Chapter 4 - Re-Gifting Theory to Europe : The Romantic Worlds of Nineteenth-Century India

Summary

Abstract

How was intellectual exchange in the colonies a vital arena for the ferment of twentieth-century theory, especially of foundational figures? This chapter explores the colonial connections between Romantic thought and the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (1850-1882) combined Herderian ideas about the naturalness of language, Kantian notions of the beautiful and the sublime, and, significantly, Sanskrit aesthetics’ tradition of implication in poetry to formulate a redefinition of literature that syncopated with his global zeitgeist. But the ideas from Sanskrit were the same ideas and texts that give rise to Saussure's Course in General Linguistic. I revisit this moment in order to expose the global dimension of theory, showcasing colonial entanglements in a way that questions the originality of thinkers such as Saussure.

Keywords: Marathi; Romanticism; Sanskrit; Saussure; World Literature

There is a relatively straight line that connects Romantic theorists of poetry from William Jones, Johann Herder, through Hegel, John Stuart Mill, to Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (viṣṇuśāstrī cipaḷuṇkara, 1850-1883). Who?—you may ask of the latter person. And there is an equally straight line that connects that same person, Chiplunkar, to the early twentieth-century grammarians such as Ferdinand Saussure and William D. Whitney. This chapter explores these connections, especially the figure of Chiplunkar, in order to describe how romantic poetic theories migrated during the course of the nineteenth century, creating and inflecting notions of literature's worldliness that are central to this volume's theme. Worldliness was intimately connected with the way literature was said to operate, to describe its poetic “force” that gave a literary work dimensions that exceeded the type-set, rectangular, space of the printed word. This chapter some processes that chart the fortunes of “literature” and “literariness” as concepts in western India, their relationship to larger, global currents, and their worldly dimension. As may be evident, the lexicon of the “world” is largely drawn from recent and slightly older work in literary studies—especially Pheng Cheah's distinction between the “world” as an ontological category and the “globe” as a space in which literature circulates—but my point here is not to reinforce that genealogy, but rather almost to forget it, until the very end of this chapter, in order to deploy alternative, rooted (worldly), but nonetheless connected (global) conceptual bases for analysis.