The East India Company and the translation of legal documents has much more to do with the origin of literature than we could have ever imagined.

This Monday, I attended Baidik Bhattacharya’s presentation of his new book, Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters. Hosted by the Comparative Literature and Translation Studies department at Barnard, the event consisted of an overview by Bhattacharya of the main aspects and arguments of his book and a subsequent, lively Q&A with the audience.

First, Emily Sun, the Tow Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies Director at Barnard, introduced Bhattacharya, who is an Associate Professor in the India Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Bhattacharya’s monograph, Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations, was published in 2018; his work has helped scholars understand the archeology of literary practice, as well as how to read beyond and across geographical regions.

“Modern literary culture was shaped mainly by colonialism,” is how Bhattacharya began his overview of Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters, which was published earlier this year. One of the main arguments of his text is that the concept of “literature” that we are familiar with today was born not with the German romantics—as is commonly believed—but with the translations of legal documents by colonial administrators in India. 

To explain this, he weaved a story which starts in the second half of the 18th century and revolves around expanding imperialism, especially that of the British colonies in the Indian subcontinent. The political administrators of these colonies wanted to combine “literary singularity [uniqueness in literature] and political sovereignty.” From this undertaking, we see the rise of a new political imagination, which marked a different model of colonialism than that of previous British colonies.

The East India Company (EIC), a British joint-stock company trading in the East Indies, invested largely in producing translations of Indian law as part of their pursuit for the integration of political sovereignty with the “customs and manners” of India. Colonial administrators soon started to write dictionaries of local phrases with the hope that such philological tools would make ruling these colonies easier. This move from politics to culture was even more evident with the surge of a “distinctively Oriental mode of writing” of administrators (especially in poetry), as well as when the EIC started requiring a “local languages examination” for everyone wishing to occupy an administrative position in their company. Gradually, a text-culture continuum developed in which literary sovereignty and political administration were intertwined; “literature and nation almost implied each other.”

Bhattacharya argued that literature was needed to understand the political atmosphere of “modernity.” He also explained the importance of translation in Europe’s second Oriental Renaissance, during which research on India’s culture and translations of its texts became widely available in England, Germany and France. This availability kicked off the colonial project of textualizing Indian cultural life. In turn, this brought about a massive change in the European landscape and brought to it a new aesthetic: an attempt at “a taming of Oriental culture” in which India became an “Other.” Finally, Bhattacharya explained in detail how colonial literature had shaped British and French literature, language practice and culture. He also encouraged the audience to “read beyond Europe and before Romanticism.”

During the Q&A portion, it was evident just how much students and professors in attendance felt highly engaged by Bhattacharya’s talk. Some of the audience’s questions touched upon topics like the differences between Bhattacharya’s “literary sovereign” and Edward Said’s expansive definition of Orientalism, and the way in which the people colonized reciprocated the literature produced by their political sovereigns. Most interestingly, Bhattacharya talked about how modern literature is a fairly recent idea—born in the 18th century—since literature used to mean “learning” or “skilled in letters,” and it only came to mean what we now understand it to be due to colonial encounters.

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