We begin this journey with Delhi Comparatists to envision a new course in literary studies, one that can find its nesting place within the domain of comparative literature. Yet no journey is completely new, severed from its past, and we know that within the past there were trajectories sustaining its future. The space where one engages with Comparative Literature determines its priorities, its objects of attention, and hence the foregrounding of the city and the Department of Modern Indian Languages in the University of Delhi that began in 1961 and was renamed Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in 1992. Many among the members of the Delhi Comparatists trace their affiliation to the department. An M.Phil. course was started in the department in 1977 and an M.A. course in Comparative Indian Literature in 1994. It also needs to be mentioned here that the formation of composite M.A. courses involving two languages in the department of Hindi at the University of Delhi and the seminar on Comparative Literature held at G.D. Salwan College, now Delhi College of Arts and Science, in 1977 served to provide the necessary impetus to the formation of a group interested in Comparative Literature. This is the premise that we have in mind as we begin, taking into consideration the model that was emerging, and gradually, we intend to move forward with attempts to look at the journey of the discipline in the country as well, underscoring areas of strength in each case and arriving at particularities sustaining each effort from perspectives that are both grounded and planetary. An integrated stage of course, throughout our journey, will be the appreciation and critique of older perspectives, reframing of models and finally the inclusion of rejuvenating viewpoints of young scholars.
The first volume is planned as a glance into history as we present four essays written by four of the earliest professors in the department, an essay by one of the first faculty members in the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, and then to link the past with the present, an essay by a comparatist from SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. Four of the six essays in this volume had been published before, and we have reproduced them without introducing any significant change. We are grateful to the copyright holders Mrs Sarmistha Dasgupta and Mrs Susmita Das for their generosity in giving us permission to reproduce the articles by Professor R.K. Dasgupta and Professor Sisir Kumar Das respectively. We are indebted to Jadavpur University for granting us permission to reproduce the article by Father Robert Antoine, S J. We also wish to thank all reviewers for their valuable comments. As for us editors, Satyanath, brought together a group of students in the department and started working in a multimodal empirical manner to establish a comparative study of literary historiography in India around 2008. The effort led to several M.Phil. and Ph.D. dissertations on a variety of themes on Indian literature involving medieval Indian literature, indigenous expressive forms, intermediality, and dense archives. This eventually led to the formation of Delhi Comparatists. Subha traces her affiliation to Jadavpur University where she was engaged in several research projects under the Special Assistance Programme. She was the Coordinator of the Programme for more than a decade. She spent the last three years of her teaching career in the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies and had a rich interaction with students of the M.Phil. course on Comparative Indian Literature. The M.Phil group had students from almost every state in the country. Both of us were in conversation for decades, and that was a source of sustenance in our many endeavours. We were both trying to move towards the framing of a literary historiography from a comparative perspective, with attention towards the marginalised in literary discourse, and to an extent, that remains our agenda as we try to integrate the scholarship in the area from diverse fields. We owe it to Professor Amitava Chakraborty from MILLS and former students of the department who revived the group, thought of the journal, and invited us as editors. We express our deep gratitude to all members of the Advisory Board for their encouragement and to the Editorial Board for assistance and support. Finally, we wish to put on record that it would not have been possible to publish this volume without the constant help of the Assistant Editor, Dr. Dhurjjati Sarma. We cannot thank him because this volume also belongs to him. We also wish to thank Ms. Shahina Khanam and Mr. Kausik Nandi for their help in bringing out this issue.