Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction
What do R K Narayan, G V Desani, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose, Suniti Namjoshi and Salman Rushdie have in common? They represent Indian writing in English over five decades. Vilified by many cultural nationalists for not writing in native languages, they nonetheless present a critique of the historical and cultural conditions that promoted and sustained writing in English. They also have in common a counter-realist aesthetic that asks its own social, political, and textual questions. Kanaganayakam analyzes the fiction of writers who work in this vibrant Indo-Anglian tradition and demonstrates patterns of continuity and change during the last five decades. Each chapter draws attention to what is distinctive about the artifice in each author while pointing to the features that connect them. The book concludes with a study of contemporary writing and its commitment to non-mimetic forms.
Communal Identities in Rohinton Mistry’s Bombay Novel
The article examines Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey as a defining example of the Bombay novel. This genre of literature, I argue, depicts Bombay as a powerful force that defines individual residents just as much as it is defined by them. The genre demands a reading strategy that highlights the artifice and agency necessary to create the composites of personal and public (i.e., historical and political) narratives that comprise the city’s postcolonial identities. Mistry, like many Bombay novelists, presents the city as a nuanced site produced through the interactions between memory, personal and public histories, and power relationships. His use of literary realism emphasizes the limitations of individual agency and presents Bombay as a decaying, unwelcoming place defined by pessimistic nostalgia. Thus, Mistry’s depiction of Bombay exemplifies the tenuous nature of individual narrative agency over personal and urban identity as well as both the alienating and the restorative consequences of communal politics.
Commentary: Scholarship as a Way of Life—Character and Virtue in the Age of Big Humanities
From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, most European scholars considered moral cultivation as the primary purpose of the humanities. The humanities were human not just because they concerned the products of the human mind but also because they transformed scholars and students into better human beings. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rise of Big Humanities questioned this moral purpose. However, Big Humanities also reemphasized the importance of epistemic virtues for scholarship. The language of epistemic virtues helped scholars create new communities of learning and scholarship. Within these communities, the language of virtues established common standards of collaboration and granted scholars a sense of purpose. Many of these scholars also continued to associate epistemic virtues with moral virtues.