Writing India anew: Indian English fiction 2000-2010 PDF
Preview Writing India anew: Indian English fiction 2000-2010
Writing India Anew Publications Series GeneralEditor PaulvanderVelde PublicationsOfficer MaryLynnvanDijk EditorialBoard WimBoot(LeidenUniversity);JenniferHoldaway(SocialScienceResearchCoun cil);ChristopherA.Reed(TheOhioStateUniversity);AnandA.Yang(Directorof the Henry M.Jackson School ofInternational Studies and Chair ofInternational StudiesattheUniversityofWashington);GuobinYang(BarnardCollege,Colum biaUniversity). The ICAS Publications Series consists of Monographs and Edited Volumes. The Seriestakesamultidisciplinaryapproachtoissuesofinterregionalandmultilater al importance forAsia in a global context. The Series aims to stimulate dialogue amongst scholars and civil society groups at the local, regional and international levels. The International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) was founded in 1997. Its maingoalsaretotranscendtheboundariesbetweendisciplines,betweennations studied, and between the geographic origins of the Asia scholars involved. ICAS hasgrownintothelargestbiennialAsiastudieseventcoveringallsubjectsofAsia studies. So far, seven editions of ICAS have been held respectively in Leiden (1998),Berlin(2001),Singapore(2003),Shanghai(2005),KualaLumpur(2007), Daejeon(2009),andHonolulu(2011).ICAS8willbeheldinMacao,P.R.China, from2427June2013. In2001theICASsecretariatwasfoundedwhichguarantees thecontinuityofthe ICASprocess.In2004theICASBookPrize(IBP)wasestablishedinordertocre atebywayofaglobalcompetitionbothaninternationalfocusforpublicationson Asia while at the same time increasing their visibility worldwide. Also in 2005 theICASPublicationsSerieswasestablished. Formoreinformation:www.icassecretariat.org Writing India Anew Indian English Fiction 2000-2010 Edited by Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy Publications Series Edited Volumes 17 Cover design:JB&A raster grafisch ontwerp, Westland Layout: The DocWorkers,Almere ISBN 978 90 8964 5333 e-ISBN 978 90 4851 8852(pdf) e-ISBN 978 90 4851 886 9 (ePub) NUR 635 ©ICAS / Amsterdam University Press,Amsterdam 2013 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright re- served above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or in- troduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors ofthe book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights tothismaterialis advisedto contact thepublisher. Contents Editors’ Preface 7 Introduction 9 Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy I RE-IMAGINING THE NATION 1 Re-writing India 29 Bill Ashcroft 2 Roots and Routes On Amitav Ghosh’s Sea ofPoppies 47 Shirley Chew 3 Revisiting Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide The Islam/EnglishDynamic 59 NandiniBhattacharya 4 Nation,‘No-Nation’and ‘Desh’ Post-Orientalism and theNational Allegory in Rushdie’s Shalimarthe Clown and Vassanji’sThe Assassin’s Song 75 Krishna Sen II REVISITINGTHE PAST 5 Tributes or Travesties? RecentReworkings ofClassics Greatand Small 95 Paul Sharrad 6 Of Art and theArtist Kunal Basu’sThe Miniaturist asa Mughal/Modern Novel 111 Rituparna Roy III REVIEWING THE PRESENT 7 Babu Fictionin Disguise ReadingAravind Adiga’s TheWhiteTiger 129 Himansu S. Mohapatra 8 Indian EnglishWomen’sFictionand theFascinationof theEveryday 145 Nandana Dutta 9 InspiringIndia The Fiction ofChetan Bhagat andthe Discourse of Motivation 161 Subir Dhar 10 Story-telling in theAgeofCybernetics Rana Dasgupta’s TokyoCancelled 171 SreematiMukherjee 11 Childhood’sEnd Science Fiction in India 189 AbhijitGupta 12 Frame/Works How India Tells Stories in Comics and GraphicNovels 205 Rimi B.Chatterjee IV REINSCRIBINGHOME 13 A DiasporicStraitjacketor an Overcoatof Many Colours? A Readingof Jhumpa Lahiri’sThe Namesake 231 Peter Liebregts 14 The Mythos of Return andRecentIndianEnglish DiasporicFiction 247 Fakrul Alam AbouttheEditorsand Contributors 259 References 265 Index 277 Editors’ Preface This volume of critical essays is derived from a panel presentation en- titled ‘Indian English Fiction: New Themes and Trends, 2000-2010’, organised by Dr. Rituparna Roy and presented on April 1 at the Joint AAS/ICAS Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii (March 31-April 3, 2011). The organiser’s intention had been to make the panel presentation the coreofaneditedvolume.Theenthusiasticresponsefrom theaudience, marked by lively discussion after the presentations, consolidated this idea. It was decided that the volume would be co-edited by Dr. Ritupar- na Roy andProfessorKrishnaSen,one of theparticipantsin thepanel. Apart from the original panelists, eminent scholars from across the globe were invited to contribute, and all of them readily agreed, since the proposed volume seeks to address issues that are both contempo- rary and relevant. The editors are honoured that this book will be included in the ICAS series, as this enables them to contribute to a global discourse on the literature,culture, history and politics ofAsia. The editors would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Paul van der Velde and Ms. Martina van den Haak of the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, for their immense support and valuable guid- ance that greatly facilitated completion of thisproject. Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy Calcuttaand Amsterdam March 2012 Introduction Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy I Surveying the Field The first decade of the present millennium has been an exciting time for Indian English fiction. While the established authors went from strength to strength, fresh voices opened up a host of new possibilities in the articulation of the Indian consciousness, both home-based and diasporic. The range of themes extended from re-mapping mythology and history to reassessing the globalised India of today, and technical experiments transited from re-inventing the epics to forays into science fiction and the graphic novel. In its grounding in socio-cultural con- cerns specific to India and in its confident negotiation of language, form and content, twenty-first century Indian English fiction follows the dynamic trajectory of innovation and insight established in the 1980s by seminal novels such as Midnight’s Children, albeit along radi- cally differentlines. The present volume contends that the current body of Indian Eng- lish fiction strikes out on so many new paths so confidently that it can no longer be dismissed as derivative or dispossessed, or mere postcolo- nial ‘writing back’ or compensatory ‘national allegory.’ The essays in this book debate all these theoretical categories afresh in the light of the new corpus of writing that has consolidated the claim of Indian English fiction to be a major component of contemporary Anglophone literature. A brief review of criticism on Indian English fiction (IEF) from 2000 to 2010 – a comprehensive survey is impossible given the num- ber of titles appearing each year in India alone – will underscore the special contribution of this book. Three kinds of publications readily come to mind. First there are the broad overviews including diasporic writing. Second, there are monographs and anthologies on single au- thors and individual texts. Third, one has monographs and anthologies on specific themes pertaining to groups of novels. As regards reader- ship, the target audience is usually the interested reader and students of literature,and occasionally specialist researchers andacademics. Theoverviews follow anumberofrubrics.Ourcontributors Bill Ash- croft and Paul Sharrad have located IEF within the postcolonial dis-
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