Practices, Constructions and Deconstructions of “World Literature” and “Indian Literature” from the PEN All-India Centre to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Direction d'ouvrage : Francesca Orsini, Laetitia Zecchini

Publisher : special issue "The Locations of (World) Literature: Perspectives from Africa and South Asia"

Journal : Journal of World LIterature

Voir l’article en open access: https://brill.com/view/journals/jwl/4/1/article-p82_5.xml

This essay explores two different ways by which ideas and “problems” of the “world,” “India,” “Indian literature,” and “world literature” were experienced, discussed, translated, imagined and remade in specific spaces like Bombay or journals such as The Indian PEN. I focus on one relatively formalized organization, the PEN All-India Centre, which was founded in Bombay in 1933 as the Indian branch of International PEN, and on a contemporary poet, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and the informal network of writers and artists close to him. Through the widely different agendas, practices, concerns, contexts and forms of writer collectivization which I outline in this essay, the PEN All-India Centre in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Bombay poets of the 1960s did try to eat the corners of the world and of world literature away. They aimed to break on the world stage, reclaimed an “India” that included what was non-Indian, and put forward, through translation and a cut-and-paste “collation” of the world and world literature, an idea of internationalism and interconnectedness where provincialism was the enemy. By discussing the situated, critical, and imaginative processes of reworlding that were at stake, and the struggles they gave rise to in the case of the PEN All-India Centre, I explore how these writers also put forward defiant practices of cosmopolitanism that reallocated the Eastern and the Western, the peripheral and the significant.

Thematic axes : Approches historiques des modernités littéraires et artistiques, Dynamiques interculturelles, Politiques des littératures et des arts : enjeux et situations

Research programmes : AHRC (2017-2021) "The Impact of non-governmental writers’ organisations on free expression"

Keywords : Literature, Indian Studies, Postcolonial studies