5 - Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature

Summary

This chapter revisits the nineteenth-century idea of Weltliteratur through colonial histories. It argues that world literature in the nineteenth century does not name a corpus, a space, or even a problem in literary history. It does not even refer to one single history or one singular event as the origin point for a planetary vision of literature. Rather, it directs one to the confluence of global histories that produced a modern idea of literature and some of the critical tools that constituted the new discipline of literary studies. The material condition for this confluence was provided by modern European empires and their meticulous arrangements for colonial governance, sustained through painstaking engagement with different linguistic and scribal traditions. This argument is fleshed out through close readings of the works of a host of colonial officials stationed in British India and their local interlocutors, and through their method of “colonial philology.” Colonial archives and philological methods, this paper suggests, provide one of the early genealogies of world literature as an idea.