In a world increasingly marked by geopolitical strife, cultural polarization, and digital fragmentation, literature continues to stand as one of humanity’s most profound instruments for fostering peace, empathy, and human solidarity. From ancient oral traditions to contemporary narratives, literary expression has served as a repository of shared human experience—preserving collective memory, resisting violence, and envisioning alternative futures grounded in compassion and coexistence. The pursuit and preservation of peace have remained among the fundamental purposes and aesthetic aspirations of literature since antiquity. In the Indian tradition, shanti (peace) occupies both a spiritual and philosophical centrality, forming the very substratum of its literary and contemplative imagination. Almost all the Upanishads open with an invocation to peace, affirming it as both a personal pursuit and a cosmic ideal—a state of
equilibrium between the self and the universe.

Literature, in this sense, not only articulates a yearning for peace in a conflict-ridden and chaotic world but also becomes a means of realizing inner harmony and the holistic evolution of human consciousness. The great Indian epics too foreground peace as the ultimate ethical and existential objective. The Shanti Parva (“Book of Peace”) in the Mahabharata, for instance, offers an extensive philosophical discourse on governance, morality, and reconciliation, positing shanti as the inevitable culmination of the epic’s moral and martial conflicts. Within the domain of Indian literary aesthetics, Abhinavagupta’s reinterpretation of Bharata’s Rasa theory marks a pivotal moment. By introducing Shanta Rasa (the aesthetic experience ofpeace or tranquillity) as the ninthand the highest rasa, Abhinavagupta reconfigures the aesthetic experience as a movement towards stillness, detachment, and transcendence. In declaring Shanta as the “Rasa of all Rasas”—the one that subsumes and harmonizes every other affect—he elevates peace to the pinnacle of both human realizationandartistic expression.

In the Western canon as well, the aspiration for peace constitutes a persistent ethical and aesthetic preoccupation that transcends epochs and genres. From Aristophanes’ comic dramaturgy in Peace and Lysistrata, where reconciliation and civic harmony are envisioned as acts of moral and political restoration, to Tolstoy’s monumental reimagining of war, history, and moral consciousness in War and Peace, the Western literary imagination repeatedly reconfigures peace as both an ethical horizon and a
redemptive ideal.

Eliot’s concluding benediction—Shantih shantih shantih—in The Waste Land further universalizes this quest, invoking a cross- cultural poetics of repose and transcendence in the aftermath of modernity’s spiritual desolation. Across traditions, therefore, literature emerges not merely as a repository of pacifist sentiment but as an epistemological space where the human longing for equilibrium, forgiveness, and reconciliation is continually interrogated and renewed. It appeals for peace not only as a socio-political necessity in a fractured world but as an ontological condition—an inward, transformative movement towardethical self-realizationandcollectiveharmony.

The Comparative Literature Association of India (CLAI) invites scholars, literary critics, writers, translators, and social scientists from across the world to an International Conference dedicated to exploring Peace as both an aesthetic category and a literary praxis. The conference seeks to interrogate literature’s unique capacity to cultivate peace, not merely as an abstract ideal but as a lived, enacted, and reimagined process of healing, dialogue, and transformation. The Conference invites critical papers that view literature not merely as representation but as a dynamic pursuit of peace – a performative and affective mode that cultivates reconciliation, foster ethical imagination, and envisions alternative futures of coexistence. We welcome interdisciplinary engagements that draw upon aesthetic theory, trauma and memory studies, postcolonial/decolonial critique, translation studies, and affect theory to investigate how literary forms and practices can function as mediations of healing, testimony, and
reparative imagination.

Rooted in the ethos of comparative literary inquiry, this conference aims to foster critical, multilingual, and multicultural conversations on how literary traditions across the globe nurture nonviolence, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restorative practices. Drawing on comparative literature’s commitment to bridging linguistic, national, regional, and ideological boundaries, it calls for a rethinking of literature as a transnational forum for negotiating difference and reaffirming human dignity. Through plenaries, thematic panels, and the presentationof critical papers,

The conference will serve as both a scholarly platform and a dialogic space for engaging with peace-centred narratives, utopian visions, and post-conflict literary expressions. It reaffirms literature’s enduring capacity to shape global peace discourses, foster intercultural understanding, and advance humanistic