South Asian Literature in English


Book Description

The first reference of its kind, this encyclopedia covers topics related to literature written in English by authors who were either born in South Asia or who identify themselves with that region. The volume focuses on writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on novelists, novels, and cinematic adaptations, as well as poets, dramatists, autobiographers, short story writers, theoreticians, critical terms, themes, genres, literary movements, and key historical events. Entries are written by expert contributors and suggest works for further reading. South Asian writing in English has recently received unprecedented critical and popular attention. The publication of Salman Rushdie's seminal novel Midnight's Children (1981) and the popularity of his later works, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize for The English Patient in 1992, and V. S. Naipaul's Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 are just a few of the highlights that mark the significance of South Asian writing in English. The first reference of its kind, this encyclopedia covers topics related to literature written in English by authors who were either born in South Asia or who identify themselves with that region. The volume focuses on writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on novelists, novels, and cinematic adaptations, as well as poets, dramatists, autobiographers, short story writers, theoreticians, critical terms, themes, genres, literary movements, and key historical events. Entries are written by expert contributors and suggest works for further reading. The encyclopedia includes a chronology and closes with a selected, general bibliography of anthologies and critical studies. Given the enormous popularity of South Asian literature in English, this reference is essential for all libraries.




South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English


Book Description

Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility.




Sensitive Reading


Book Description

Introduction / Yigal Bronner and Charles Hallisey -- Shriharsha's Sanskrit Life of Naishadha : translator's note and text -- Points and progression : how to read Shriharsha's Life of Naishadha / Gary Tubb -- "If I'm reading you right..." : reading bodies, minds and poetry in the Life of Naishadha / Thibaut d'Hubert -- Ativirarama Pandyan's Tamil Life of Naidatha : translator's note and text -- Hearing and madness : reading Ativirarama Pandyan's Life of Naidatha / N. Govindarajan -- How we read / Sheldon Pollock -- Malamangala Kavi's Malalyalam Naishadha in our language : translator's note and text -- I talk to the wind : Malamangala Kavi's Naishadha in our language / Sivan Goren-Arzony -- In the garden of love : an essay on Naishadha in our language / Meir Shahar -- "Khwaja the Dog-Worshiper" from The story of the four dervishes : translator's note and text -- How not to see a dog-worshiper / Jamal Jones -- A historian reads a fable / Muzaffar Alam -- "Touch" by Abburi Chayadevi : translator's note and text -- How to touch "Touch" / Gautham Reddy -- "Don't stand so close to me!" : remarks on Chayadevi's "Touch" / Sanjay Subrahmanyam -- "A street pump in Anantapuram" and five other poems by Ismail : translator's note and text -- Speaking of landscapes, revolutionaries, and donkeys : Ismail's words and images / Afsar Mohammad -- Between sky and road : the wandering scholar, modernism and the poetry of Ismail / Gabriel Levin -- The music contest from Tiruttakkatevar's Tamil Chivakan's gem : translator's note and text -- Love in defeat / Talia Arlav -- Sweetness that melts the heart / Kesavan Veluthat -- What's gained in translation / Sonam Kachru -- Two songs by Muttuswami Dikshitar performed by T.M. Krishna and Eileen Shulman : translator's note, texts, and recordings -- Beyond passion, beyond even the Raga / T.M. Krishna -- Reading as an act of trust / Donald R. Davis -- Desire and passion ride to war (unknown artist) : selector's note -- Pillars of love : a dialogic reading of temple sculpture / Anna Lise Seastrand -- Side observation of a small portion of Varadaraja-svami Temple / Tawfiq Da'adli -- Ravana visits Sita at night in the Ashoka Grove, from Kamban's Tamil Ramayana : translator's note and text -- Kamban's Tamil as a kind of Sanskrit / Whitney Cox -- Can darkness stand before light? : encountering an episode from a medieval Tamil masterpiece / Yehoshua Granat -- When a mountain rapes a river, from Bhattumurti's Telugu Vasu's Life : translator's note and text -- Irreconcilable differences and (un)conventional love in Bhattumurti's Vasu's Life / Ilanit Loewy Schacham -- Desire, perception, and the poetry of desire : a reading of Vasu's life / Deven Patel -- "The ten on the wild boar" : translator's note and text -- Reading "Ten on the wild boar" / Archana Venkatesan -- Three poems about love's inner modes : translator's note and text -- Between us : reading Tamil Akam poems / Jennifer Clare -- The unbaked clay pot in pouring rain : reading Sangam poetry today / R. Cheran -- Nammalvar's Tamil A hundred measures of time : translator's note and text -- "You came so that we may live" / Anand Venkatkrishnan -- Taking the measure of A hundred measures / Andrew Ollett -- A Persian Ghazal by Hafez and an Urdu Ghazal by Ghaleb : translator's note and text -- How a Ghazal thinks / Rajeev Kinra -- The Ghazal of What's more than real / Peter Cole -- Afterword / Wendy Doniger.




Postindependence Voices in South Asian Writings


Book Description

Offers Important Readings In South Asian Literatures In English. The Contribution Also Indicate The Main Trends. The First Of Its Kind In More Than Half A Century.




The World Next Door


Book Description

This book grows out of the question, "What is South Asian American writing and what insights can it offer us about living in the world at this particular moment of tense geopolitics and inter-linked economies?" South Asian American literature, with its focus on the multiple geographies and histories of the global dispersal of South Asians, pulls back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of many nations and peoples. Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book argues that to read the body of South Asian American literature justly, one must engage with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Poets, novelists, and playwrights like Indran Amirthanayagam, Meena Alexander, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Shani Mootoo, Amitava Kumar, Tahira Naqvi, and Sharbari Ahmed exhort North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. These writers' significant contribution to American literature and to the American imagination is to depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined within the fold of other nations. The world out there arrives next door.




Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature


Book Description

This volume studies the representation of religion in South Asian Anglophone literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It traces the contours of South Asian writing through the consequences of the complex contesting forces of blasphemy and secularization. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach, it discusses various key issues such as religious fundamentalism, Islamophobia, religious majoritarianism, nationalism, and secularism. It also provides an account of the reception of this writing within the changing conceptions of racial "Others" and cultural difference, particularly with respect to minority writers, in terms of ethnic background and lack of access to social mobility. The volume features chapters on key texts, including The Hungry Tide, The Enchantress of Florence, In Times of Seige, One Part Woman, Anil’s Ghost, The Book of Gold Leaves, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, The Black Coat and Swarnalata, among others. An important contribution to the study of South Asian literature, the book will be indispensable for students and researchers of literary studies, religious studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, and South Asian studies.




South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010


Book Description

Tracing a literary lineage for works from different genres, it identifies key trends in recent South Asian American and British Asian literature by considering the favoured formal and aesthetic modes of major writers and by relating their work to differen




The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English


Book Description

The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English traces the development of literature in the region within its historical and cultural contexts, establishing connections from the colonial activity of the early modern period through to contemporary writing across nations such as Thailand, China, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong.




South-Asian Fiction in English


Book Description

This collection offers an essential, structured survey of contemporary fictions of South Asia in English, and includes specially commissioned chapters on each of the national traditions of the region. It covers less well known writings from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well as the more firmly established canon of contemporary Indian literature, and features chapters on important new and emergent forms such as the graphic novel, genre fiction and the short story. It also contextualizes some key ‘transformative’ aspects of recent fiction such as border and diaspora identities; new middle-class narratives and popular genres; and literary response to terror and conflict. Edited and designed with researchers and students in mind, the book updates existing criticism and represents a readable guide to a dynamic, rapidly changing area of global literature.




Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers


Book Description

Global and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance. In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, Asia, and around the world.