There is a relatively straight line that connects Romantic theorists of poetry from William Jones, Johann Herder, through Hegel, John Stuart Mill, to Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (viṣṇuśāstrī cipaḷuṇkara, 1850-1883). Who?—you may ask of the latter person. And there is an equally straight line that connects that same person, Chiplunkar, to the early twentieth-century grammarians such as Ferdinand Saussure and William D. Whitney. This chapter explores these connections, especially the figure of Chiplunkar, in order to describe how romantic poetic theories migrated during the course of the nineteenth century, creating and inflecting notions of literature's worldliness that are central to this volume's theme. Worldliness was intimately connected with the way literature was said to operate, to describe its poetic “force” that gave a literary work dimensions that exceeded the type-set, rectangular, space of the printed word. This chapter some processes that chart the fortunes of “literature” and “literariness” as concepts in western India, their relationship to larger, global currents, and their worldly dimension. As may be evident, the lexicon of the “world” is largely drawn from recent and slightly older work in literary studies—especially Pheng Cheah's distinction between the “world” as an ontological category and the “globe” as a space in which literature circulates—but my point here is not to reinforce that genealogy, but rather almost to forget it, until the very end of this chapter, in order to deploy alternative, rooted (worldly), but nonetheless connected (global) conceptual bases for analysis.