Rabindranath Tagore and "world literature"

My aim in this essay is to illuminate the need to accommodate Tagore's vision in contemporary world literary theory ("world literature" studies) and to suggest how the neglect of Tagore from a theoretical perspective illustrates the central and symptomatic problem of the field. A nomenclatural aid that seeks to bring to world/global citizens of today the irrefutable proof of a small world and the globalisation of culture, this "new" world literature continues to fight some old battles: the meeting of East and West, nationalism versus internationalism, the absolute necessity of linguistic diversity and the paradoxical effect of translation on the language pool, the place of the university in our public lives and a continuation of the idea that peace and prosperity, security and solidarity, may be achieved through the ideological vehicle of literature. This essay gestures towards how one may "don world literature in an age that is still deeply invested in the nineteenth-century legacy of the nation-state, where the borders of geographical territories and the boundaries of intellectual imaginaries are not only not porous or limitless but are increasingly surveilled and managed. My argument is divided into two parts. The first part rehearses some of the recurrent assumptions specific to recent debates in world literature studies. It interrogates the investments of Western monolingual and monocultural conceptualisations of literature and expands upon its nineteenth-century, binary-driven paradigms. It then situates Tagore under the rubric of comparative literature studies in the local Indian context, where the idea of world literature is in direct contradistinction to how it is understood in the "global" metropolitan academy. The second part resurrects Tagore's expansive vision of world literature to suggest an alternative vision of how world literature studies may be revamped and reconfigured. Reading Tagore's vision of visva sabitya, this essay speculates upon a far more porous, promiscuous and productive genealogy of literature that derives from Asian traditions and radicalises the very idea of what we may mean by the "literary" in our contemporary world.