Any study today of a literary work published a hundred years ago may be understood as an undertaking in archival research, but the changes in the field of literary studies have been so severe, cataclysmic almost, from the last quarter of the twentieth century onward that reading The Waste Land and its attendant critical exegesis again – a century after its publication – for what it used to signify (when literature still mattered) feels a lot like stepping back in time. The literary value system engendered by Eliot and his cohorts persisted in the consciousness of world literary studies well into the 1970s, ending almost abruptly after the advent of theory and neoliberalism from the next decade onward. Today, after an examination of a literary work has been proclaimed to be no different than the anthropological and ethnographic study of a Balinese cock fight, following which postcolonial studies has given way to world literature studies, the literary ethos surrounding and represented by The Waste Land seems strangely familiar but impossibly remotely located in a foreign country called the past.

How then to approach The Waste Land today? Location would be key. In the time of the advent of postcolonial studies, John Mackenzie, characterising developments in the academic study of colonialism, defined the traditional point of view as a ‘centrifugal’ tendency: ‘Imperial history and the imperial idea have been examined almost entirely in a centrifugal manner, as the radiation of influences from Britain into its wider hinterland.’ If we think of the manner in which The Waste Land was disseminated and the mode of criticism that dealt with its ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ on the colonies through the decades following its publication, we see an almost exact correspondence to the traditional study of imperialism as Mackenzie defines it. Eliot's poetry, produced in England and Europe, was seen ‘radiating outward’ from the centre to the periphery where, presumably, it would be studied, imbibed and imitated. Postcolonial theorists from the mid-’80s onward, straining to move away from readings that mapped such a ‘centrifugal tendency’, wished, rather, to offer ways of dismantling colonialism's signifying system and exposing its operation in the silencing and oppression of the colonial subject, interpreting colonialism rather as a discourse, a text without an author. Derrida and Foucault were the instruments through which the turning of the text of colonialism into an array of effects was accomplished.

Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on world literature, Viśvasāhitya (1907), is important not just because of the political and historical circumstances of its production, but because it advocates a method of ‘doing’ world literature that potentially frees us from the conundrums besetting the methods used so far if scholars writing on the essay were to read it for what it actually says. In this paper, the Bengali text of this essay is closely interrogated to arrive at the surprising conclusion that the idea of world literature that he arrives at in this essay, in complete contrast to Goethe’s, is not an addition of the national literatures of the world – that, he says, is a very provincial way of looking at the question. Instead, he posits here a philosophical notion related to an understanding of the self and the other which is predicated upon his inheritance of, and interest in, both Upanishadic high theory as well as popular folk culture. His concept (or anti-concept) was premised upon his advice to find the world in the self, and was one that may, perhaps, be mined for its emphasis on particularity and attention to the individual as it exists in relation to the whole.

English poetry, it might safely be surmised, arrived in India from about the seventeenth century onward in the knapsacks, trunks, bags, and portmanteaus of traders and adventurers intent on making their fortunes in the East. It then proceeded to establish itself among readers in exile and readers new to the English language with astonishing rapidity, fueled in the most part by the newspaper and periodical print culture that had spread through urban and semi-urban settlements in every part of the country. The first newspaper in India, Hicky's Bengal Gazette, reserved a section of the pages of its first issue in 1780 for a Poet's Corner, a demarcated space which would carry one or more poem in each issue for the short period of the paper's existence, a practice followed by every nineteenth-century newspaper published subsequently. The poem published in the first issue was called “The Seasons,” and described, expectedly, the English seasons; it took a few months for a long poem with the title “A Description of India” to make an appearance here.

Since then to the present day, poetry written in India in the English language has, of course, changed hands and, indeed, changed nationality: what was once written by Englishmen in India – English poetry – is now Indian poetry (and has been since the nineteenth century), and is currently generally called Indian poetry in English to distinguish it from poetry written by Indians in the classical languages in the past and in the many powerful modern Indian regional languages since the mid-nineteenth century. If used in an over-arching sense, any category called “Indian Poetry” is a construct that is still hard to defend; in a 1963 article titled “Bengali Gastronomy,” the famous Bengali poet and critic Buddhadeva Bose commented derisively that just as there was no such thing as “Indian food,” there was no such thing as “Indian Literature,” gesturing elliptically toward the common understanding that every region in India produced its own variant tradition – of poetry or curry – and needed to be marked accordingly. So there was Kannada, Punjabi, or Gujarati literature (or cuisine), but nothing that could be described as “Indian” curry or “Indian” poetry outside of Indian restaurants and international publishing houses.

Almost every account of Rabindranath's English versions of his poems in Gitanjali: Song Offerings (London, 1912) that led to him winning the Nobel Prize the following year begins with story of his discomfort with the English language. It was a story that, like much else in the critical corpus on his work, he himself insisted on shaping from the start. Sisir Kumar Das's magisterial volumes on The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore open, in Volume One: Poems, with a well-known letter Rabindranath wrote his niece, Indira, in which he reflects on the success of the translations (preceding the Prize). Writing from London on May 6, 1913, he had said, in his original letter:

The translation that Sisir Das used in his volume is different from my translation above, in that in it, crucially, the word māyā, which Rabindranath used twice, was rendered as “delusion.” Now, māyā could certainly imply both delusion and illusion, and in the second instance it works, but the first time he uses the word, in the phrase “māyā kete geche,” it would be better rendered, it seems to me, as “rid myself of that illusion.” The difference lies simply in that the word “delusion” implies fallacy, whose synonyms may include “misconception” or “mistake,” whereas “illusion,” meaning “impression,” seems to take the reader toward pretension, and the getting rid of it thereof, which is what he seems to be gesturing toward over here, coupled as the phrase is with the English social occasion of invitation to tea.