In Chapter 5, I follow this lead further and demonstrate that one of the most prominent sites where this new aesthetic regime and its colonial history was articulated most forcefully was the nineteenth-century French novel. Discussing Jacques Rancière’s influential work on novels by Balzac and Flaubert and his suggestion of the new idea of literature emerging through the “democratic petrification” of writing, this chapter shows how the context of such a development in France was historically much wider than developments within its national borders. Instead of thinking the historicity of literature through Europe alone, this chapter shows how the literary sovereign shaped the central ideas of textualization and readability through colonial documents, translations, textual representation of the orient, and so on. This textual history is then embedded within larger registers of visuality in contemporary French cultures that extended the colonial paradigm further.

In Chapter 1, I explore in detail – through official and personal papers, published translations, letters exchanged between colonial officials, prefaces and commentaries, and so on – how the Company officials, in close collaboration with their local pandits and munshis, produced a tradition of what I call ethnographic recension that anchored an ethnographic world within the very space of a legal or literary text. Coming between the Renaissance humanists such as Politian, Desiderius Erasmus, and Joseph Scaliger on the one hand and nineteenth-century textual scholars such as Karl Lachmann on the other, these colonial administrators introduced a new model of textual authority by combining philology and ethnology that was the first move to mark the newness of colonial knowledge. This ethnographic world was seen as a guarantor of textual authenticity, but its very inclusion set off the dual career of the literary sovereign – its role in defining what is literary, and its participation in political sovereignty.

In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, this book argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows it through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light.

Chapter 3 explores colonial archives to unearth two models of comparatism – one diachronic or chronological and the other synchronic or territorial. The first model emerged from Jones’s works, both his translations and his speculative essays in Asiatick Researches, covering a broad range of subjects such as Indian chronology, astronomy, literary history, and so on. Along with this, and in explicit opposition, the second model was developed by colonial officials such as Brian H. Hodgson and W. W. Hunter through their copious comparative vocabularies: Hodgson’s numerous essays published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society after 1847 and Hunter’s A Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia, with a Dissertation (1868). The potential of these two phases was fully realized in the ambitious Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) under the supervision of George Abraham Grierson. My claim in this chapter is that, with Grierson’s attempt to enumerate and describe modern Indian vernaculars, and his seamless mixing of colonial structures and linguistic knowledge in the survey, we encounter the full range of the comparative method for the first time.

My wager in this book is that the modern idea of the literary as a sovereign order of textuality since the late eighteenth century – autonomous, autotelic, and singular – was coproduced with an extraordinary model of colonial sovereignty in the far-flung colony of British India. I track the proliferation of this model of the literary sovereign then through the conceptual grid of Weltliteratur or world literature and show how this colonial history made its mark across literary cultures in Europe. From the eighteenth century onward, this colonial history shaped and reshaped literary cultures on a global scale, and laid the foundations of what can be defined as the modern culture of letters.

Chapter 6 explores the gradual development of English literary history to trace how the autonomous and performative being of the literary came to be enframed within the nation, and how literary texts were seen as unmistakable expressions of national spirit. Some of these ideas were first expressed as part of the literary sovereign paradigm, and were reinforced through the successive stages of its travel across geographies. After the initial impetus from the colonial administrators, the idea of the literary and the nation as conjoined entities in history received a further elaboration in two publications from 1808 – Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Both Schlegel and Fichte identified unbroken literary tradition as the most organic expression of a nation, and both advocated for a “literature” in vernaculars as the most legitimate ground for a national history. However, the bulk of this chapter traces the new discipline of literary history in England, from Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry (1774–81) to Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) and beyond.

In Chapter 4, I discuss the idea of Weltliteratur and argue that it was one of the most successful tools through which Europe negotiated with and made sense of the colonial history of the literary sovereign. Though mostly associated with Goethe, its clearest outlines were available through a combination of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Weltliteratur, I argue, is the culmination of a set of ideas Kant introduced to account for the peculiar nature of the power of judgment or taste – that such judgments cannot have any a priori or universal principles and yet claim universality. Whether framed as the beautiful or the sublime, he suggested, such claims remained contingent, relying on a communal consensus that could have been established only according to anthropological principles. Kantian aesthetics is “impure” as it always and already relies on something external to it, that cannot be made sense of within the borders set by aesthetic judgment itself. Similarly, Weltliteratur was a combination of aesthetic and anthropological principles, advocating a form of comparative judgment replicating the Kantian model.

The idea of textual autonomy and singularity was secured not so much by the transparency of translation but by the opacity of what was essentially untranslatable. These untranslatables might include anything from ethnographic details of local cultures to “exotic” religious or literary practices, but the central point remained that their impermeability was a necessary guarantor of textual integrity and authenticity. Across literary and legal translations like Charles Wilkins’s The Bhăgvăt-Gēētā (1785) and The Hĕĕtōpādēs of Vĕĕshnŏŏ-Sărmā (1787), Charles Hamilton’s The Hedāya, or Guide (1791), and William Jones’s Al Shirājiyyah (1792), I argue, the untranslatable emerged as a political category, as an essential ingredient of the literary sovereign. This political character of the untranslatable was eventually ratified in the sensational impeachment trial of Hastings. Analyzing the speeches and other documents from the trial, I demonstrate how the untranslatable Indian culture became the central point of contention, and how it was the autonomy of this cultural core that determined the course of colonial governance.

This chapter revisits the nineteenth-century idea of Weltliteratur through colonial histories. It argues that world literature in the nineteenth century does not name a corpus, a space, or even a problem in literary history. It does not even refer to one single history or one singular event as the origin point for a planetary vision of literature. Rather, it directs one to the confluence of global histories that produced a modern idea of literature and some of the critical tools that constituted the new discipline of literary studies. The material condition for this confluence was provided by modern European empires and their meticulous arrangements for colonial governance, sustained through painstaking engagement with different linguistic and scribal traditions. This argument is fleshed out through close readings of the works of a host of colonial officials stationed in British India and their local interlocutors, and through their method of “colonial philology.” Colonial archives and philological methods, this paper suggests, provide one of the early genealogies of world literature as an idea.