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22 - The Multilingual Local: Worlding Literature in India

from Part IV - Cartographic Shifts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

By
Francesca Orsini
Edited by
Debjani Ganguly
Debjani Ganguly
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

Literary history in South Asia can be neither simply national nor monolingual. Its multilingualism has implications for doing world literature from a South Asian perspective, which does not follow a neat process of distillation from local to regional to national to world. Rather, it requires us to consider multiple co-existing languages (“multilingual locals”) and multiple levels and circuits of circulation that change over time in response to political, ideological, and aesthetic shifts. Paying attention to the media through which literature has circulated into and out of Indian languages, English included, and across regions and countries (“significant geographies”) is also important. We then are able to consider the relative visibility and familiarity of Indian and world literature, “thick” and “thin” readerly encounters, and the local production of world literature in new and interesting ways.

Keywords

multilingualismIndiaperiodicals/magazinesCold War
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of World Literature , pp. 411 - 428
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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