Contents: Acknowledgements. I. Mapping modern India: literary cultural ethos: Introduction. 1. Shifting paradigms. 2. Critical practice. 3. Patronage and promotion of literature. II. Fiction as discursive space. A brief interlude. 4. The nation, history and identities: The Memory of Elephants, Gopalla Gramam, Gopallapurathu Maddal and Red Earth and Pouring Rain. 5. Development and its discontents: the state and programmes of development. Towards a conclusion. A select bibliography. Index.

"Fiction in India has witnessed great changes since the 1980s. Written, critiqued, read, patronised and translated from the myriad subject positions that Indian culture is teeming with, fiction is a valuable site from which to critique the Indian literary cultural ethos. Fiction as Window, in its first part, uses the fiction produced across languages in India during this vibrant period to critically look at the issues that criticism, patronage and translation of fiction throws up. Cutting across languages, in its second part, the book analyses novels from various Indian languages and those written in or translated into English and Hindi in an attempt to see how these issues are fictionalised. The book cuts new ground with its blend of the literary and the aliterary and its analyses of awards foundations as sites of production of a cultural tradition." (jacket)