The Politics of Modern Indian Language Literature: Implicit and Symptomatic Readings [Hardcover]

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 marginalized communities.

Introduction: Reading modern Indian bhasha literature; Part 1: The nation and its ethnicities; 1. Literature for Performance; 2. Constructing a Syncretic History; 3. The Meaning of life; 4. Failure and Middle-class life; 5. Essentializing the Marginalized; 6. The Private as Public; 7. The Polarization of Social Experience; Part 2: Modernity and its effects; 8. Breaking Taboos; 9. Modernity and Interiority;10 Unstable Hybrid; 11. Outward Profusion, Inner Silence; 12. Another Modernity; 13. Literary Modernism and the Community; 14. Living in the World; Part 3: Gender and the position of women; 15. Nation of Women; 16. Tradition, Privilege and Gender; 17. Eternal Womanhood; Part 4: The experience of caste; 18. Literature and Testimony; 19. View from Under; 20. The Nostalgia of the Small Farmer; 21. Lost Authority, Soft Power; 22. The Myth of Varna; Part 5: Humanism and authorial discourse; 23. The Popular Writer and Literature; 24. Humanism without Politics; 25. A Tapestry called Humanity; Afterword: Patterns in Bhasha Writing

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 lÓ"