while the study of India’s many literary traditions has grown in strength in universities outside of India. The emerging concept of world literature has much to gain from debates that have long held sway within the study of the subcontinent.

The study of Indian literature has helped us think about the tension between the ‘world’ and the ‘nation’ as the proper adjective to describe literature. Are these competitive, mutually exclusive, intersecting, or complementary? As early as the mid-1960s, Indian literary scholars were thinking about world literature as a category that did not usurp, but in fact relied upon, the concept of the nation. In the 1990s Indian writers such as Amitav Ghosh argued that works could come to be perceived as world literature precisely because of their local inflections. Ghosh argued that the aspiration to join the ranks of world literature inspired the invention of the local: writers produced elaborate visions of particular places precisely to convey these life-worlds across cultural borders. This view of world literature sought to reveal how literature can participate in multiple worlds simultaneously, challenging the idea that worldliness is divorced from the local and questioning the idea that the indigenous is insulated from the world.

Indian literature has wrestled with the question of comparative language that haunts the concept of world literature. Western theorists have sometimes assumed that since the ‘nation’ is the provenance of the specialist and the ‘world’ the provenance of the generalist, we are somehow able to know a nation intimately, in a way that we can never know the world. Yet India has long had to grapple with internal heterogeneity, long historical duration, and robust multilingualism. India is more comparable to Europe than to France, while the problem of multilingual readerships and aesthetics has long been a feature of Indian Anglophone production. In the historical novel The Glass Palace (2000), for instance, Ghosh invites us to think about the dizzying array of languages used in everyday life in 19th- and 20th-century South and Southeast Asia. Ghosh’s characters shift languages, on average, once every six pages, and no single figure has mastery over all the different tongues that appear in the novel. If the concept of world literature raises anxieties about our inability as scholars to command so many languages, writers like Ghosh remind us that nations like India have long turned this very impossibility into a fruitful opportunity for linguistic exchange. Reading and researching Indian literature has required both lay and scholarly readers to think closely about the uses of translation, and to meditate on how encounters with a foreign language can shift our perspectives on the languages we know well.

Indian literary studies have further grappled with world literature’s animating tension between different ethical and political approaches to internationalism. Some of these approaches take us into the heart of imperialism and its legacies, while others look outward to new forms of solidarity or sympathy across social borders. Indian literary study has drawn close attention to the material asymmetries of global circulation, where some kinds of literature pass more easily around the world than do others. Literature in English, for instance, gains far more global publicity than literature in Tamil or Hindi, revealing the uneven topographies of world literature. Finally, Indian literature has long grappled with the prominent role of the diaspora, which has in many ways fractured conventional ideas of ‘Indian literature’.

Just as crucially, Indian literature has been a source of key critiques of world literature. Is this model another aspect of Western imperialism that reinstates the West as the implicit centre of literature under the pretence of cosmopolitan forms of reading? Does world literature implicitly privilege writers in the diaspora, such as Salman Rushdie, over less famous writers, such as Shashi Deshpande, who work within national geographies? And if the diaspora has complicated the idea of Indian identity, has it not also served to fossilise particular images of the subcontinent? Metropolitan reading publics have often taken writers of Indian descent as native informants who provide a sociological window of ‘truth’, while Indian audiences have sometimes interpreted such sociological assumptions negatively, critiquing writers of the diaspora for inauthentic portraits of Indian life. The very idea of worldliness seems to founder within these poles of reading.

But Indian literature, broadly speaking, has also become a wellspring for a new confidence in a sometimes exuberant mode of world literature. Recent scholars have pointed to the rise of new Indian novels, such as Jamyang Norbu’s The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (1999), which despite its clear invocation of British literature is much less interested in Western colonialism than in using the global spread of English to address alternative imperial forces, such as China in Tibet. Recent years have also witnessed the rise of new ways of understanding how Indians have read Western literature, moving away from older models which stress such reading as a form of internal colonialism and towards newer models that illuminate the complex forms of creativity that transnational reading requires. Indian reading and writing practices are not necessarily in tension with Western or other traditions. When contemporary Indian literature, for example, speaks directly to its readers, it inherits the techniques both of British realist novels and of Indian oral storytelling forms. Indeed, we might see in these texts the influences of numerous, sometimes indeterminable ancestors.

Indian literature is also at the forefront of suggesting how world literature might de-centre the West. We are beginning to see a resurgence of interest in a world literature of the global South, which draws upon often submerged Bandung-style histories of aesthetic connections across the globe. These intimacies between Indian and, for example, Indonesian literature, not only dethrone Western conceptions of world literature but also show how, paradoxically, Western canonical institutions (like the Nobel Prize in literature) have heightened the visibility of these different parts of the global South to one another.

Indian literary studies offer promising angles for world literature. They bring an acute sensitivity to the material conditions under which literature gains visibility in different parts of the world; an acknowledgement of the usefulness of translation for legitimate scholarship, as used in literary histories of India; an awareness of competing ideas of ‘worlding’ in different literary traditions, as shown by emerging work on Hindi and Tamil; an attentiveness to histories of inequality and oppression; and an increasing confidence that working within international or intercultural systems does not necessarily eviscerate local connections. Most crucially, the precedent of Indian literature suggests that we do not need to agree on one single model of what ‘world literature’ is or should be: the multiplicity of worlds may be what makes the concept maddening, but also what makes it rich and useful.

Shameem Black is a Research Fellow at the School of Cultural Inquiry, Australian National University.

This article appeared in the most recent edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Ideas from India’.