Bhavya Tiwari considers herself primarily a comparatist who moves in literary and linguistic worlds of English, Hindi, Bengali, Spanish and Urdu. As an associate professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston, her research engages with world literature and translation studies. From her important essay on Rabindranath Tagore’s 1907 speech titled “World Literature” to her book Beyond English: World Literature and India — which was awarded the honorable mention for the Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association to an outstanding first book published in the discipline of comparative literature — Tiwari has emerged as an important voice in the field. On a recent visit to WashU, she talked with PhD candidate Jey Sushil (Program in Comparative Literature) about her journey as a comparatist and how we can go “beyond English through English.”

In your lecture, you talked about America being a multilingual nation. When we think of the U.S. in terms of languages, many people only think of English, but you argued otherwise.

I teach at the University of Houston, a Hispanic-serving institution. It’s one of the most diverse campuses in North America. The city of Houston offers us diversity in all senses. Most of my students come from bilingual, multilingual, bicultural and multicultural backgrounds. They already know, experience and live in a world beyond English.

Moreover, if we look at the history of American literature, it has always been multilingual and extraordinarily diverse in nature. Werner Sollors’s Multilingual America comes to mind. In most big cities in the U.S. you will hear many languages, and you can experience different cultures. Even in small towns of America, English is spoken and understood differently.

Gloria Anzaldúa is one of the authors who writes in a mix of English and Spanish and the way she uses language…

When I came to the United States, I came to Texas, and I have stayed in Texas. And in Texas, you hear Spanish (and other languages depending on where you are) all the time. So, when you read an author like Gloria Anzaldúa, it makes so much sense to think of the U.S. as a multilingual nation. In her “The Wild Tongue,” Anzaldúa discusses different kinds of Englishes and Spanishes that are spoken in border states such as Texas and California. America is deeply multilingual. Now, it’s a different matter that we continue to perpetuate the myth of monolingualism.

I am not saying that English doesn’t exist. But if we change the way we ask questions — like instead of focusing too much on English, if we focus on other things such as the multilingualism in America — maybe our scholarship, maybe the way we conduct discussions in our classrooms, maybe how we conceptualize our content for classrooms would change. I also want to point out here that American literature has had to make a space for itself in English departments in the U.S.

Your work Beyond English is considered as one of the most significant works in the realm of comparative and world literature. The title of your book reminds me of Aamir Mufti’s book Forget English. In your lecture, “The Task of a Comparatist,” you argued that one must “go beyond English through English.” Can you please unpack this?

Forgetting English is not possible. It’s the language of upward mobility. It’s a language that marks a position in the globalized world. It pays your bills. Like Mufti and so many other scholars in the U.S., my scholarship, too, is in English. You cannot forget it, just like you cannot forget the internet.

When I was working on my first book, most of the scholarship that I was reading on world literature and comparative literature criticized the centrality of Anglophone texts. But most of these scholars were using canonical Anglophone literary texts and scholarships published in English to critique world literature and comparative literature. To me, that was deeply ironical.

In my book, I wanted to show that we can go beyond English by using English as a tool — a medium to access different cultures and different literary traditions in translation and in the original. My focus was never on English versus some other language. That framework is not helpful, in my experience. My focus was always to treat English like any other language of the world. This has helped me to work deeply on texts from Spanish, English, Hindi and Bengali in the original and translation.  

In the context of global conditions right now, does reading literature from different cultures makes us more humane?

As you know, I have worked on Tagore. In one of his lectures (vishva sahitya), he says that the dharma of all human beings is to understand other humans. This can only be possible if we read each other’s literatures and find ourselves in each other’s works. That’s vishva sahitya for Tagore. There is no need to understand everything. One cannot. But being aware that I am not the world is enough, and that there are more worlds than I could ever know is an important step toward developing empathy and humility.

Whether it is Tagore or Sanskrit theorist Bharat of Natya Shastra, the ideal reader/audience transcends self to become the other, which is very different from Edward Said’s “self,” and the “other.” To answer your question, yes.

What is your position on the idea of untranslatability? To put it in simplistically, there is a saying that there is always something lost in translation.

I do not think that the language of loss and gain is helpful as it borders on the binarized ideas of profit and loss. Just as in scholarship by giving centrality to English stops us from doing comparative multilingual work, untranslatability becomes a bad excuse to not know the world, locally and globally. Yes, there are many emotions and concepts that exist in a language and not in the other, but then we also have to be aware of our limitations as scholars. Maybe those ideas thrive in languages and cultures unknown to us. Maybe our colleagues know them.

There is no need to understand everything. One cannot. But being aware that I am not the world is enough, and that there are more worlds than I could ever know is an important step toward developing empathy and humility.

How did you come to study comparative literature?

I did my BA in English literature from Basanti Devi College in Calcutta. My college is a Bengali-medium college, where English is taught as one of the subjects, and all the other subjects are taught in two languages, Bengali and English. I was deeply dissatisfied with the archaic curriculum in my English literature classes, which says more about the Indian academic system rather than anything specific about my college. So, I sat for the MA entrance exam in comparative literature at Jadavpur University. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I was accepted. That’s how I became a comparatist.

And then you came to the University of Texas at Austin for your doctoral work. You could have been in any English department. Why comp lit?

The universities in the U.S. offer you the freedom to study whatever you want. I had enjoyed my MA in comp lit in India, so I continued with the known devil in the U.S.