Contents: Foreword/Harish Trivedi. Introduction/Somdatta Mandal. I. India and / as the nation: 1. Nativities: Reading Tagore's Gora/Supriya Chaudhuri. 2. Sri Aurobindo's 'The Uttarpara Address': Mythopoeia, Sanatan Dharma and Nationalism/Saurabh Bhattacharyya. II. India in theory and history: 3. Nation? Colony? Community? Colonial historiography and postcolonial elaboration in India/Debasish Lahiri. 4. The emblematic body: Women and nationalism in partition narratives/Himadri Lahiri. 5. Nationalisms contested: The poetics of space in selected short stories of Sa'adat Hasan Manto/Saurav Dasthakur. III. Postcolonial fiction of India: 6. India in The Serpent and the Rope: 'Metaphysic' or Mother?/Angshuman Kar. 7. Colonial chromosomes and postcolonial genes: Hybrid metros in the making of India/T. Ravichandran. 8. Understanding Nationalism: A study of Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines/Sandipan Roy. 9. Bravely fought the Manly Queen: Mahesh Dattani's representation of postcolonial politics/Basudev Chakraborti. IV. India and eastern perspectives: 10. Raiding the child's kingdom: Fairy tales and the question of nation in Colonial Bengal/Suparna Bhattacharya. 11. The poetry of the Dutts/Nishi Pulugurtha. 12. Converting the Hero: Lal Behari Day's Chandramukhir Upakhyan/Sipra Mukherjee. 13. The nation in a family: Satinath Bhaduri's Jagori as a case in point/Sharmila Majumdar. 14. The woman question and the discourse of Nationalism: A reading of Ashapurna Devi's Prothom Protishruti/Rakhi Ghosh. 15. Reconstructing the Odia Identity: Nationalism and subnationalism in Colonial Orissa/Subhendu Mund. V. India and the performing arts: 16. Imperial Simla and the contest for performative space: The Gaiety and the Kali Bari theatres/Poonam Trivedi. 17. Postcolonial negotiations with the nation: Rituparno Ghosh's Chokher Bali/Paromita Chakravarti and Swati Ganguly. 18. "A place of their own": Women and Nation in Meghe Dhaka Tara and Mahanagar/Amrit Sen. 19. The importance of being Mangal Pandey: The story of a nation in the making/Vishnupriya Sengupta. 20. "Seen your India -- Multiplicity, reality and the Bollywood posters from Lumiere to Lagaan/Indranath Chattopadhyay. List of contributors.
"Rabindranath Tagore regarded the nation as a living entity, and an idea of the mind. Two things determine its contents -- its ancient memories, and its desire for living together. Nation and nationalism are two common tropes through which different cultural facets of India can be identified. Divided into five groups, the twenty-one articles in this anthology represent the multifaceted perspectives of India as the nation, ranging from political doctrines to narratives based on history, colonial and postcolonial fiction, theatre and film. Apart from a couple of invited contributions, most of these articles are revised versions of presentations made at the Annual Conference of the IACLALS (Indian Chapter of Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies) held at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan in February 2006." (jacket)
