Ireland and India between Home and the World

Abstract

This article charts world-making and home-formation as two connectors between Irish and Indian literature on their way toward becoming world literature. Home and world are conceptualized as flows while the idea of the path is seen as a synthetic bridge between them. The first part examines how Irish literature becomes world literature by studying two temporal encounters between Irish and Indian writers, between W.B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore and between Colm Tóibín and Amit Chaudhuri. The second part shifts from temporality to spatiality in a discussion of global modernisms that reads Tagore’s 1922 Lipika text on the path in relation to T.S. Eliot’s modernist imagination of tradition and the individual talent. The two parts of the article coalesce around the triad of home, world and path by envisaging the turn of world literature with a renewed focus on the universal and the ontological oneness of literature.