In contemporary times, globalization has rendered physical distances less significant, blurring national borders and connecting us into a shared, albeit ambiguous, community. The nursery rhyme refrain, “It is a small world after all,” encapsulates this interconnectedness, emphasizing how compact and interwoven the world has become. In such a context, setting regional parameters for ‘comparison’ might seem futile. However, meaningful comparisons can emerge by identifying differences through frameworks that respect local particularities while fostering global dialogue.

Since the late 1970s, postcolonial theory has catalyzed shifts in how Asia is conceptualized within cultural discourse. Critiques of exoticism, primitivism, and essentialist frameworks for understanding Asia spurred the rejection of Orientalist perspectives. By the 1980s, these critiques inspired Asia-centered scholars to propose alternatives emphasizing the unique historical and cultural contexts of Asian societies. This methodological shift, described as regional studies, offered a nuanced lens to counter earlier reductive paradigms.

Nevertheless, region-based art history presents limitations. Emphasizing Asia’s intrinsic value risks excessive isolation and marginalization, inadvertently perpetuating the peripheralization it seeks to dismantle. This research advocates for a more reflexive perspective, focusing on South Asian art practices that reject ethnographic and sociological frameworks in favor of self-defined approaches to cultural identity. These practices offer new ways of understanding cultural identity and comparison, transcending the constraints of regional studies.

This study highlights the work of Raqs Media Collective, an Indian artist group established in 1991 in New Delhi, as an exemplar of these alternative approaches. Operating as artists, philosophical agents, and provocateurs, they embody a concept of resonance that embraces both dispersion and unity—a paradoxical idea reflecting the complexities of contemporary times. Their notion of ensemble articulates distinct identities without overemphasizing national boundaries, serving as a key term in contemporary comparative literary studies. For example, their multi-disciplinary projects juxtapose historical narratives with speculative futures, creating spaces for dialogue that transcend traditional solidarities.

This approach opens endless possibilities for rethinking cultural comparison beyond reductive binaries. The dichotomous framework dividing East and West may no longer hold relevance in an interconnected world. However, reflecting on such frameworks inspires meaningful directions for comparative analysis. By examining ensemble as a conceptual tool, this study seeks to foster a universal understanding that the ultimate purpose of comparing literature and culture—whether through regional distinctions or other frameworks—is to promote harmonious coexistence and mutual enrichment among diverse cultural landscapes.

Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019) decolonizes dominant, often Eurocentric, climate narratives by foregrounding South Asian oratures as vital epistemological frameworks for understanding and responding to environmental precarity. This study argues that Ghosh’s novel reimagines climate change through the Bengali legend of Bon Bibi, the goddess of the Sundarbans, thereby challenging techno-scientific rationalism prevalent in Western climate discourse. Instead, Gun Island emphasizes indigenous knowledge systems, spiritual beliefs, and localized narratives as crucial for comprehending the multifaceted dimensions of environmental catastrophe. These oratures, deeply rooted in local ecological wisdom and spiritual traditions, offer potent counter-narratives to technologically deterministic and globally homogenized understandings of environmental change.

Furthermore, the novel exposes the environmental injustices exacerbated by climate change, particularly its disproportionate impact on marginalized communities in the Global South and the South Asian diaspora, manifested in climate-induced displacement. By centering the Bon Bibi orature, Gun Island not only critiques the epistemic dominance of Western climate narratives but also amplifies marginalized voices and alternative knowledge systems. With decolonial and environmental humanities frameworks, this study reveals how Ghosh’s work contributes to a decolonized understanding of climate narratives. Ultimately, Gun Island reimagines global narratives of environmental crisis from the Global South, fostering a more ecologically just and culturally diverse vision of our shared planetary future within ‘World Literature’.

Translation of oral literature has often been criticized for its limitations in its ethical representation of the ethnic identity and geo-cultural spaces of indigenous people. Since English has become the lingua franca dominating the literary culture in the post-colonial global cultural configuration, translator, majorly translating from indigenous languages into English, struggle with the “acceptable” narrative style and techniques that the English language allows. As English has become the language of worldwide communication and portability of regional literature, what suits in the English language compromises the native narrative styles, musicality inherent in indigenous taletelling, let alone culture specificities in translation. The present paper will question the dominance of western discourse of translation theory and practice in the translation of Indian indigenous oral literature which becomes antagonistic through its emphasis on binaries, exclusivist politics and othering. This paper would propose collaborative translation as an alternate method of translating indigenous literature based on an experimental project at Sikkim University, India where indigenous storytellers of oral narratives belonging to the Lepcha, Limbu and Bhutia community, were brought together with translators who had no access to the native language. Translation here was moved from the domain of “close reading” to “telling and listening” thereby creating an environment of trust that moves the act of translation from the level of individual to that of a collective responsibility. This paper will question whether such collaboration involving native participants help in avoiding/managing issues of asymmetrical power positions of languages involved in the translation? How can the participation of local agents affect/eradicate epistemological violence and misrepresentation in translation of indigenous texts? Can this method of translation become inclusivist enough to provide a space to oral literature within the literature of the world without compromising the style, narrative technique and cultural specificities that mark the identities of their people?