Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture

Abstract

The thirteen essays in this volume are categorized under six headings, and the objective is multicultural comparatism, or more precisely, consider a wider range of similarities and differences, interactions and reactions, in order to understand better both the artistic form and the social import of any literature (xi). Patrick Colm Hogan addresses the biases that underlie the dichotomizing view of East/West. He urges that it would be more productive to trace commonalities and to identify and isolate the literary universals—the universal patterns of grammar, for instance. Hogan sets classical Sanskrit plays alongside classical Greek tragedies and the plays of Shakespeare. He shows that, contrary to Western perceptions of Indian literature, there has been as much transmutation of sources by Kalidasa as by Shakespeare, that the stylized formula of Sangam poetry has room for innovation, and that deus ex machina sequences in the classics of both Indian and European drama are not randomly imposed but work from within the structure through mimetic and symbolic unities. Hogan also lists various topics of possible comparative studies between Indian and European literatures, such as the practice of considering optimum length of lines.