Explores the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe.

In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain pure.

As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.

This volume makes significant and fresh contributions to fields of comparative literature and translation which are assuming increasing importance and relevance in the realm of literary and cultural studies. Divided into four inter-related parts, it presents twenty-one seminal essays--written by distinguished scholars--with new aspects on comparative literature starting with the Sanskrit tradition and coming up to modern theoretical concerns, such as epistemological issues involved in cross-cultural comparative work and symbiosis of comparative literature and world literature. The book will be of interest to scholars and academics of Comparative Literature, Translation, Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies.

This book examines the emplotment of India in the Western literary imagination. Basing her discussion on the reception of an emblematic Sanskrit text, Kalidasa's SAakuntala, Figueira studies how and why this text was distorted in translation, criticism, and adaptation, and isolates the linguistic errors and cultural distortions that can be grouped into trends and patterns. The unique situation of SAakuntala's reception affords the author the opportunity to look at the way Europeans projected their cultural needs upon India.

The author puts into perspective an entire social and intellectual history of Europe's encounter with Indian culture, an examination of its cultural and political consequences, and a philosophical inquiry into differences between Eastern and Western world views.

Dorothy M. Figueira is Assistant Professor at State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is the author of Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe, also published by SUNY Press.

This volume stems from the understanding that historiographical analyses of the Gita's reception overlook the element of its translation. It begins with this recognition and posits translation as fundamental to any understanding of the Gita's reception. It examines in depth and compares how translations of the Gita do not seek the same aims in all places and at all times and recognizes that translation theories and methodologies are not uniform across nations and eras. Therefore, this volume looks at insolites (unusual, strange) readings of the Gita and how they seek to fill the hermeneutical gap between readings tied to its canonical and scriptural status and those that are distant from the text's tradition.

Questions whether current theories and pedagogies of alterity have allowed us truly to engage the Other.

Tracing the historical development of recent identity-based trends in literary theory to their roots in structuralism, Dorothy M. Figueira questions the extent to which theories and pedagogies of alterity have actually enabled us to engage the Other. She tracks academic attempts to deal with alterity from their inception in critical thought in the 1960s to the present. Focusing on multiculturalism and postcolonialism as professional and institutional practices, Figueira examines how such theories and pedagogies informed the academic and public discourse regarding September 11. She also investigates the theories and pedagogies of alterity as crucial elements in the bureaucratization of diversity within academe and discusses their impact on affirmative action.

Questions whether current theories and pedagogies of alterity have allowed us truly to engage the Other.

Tracing the historical development of recent identity-based trends in literary theory to their roots in structuralism, Dorothy M. Figueira questions the extent to which theories and pedagogies of alterity have actually enabled us to engage the Other. She tracks academic attempts to deal with alterity from their inception in critical thought in the 1960s to the present. Focusing on multiculturalism and postcolonialism as professional and institutional practices, Figueira examines how such theories and pedagogies informed the academic and public discourse regarding September 11. She also investigates the theories and pedagogies of alterity as crucial elements in the bureaucratization of diversity within academe and discusses their impact on affirmative action.