India and The West Literary Encounters

About the Book This Collection of ten essays deal with the theme of India and the West in a series of lectures and papers delivered at National and International Seminars and Conferences. They deal with the Literary and Cultural Interface. They concern themselves with the sacred and the secular, ancient and modem, East and West in a comparative perspective. They bring together Panini and Bhartrihari and Noam Chomsky. There is a detailed study of the Upanishads and their impact on English Literature. They plumb the depths of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Garuda Purana. They study the themes of Heaven and Hell and study writers like Marlowe, Milton, Sartre and Swedenborg. They deal with British, German, French and Italian Sanskritists. The study of various Indian Languages into English is quite extensive. There is a study of "the Boston Brahmins" and "American Transcendentalism" and the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The book is particularly useful for the students of Indology and the Departments of Comparative Literature, Translations and Culture Studies.

About the Author S. Ramaswamy was three times a Fulbright at the Universities of California, Texas and Yale, twice a British Council Scholar at Oxford and London and a Shastri Indo-Canadian Fellow at McGill University, Montreal. He is the winner of awards like Phi Beta Kappa A ward of Southern California, Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award for his travelogue on England in Kannada 'Englendinalli Alemari. He has done Post-Doctoral Research at Paris, Heidelberg and Amsterdam. He has studied Sanskrit traditionally in a Pathashala and privately under a Guru. He was editor of Tattvaloka - A Journal of Vedanta. He has translated works like Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa's Sartha as 'Caravan' into English published by Oxford University Press in 2006. He has 11 books to his credit (six in English and five in Kannada) and more than a hundred and fifty research papers in the areas of British, American, Commonwealth, Comparative Literature and in Indological Studies. Some of his papers have been published in England, Canada and Italy. He is a Life Member of Indian Association for American Studies, Indian Association for Canadian Studies and Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies and Ramana Maharshi Centre for Learning. He is a Fellow of Silliman College, Yale University, U.S.A.

Preface These lectures and articles were written over many years and some were delivered as lectures and others given as Papers at various Seminars and Conferences. An under current of Sanskrit runs through all of them and so the "Sanskrit Charge" is the common thread that ties these articles together in a literary perspective. If on the one hand, there is Sanskrit, on the other the various regional languages of India as well as Western Literature, mainly English Literature of England as well as those of the "Common Wealth Countries". In each case the occasion and context dictated the approach and the texts chosen.

The first lecture "Vagartha" was delivered at the Regional Institute of English, Bangalore as the Inaugural Speech of a conference. So it is mainly about the Word and Meaning. "Vak" and "Artha" in the Sanskrit context of Bhartrihari's V AKYAP ADIY A, connecting it with T.S.Eliot' perception with the "Word". The second assay "Panini and Chomsky" deals with the Sanskrit Grammarian, Panini and the American Panini", Noam Chomsky. Panini of the sixth century B.C. of India codified classified and presented the language and is famous as the author of the Astadhyayi.

Chomsky of the present day is the 20th Century Panini and associated with the M.LT. and his Syntactic Structures marks an epoch making achievement. I would think about it when I used to walk past the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on my way from Boston to Hayward University which resulted in the paper delivered at the Sanskrit Department of Bangalore University. The third, The Impact of the Upanishads on English Literature was presented as Lecture arranged by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and ISKON. The National Week-long Conference was on the theme of the Upanishads and my lecture was fairly lengthy, as it covered the entire gamut of quotations in Sanskrit from the various Upanishads on the one hand and Literary works, Poetry as well as Drama in English Literature. No major English Poet is omitted and this firsthand knowledge of Sanskrit and English dealt with the subject extensively. This emerged as a "Revaluation" of English Literary History from the beginning to them, ends. This, therefore, is one of the lengthy articles in the book. In our tradition, Suit is followed by Smriti and therefore, after the lecture on the Upanishads the Bhagavad-Gita is taken into consideration. Smriti followed Sruti in its footsteps and this lecture tries to show how this happens in the, Bhagavad-Gita. As in the previous lecture, a large number of ~Sanskrit quotations are used in the parallel context and it is sought to be as specific and accurate as possible for me. Shankaracharya is described as the" Alaya" of Shruti, Smriti and Purana. It is natural that after Sruti and Smriti comes "Purana". There are eighteen major Puranas and the Garuda Purana is special as it deals directly with death, hell, rebirth etc. It is not popularly discussed and is conditioned to be inauspicious - to be read only in a house when death has occurred. The lucid picture of various hells to which the sinners are punished is blood-curdling. There is the concept of Hell in Western Literature - in Marlowe, Milton, Dante, Swedenborg, and Jean-Paul Sartre, each in his own way has written about Hell and an attempt has been made in this paper to present a comparative view.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages