Conclusions

Abstract

Abstract The conclusion returns to the spatial and located approach of the book. Space is useful for thinking how literature works in a multilingual (and of course stratified and hierarchical) society. Throughout the book “Purbi”/Eastern or “Avadhi” has not been a marker of regional or linguistic identity but a site for multilingual people, spaces, and practices. Space works in this book as a way of bringing together literary strands that have inhabited their own disciplinary silos—Sufi, bhakti, courtly Brajbhasha, and Persian. Cartography helps locate and bring together authors working in different languages as part of the same local environments. This highlights the exclusions of the single-language archives but also the dialogism inherent in some texts, like Sant poetry. Space also helps us think of the concrete spaces of literary practices—the sites and occasions of performance, training, devotional singing, and poetic cultivation within different communities of taste. And it raises interesting questions about literary contact and circulation without translation. The keywords suggested by this book—location and a spatial approach; consciously looking for “other stories”; familiarity and access vs. cultivation; mixing vs. parallel cultivation; overhearing and being “well-listened”; circulation without translation; transcodification, etc.—expand the conceptual toolbox of world literature beyond (and below) the transnational or indeed the national. For this reason, the conclusion suggests that a located and ground-up approach also speaks to world literature.