ABSTRACT
Indian literature is produced in a wealth of languages but there is an asymmetry in the exposure the writing gets, which owes partly to the politics of translation into English. This book represents the first comprehensive political scrutiny of the concerns and attitudes of Indian language literature after 1947 to cover such a wide range, including voices from the cultural margins of the nation like Kashmiri and Manipuri, that of women alongside those of minority and marginalised communities. In examining the politics of the writing especially in relation to concerns like nationhood, caste, tradition and modernity, postcoloniality, gender issues and religious conflict, the book goes beyond the declared ideology of each writer to get at covert significations pointing to widely shared but often unacknowledged biases. The book is deeply analytical but lucid and jargon-free and, to those unfamiliar with the writers, it introduces a new keenness into Indian literary criticism to make its objects exciting.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Section 1|4 pages
The Nation and Its Ethnicities
chapter 6|9 pages
The Private as Public
chapter 7|8 pages
The Polarisation of Social Experience
part Section 2|2 pages
Modernity and Its Effects
chapter 13|10 pages
Literary Modernism and the Community
part Section 3|26 pages
Gender and the Position of Women
part Section 4|3 pages
The Experience of Caste
part Section 5|49 pages
Humanism and Authorial Discourse