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.
The Mimic (Wo)man 'Writes Back': Anita Desai's In Custody
This article aims to trace the articulation of resistance in terms of gender and the postcolonial condition in Anita Desai’s In Custody (1984). As one of the most prominent post-Independence Indian writers of her time, Anita Desai has been a strong voice in portraying the Indian domestic sphere. Accordingly, one of the main concerns of Desai’s novels has been the representation of women and their struggles against patriarchal and colonial oppression. Though promising in many aspects, the political Independence of 1947 failed to unburden women from the ideal visions of womanhood promoted both by traditional community and colonialists in India. The present study focuses on the portrayal of women and female instances of resistance and the spaces through which they manage to survive in a male-dominated Post-Independence Indian society. Since the 1980s, Homi K. Bhabha has opened up a wide variety of critical issues fundamental to the understanding of colonial and post-colonial condition. His theorization of the idea of ‘mimicry’ is used in order to explore the socio-cultural interrelations Desai’s novel seeks to reveal.
‘Ethnic’ Conflict as Stat–Society Struggle: The Poetics and Politics of Assamese Micro-Nationalism
This paper is an attempt to understand one case of ‘ethnic’ conflict in India—Assam. By looking closely at this one case I hope we will understand better the phenomenon of India's persistent dilemma of micro-nationalist politics that from time to time seems to be fundamentally at odds with India's macro-nationalist project. To be sure, despite the seriousness of some of these conflicts—say Punjab and Kashmir at present, or Assam until recently—the incidence of micro-nationalist dissent should be kept in perspective. The Indian state can claim quite a bit of success in its project of ‘nation building’-it has been able to incorporate micro-nationalist dissent of a number of peoples by using persuasive and coercive means at its disposal. Moreover, cven conflicts that appear stubborn at one time turn out to be surprisingly amenable to negotiated settlement. Irrespective of the Indian state's ability to manage micro-nationalist dissent, the assumption that nationalisms have a telos that inevitably leads to a demand for separation relies on a rather sloppy and lazy naturalist theory of the nature and origins of nations and nation states. What the Indian experience forces us to confront is the fate of nationalism and the nation state as they spread worldwide as a modal form. In the Indian subcontinent these new forms that privilege 'formal boundedness over substantive interelationships," come face to face with a civilisation that represents a particularly complex way of ordering diversity.2 In a subcontinent where the historical legacy of state formation is marked by an intermittent tension between the imperial state and regional kingdoms, nationalisms and the nation state may have proved to be rather unfortunate modern transplants.3