ABSTRACT
The purpose of the Afterword is to summarise the findings in the individual chapters with regard to discovered aspects of the writing. Since there are overlaps, the areas of pertinence have been recast as follows: (a) The national, the local and conflict; (b) modernity and tradition; (c) the shape of literary modernism; (d) interiority and the self; (e) caste and hierarchy; (f) gender and sexuality. Most of the writers try to address the nation in their concerns even if their experiences are local but the exceptions are those in the political peripheries antagonistic to subsumption by Indian nationhood. It is also these peripheral identities that value their own ethnic traditions, while most of the other writers resist it. Literary modernism is, by and large, mediated by the West and this is understandable given that many of the writers are academics. ‘Interiority’ plays a big role in modernist literature and is often used to question traditional attitudes, often by being deliberately transgressive. Caste and hierarchy are important issues overtly or covertly, and while Brahminism is abhorred, the Brahmins themselves have little social authority although they once authored Brahminism as an ideology. Caste power is more in the hands of the landowning castes who are not often Brahmin. Hierarchy is a consideration stretching beyond the Hindu religion to pervade the practice of Abrahamic religions in India as well. Male sexuality is an issue in three writers – among whom it is inflected by caste in two of them (Ananthamurthy, Limbale). There is also a degree of gender consciousness among the modernist writers when their dilemmas or failures are ‘masculine’. Feminine sexuality is a key issue to Indira Goswami and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay but the latter, while admitting it, would prefer to put restrictions on its fulfilment. Absences noted in the writing are religious belief and the resultant conflict, with only Karnad, who professes ‘secularism’ as a conscious ideal, portraying it. Its absence suggests that religious conflict is not inherent to India but a creation of electoral politics. The non-portrayal of religious belief or the taking of an antagonistic position towards it may be on account of Nehruvian rationalism that tried to inculcate the scientific spirit through education. Postcoloniality has a small presence as a motif in the book. Indian writing in English responds more strongly to ‘universalist’ literary theories.
