and multicultural complexity, and are a distinct source for realizing the improvement of language and mind's eye through the years. during this remarkable quantity, a global group of well known students considers fifteen South Asian literary traditions--including Hindi, Indian-English, Persian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Urdu--in their complete ancient and cultural variety.
The quantity is united through a twofold theoretical target: to appreciate South Asia via taking a look at it in the course of the lens of its literary cultures and to reconsider the perform of literary heritage by way of incorporating non-Western different types and strategies. The questions those seventeen essays ask are consequently large, starting from the nature of cosmopolitan and vernacular traditions to the impression of colonialism and independence, indigenous literary and aesthetic thought, and modes of functionality. a cosmopolitan assimilation of views from specialists in anthropology, political technological know-how, historical past, literary experiences, and faith, the publication makes a landmark contribution to historic cultural experiences and to literary idea as well as the recent views it deals on what literature has intended in South Asia.
(Available in South Asia from Oxford college Press--India)
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Additional resources for Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia
Sample text
There are complex reasons for this state of affairs, and briefly reviewing them will help to situate the present project in relation to the many practical, historical, and theoretical challenges it has had to face. ” ACTUALLY EXISTING LITERARY HISTORY A good place to begin is with the history of literary studies, and especially the history of literary history, in South Asia itself, especially since the understanding of literatures in their places of origin is crucially important, both as a problem and as a problematic, to the contributors to this book.
What seems to distinguish Bangla literary culture are the processes inaugurated with the con- 18 introduction solidation of British colonialism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is crucial to recognize what is often ignored: that we do not all live in the same Now, as Ernst Bloch put it—that the rhythms of historical change are as variable across South Asia as they are anywhere else, and that, as a case in point, the force of the colonial impact on Bangla literature was different from what occurred in Kannada, Sindhi, or Telugu.
A good example of history as doing things with the past is found in the genre of the tazkirah in Persian and Urdu. In chapter 15, Frances Pritchett explores in detail the complexities of this form of “remembrance” (the root meaning of tazkirah), at once genealogical, critical, and anecdotal. Its visions of a literary culture may not be reducible to a simple chronology, but it everywhere produces some past by assembling the poets who count in the literary tradition. Remarkably, as argued by Muzaffar Alam in chapter 2, what may have been the first such tazkirah in Persian was produced not in Iran but in the Panjab (in the Lubab al-albab of Sadid al-Din Muhammad ªAuf i, d.