Modern Indian Literature as Cosmopolis

Focusing on "movable centres" and "planetary suburbs," taking up "glocal forms and genres," opening up the "unfinished/unfinishable puzzle" of "India" as a "world model" and simultaneously "dislodging it from its homeness," Didier Coste engages with the full potential of doing Comparative Literature in present times. His reading of a dizzying range of "Indian" texts and communities in an ardent, incisive, and imaginative manner with Hanuman's "flickering torch in hand" will be of immediate interest to scholars in different fields trying to locate and understand the implications of recomposed relational selves open to new forms of creativity.

Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta taught Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her recent edited volumes include Critical Discourse in Bangla, 2022 (with Subrata Sinha) and Figures of Transcontinental Multilingualism, 2018 (with K. Alfons Knauth).

Didier Coste presents in full bloom what Goethe would have just about sown the seeds for in his "Conversations with Eckermann"-the great herbarium of World Literature. For, when asked to fetch just one herb to revive the fatally wounded Lakshmana, Hanuman would have rather lifted and brought the whole herbarium, nay the entire mountain. In his provocative metaphorics of conversations with this Hanuman-whose place in the bamboo groves is playfully interchanged with Goethe's in Weimar-with Eckermann and himself as interlocutors, Coste reimagines World Literature through the prism of Modern Indian Literature-a truly cosmopolitical and planetary gesture indeed. And, what a fantastic effort it has turned out to be, such a wonderful and thought-provoking book... a must-read!

Saugata Bhaduri is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His books include Polycoloniality: European Transactions with Bengal from the 13th to the 19th Century (2020), Perspectives on Comparative Literature and Culture in the Age of Globalization (2010), and Translating Power (2008).