Buddhadev Bose, the Bengali poet, critic, and academic, set out to write his ideas behind introducing comparative literature in India. He posits comparative literature as a discipline of non-specialization, “an eclectic study.” It is a “corrective to the excess of esoterism which now prevails in academic circles.” Although Comparative Literature “needs the knowledge of languages,” it is “not a language school.” Bose’s idea of comparatism as a method was centred on translation. Although the initial impulse was to study Indian classical and native languages alongside other literatures, one of the most important outcomes of the comparative method was the conceptualization of the idea of Indian literature. It entered the curriculum as a separate comparative category to be studied in the curriculum in the 1970s (Dasgupta 2016, 12). The intention behind the introduction was not to assert national identity. Instead, if studying comparative literature meant “studying a text within a network of relations,” the geographic area of the Indian nation-state proved to be a “contiguous space” where one encountered “shared histories with differences” (Dasgupta 2016, 12).

A discipline which was meant to provide a non-professionalized humanistic enquiry into literature found its grounding while establishing a comparative method to conceptualize a national literature, and, eventually, other non-textual forms of creative expression. Other attempts towards comparatism in allied fields, such as theatre and performance studies, have found a similar trajectory. While the idea of intercultural theatre in the 1970s and 80s rested on a promise of finding universal behaviours through anthropological explorations in the Global South (usually by white, male directors from the Global North), postcolonial critics such as Rustom Bharucha offered the idea of “intracultural theatre” where the complexities of a performance culture within the boundaries of a nation-state could be studied.

Bose’s idea of a non-professionalized humanistic enquiry in the discipline of comparative literature eventually became a method in self-reflection. It was not a reflection of the world outside, though that too was necessary for a self-reflexive contemplation to happen. The trajectory of national self-recognition of national literatures or other allied national art forms could happen through a comparative method. While this was the course that a comparative method took in India, the same can be said of other postcolonial nations in the Global South. 

Since the comparative method was central to the imperial project,  we invite abstracts which enquire if concepts such as the postcolony or the nation still be considered within world/ comparative methodologies in postcolonial regions? We are especially interested in inquiries into comparative methods on forms (including non-literary forms such as performance) and genres in which political forms (such as the nation or the world) could be mapped.