Author : A. Guttman
Publisher : Springer
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 50,65 MB
Release : 2007-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0230606938
This book investigates representations of the nation of India as characterized by unity and diversity in the works of six contemporary novelists, linking their work to important political, historical and theoretical writings.
Author : Preetha Mani
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 413 pages
File Size : 40,83 MB
Release : 2022-08-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810145014
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon can be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English. Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani—imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
Author : Hans Harder
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 20,72 MB
Release : 2017-08-03
Category : History
ISBN : 135138435X
Writing histories of literature means making selections, passing value judgments, and incorporating or rejecting foregoing traditions. The book argues that in many parts of India, literary histories play an important role in creating a cultural ethos. They are closely linked with nationalism in general and various regional ‘sub-nationalisms’ in particular. The contributors to this volume look at a great variety of aspects of the historiography of modern regional languages of India. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
Author : Ronojoy Sen
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 32,2 MB
Release : 2015-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0231539932
Reaching as far back as ancient times, Ronojoy Sen pairs a novel history of India's engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and colonialism, and as an independent nation. Some sports that originated in India have fallen out of favor, while others, such as cricket, have been adopted and made wholly India's own. Sen's innovative project casts sport less as a natural expression of human competition than as an instructive practice reflecting a unique play with power, morality, aesthetics, identity, and money. Sen follows the transformation of sport from an elite, kingly pastime to a national obsession tied to colonialism, nationalism, and free market liberalization. He pays special attention to two modern phenomena: the dominance of cricket in the Indian consciousness and the chronic failure of a billion-strong nation to compete successfully in international sporting competitions, such as the Olympics. Innovatively incorporating examples from popular media and other unconventional sources, Sen not only captures the political nature of sport in India but also reveals the patterns of patronage, clientage, and institutionalization that have bound this diverse nation together for centuries.
Author : Rotem Geva
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 10,51 MB
Release : 2022-08-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1503632121
Delhi, one of the world's largest cities, has faced momentous challenges—mass migration, competing governing authorities, controversies over citizenship, and communal violence. To understand the contemporary plight of India's capital city, this book revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in its history, telling the story of how the city was remade by the twin events of partition and independence. Treating decolonization as a process that unfolded from the late 1930s into the mid-1950, Rotem Geva traces how India and Pakistan became increasingly territorialized in the imagination and practice of the city's residents, how violence and displacement were central to this process, and how tensions over belonging and citizenship lingered in the city and the nation. She also chronicles the struggle, after 1947, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, augmented by the imperative to maintain law and order in the face of the partition crisis. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Geva reveals the period from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s as a twilight time, combining features of imperial framework and independent republic. Geva places this liminality within the broader global context of the dissolution of multiethnic and multireligious empires into nation-states and argues for an understanding of state formation as a contest between various lines of power, charting the links between different levels of political struggle and mobilization during the churning early years of independence in Delhi.
Author : A. Guttman
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 20,90 MB
Release : 2007-11-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781403983909
This book investigates representations of the nation of India as characterized by unity and diversity in the works of six contemporary novelists, linking their work to important political, historical and theoretical writings.
Author : Ruchir Joshi
Publisher : HarperPerennial
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,67 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Families
ISBN : 9780006551874
This is a debut novel from India of an utterly original kind. Joshi has found a style and a form in which to say new things about the Indian experience in a new manner. Like Roy, Joshi is doing something entirely fresh. The novel takes three generations of a Gujarati family and uses them to track the course of Indian history back to 1930 and forward into the first decades of the next century. The grandparents are disciples of Gandhi, smart, sarcastic and principled; they meet on a non-violent demonstration against British rule in Calcutta in the 1930s, fall in love while falling under the army's baton. Their only son, Paresh, our principal narrator, grows up to drift through life, torn in different directions all at once. In turn, he produces a daughter, Para, who is tomboyish, aggressive, martial, and, in her sequences in the book, a squadron leader in the Indian Air Force when, in the near future, India is at war with a Muslim Pakistani-Iranian alliance. She therefore kills people for a living and is the antithesis of her grandparents' principles of Gandhiesque non-violence, civil disobedience and passive resistance. This trajectory of Indian history from non-violence to belliger
Author : Ulka Anjaria
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 44,67 MB
Release : 2015-07-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1107079969
A History of the Indian Novel in English traces the development of the Indian novel from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up until the present day. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that shed light on the legacy of English in Indian writing. Organized thematically, these essays examine how English was "made Indian" by writers who used the language to address specifically Indian concerns. Such concerns revolved around the question of what it means to be modern as well as how the novel could be used for anti-colonial activism. By the 1980s, the Indian novel in English was a global phenomenon, and India is now the third largest publisher of English-language books. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History invites readers to question conventional accounts of India's literary history.
Author : Laura Bear
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 32,16 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780231140027
Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.
Author : Sumathi Ramaswamy
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 14,95 MB
Release : 2010-04-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0822391538
Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.
