Contents: Preface. I. Politics, theory: 1. Genealogies of Indian literature. 2. Nationalism, colonialism and Indian English literature. 3. Postcoloniality and the Indian diaspora: a minority view. II. History, location: 4. Literary historiography in Malayalam. 5. Reflections on history, fiction and historical fiction. 6. A poet, a critic and the dialectic of the Indian renaissance. 7. Myth, truth and history in contemporary novel. III. Culture, translation: 8. Mapping the Khasak landscape: an essay on translation. 9. Fiction and reception: the Mahabharata novels in Malayalam. 10. Translation as hoax: art, othering and life writing. IV. Texts, readings: 11. Kamala Das: text and history in the Anamalai poems. 12. Jayanta Mahapatra: decolonizing Indian English poetry. 13. Shashi Deshpande: the sexual politics of fiction. 14. Ayyappa Paniker: poetry as inter-text. 15. Meenakshi Mukherjee: towards a new critical paradigm. Bibliography. Index.
"This book provides a critical reading of trends, texts and authors belonging to the broad field of Indian literature from a theoretically informed perspective. It deals with the conceptual and methodological issues concerning the constitution of Indian literature as a domain of knowledge. Inasmuch as the essays constituting the volume interrogate-most of them directly, and some by implication--the canonical views on the categories of 'India', 'literature' and 'Indian literature', the book can be said to represent a critical attitude that has till recently been admitted only into the periphery of literary debates. Consideration of Indian literature from a self-consciously non-dominant position is what the book attempts by raising questions about politics, theory, history, genealogy, location, culture and translation with reference to Indian literature. Though literary and cultural texts from several languages are used for this purpose, the central argument has been elaborated with the support of texts and authors from two specific literatures: Indian English literature and Malayalam literature.
The topics that are discussed in the book include issues concerning modernity, nationalism, colonialism, textuality, historicity, identity and diaspora. For this, the work draws upon a broad range of writing by such authors as Raja Rao, Jayanta Mahapatra, Shashi Deshpande, Kamala Das, Mahasweta Devi, OV Vijayan, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, CV Raman Pillai, Kumaran Asan, MT Vasudevan Nair and Ayyappa Paniker.
Basic to the work is the understanding that both the Indian literary canon and the methodologies of reading it, as they have come down to us, are products of a historical process that has unfolded itself in certain ideologically programmed ways. A critical debunking of this ideology is what is attempted in several of the essays in this volume. The result is a refreshingly new perspective on Indian literature that is both sensitive and radical at the same time." (jacket)
