SAC Speaker Series
Ten Theses on the Idea of Indian Literature

Lecture from Preetha Mani, Assistant Professor of South Asian Literatures
Rutgers University

This hybrid event will be offered in person and online via Zoom. Free registration is required to join the Zoom event.

Abstract

Based on my recent book, this talk compares Hindi and Tamil literature to explore the feasibility and durability of the idea of Indian literature and its capacity to collect diverse literary and linguistic strategies and aims beneath the auspices of a single rubric. Hindi and Tamil writers were active theorists who claimed the literary as the terrain on which to define and contest the postcolonial condition. Their theorizations created new forms of aesthetic affiliation between readers, writers, and texts by framing how texts should be positioned and received. The affiliations they forged were tied to the fissures of language and region yet also exceeded these fissures through the promise of readerly communion in multilingualism and translation. The unrealizability of this promise breathes life into the idea of Indian literature and its ambition to circumvent the politics of language, while linking literature to nation.

About Preetha Mani

I am a literary comparatist focusing on issues of translation, genre, feminist and postcolonial theory, and world literature. My specialization is in twentieth-century Hindi and Tamil literature and literary history with an emphasis on how these rich traditions converse with other literatures of India and the world. I approach the study of literature through close textual reading combined with a firm rootedness in how understandings of the relationship between literature and society have changed over time. I have an enduring interest in the relationship between gender and genre and the popular and the literary, which informs my ongoing work on the comparative study of Indian and world literatures, translation studies, and women’s writing in South Asia.