Introduction to New Work in Comparative Indian Literatures and Cultures

Abstract

For the thematic issue New Work in Comparative Indian Literatures and Cultures 14.2 (2012) of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture — following a widely distributed call for papers — we selected new work about literatures in Indian languages by scholars in India, as well as worldwide. We paid close attention to work in the comparative and contextual perspective within the widest definition of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of comparative cultural studies as stated in the aims and objectives of the journal. articles in the journal's thematic issue at hand contain a range of work with regard to genre and period. New Work in Comparative Indian Literatures and Cultures contains the following articles: Africa and India in the Novels of Dai and by Debarshi Prasad Nath and Juri Dutta. They discuss the work of two writers belonging to different continents, India and Nigeria. Interestingly, the novels of the two writers Dutta is analyzing — Lummer Dai and Buchi Emecheta —never heard of each other. Both novels are based on the custom of bride price, both writers speak out against the stifling rigidity of traditional customs, and uphold aspects of modernity in languages other than their native tongues. At the same time, both writers affirm the sanctity of the traditional institutions and customs. Emecheta relates her novel through the woman's voice and describes the limited choices available for her protagonist against the overarching presence of the traditional institutions. Dai's novel, on the other hand, presents a more optimistic picture regarding the possibility of change through his protagonist who successfully overcomes the immediate obstacles on her way to self-fulfillment. The Idea of England in Eighteenth-century Indian Travel Writing by Amrita Satapathy who discusses how Dean Mahomed's 1794 Travels of Dean Mahomed maps out territories of the mind of the colonizer and the colonized, how the narrative redefines contours of two diverse communities and cultures, and determines forms of cultural representations. Mahomed's Travels presented for the first time the idea of England from an Indian immigrant's point of view and altered the prejudiced outlook of early Western travel writings about the East. Mahomed's narrative opened an alternative vista for the wideeyed Easterner of the world of the West and exposed a life less ordinary lived by inhabitants of Cork,