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An incisive exposition of the question of subjectivity in modern Indian literature. Seeking to foreground subjectivity through literary expressions of intense emotionality, whether suffering, humiliation, creativity or strife, the work also raises the timely question of the relation of justice and speech. Some of the authors studied include Tagore, Saratchandra, KR Meera, Urmila Pawar, Agyeya, Ismat Chughtai and Krishna Sobti.
List of contents
- In Gratitude
- Prelude
- First Study: Injustice and the Self
- Second Study: Ambition and Achievement
- Third Study: Modes of the Bildung-Humour and the Lyric
- Fourth Study: Desire as Inner Mutuality
- Fifth Study: A Skein of Voices
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
About the author
Nikhil Govind is Associate Professor and Head, Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy for Higher Education (MAHE). His doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, was on the consonance between revolutionary and literary form in strands of Bengali and Hindi literature. He is the author of BETWEEN LOVE AND FREEDOM: THE REVOLUTIONARY IN THE HINDI NOVEL (Routledge, 2014, reprinted 2018). He is a Working Editor and on the Editorial Board of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME). He writes regularly for mainstream media on Indian literature, cinema, higher education, and contemporary culture.
Summary
This book discusses the question of subjectivity in modern Indian literature using some of the most influential literary texts of the last hundred years. Scholarship in Indian literature tends to be divided along the lines of region, language, historical period, class, caste and so on. However, this book, by foregrounding a concept---subjectivity---allows the concept to determine the architecture of the book. Thus there are chapters on the various modes of subjectivity---a sense of ethical subjectivity is often awakened by a fierce sense of injustice, and the first two chapters discuss this, in the context of a contemporary Malayalam novel by KR Meera, and Urmila Pawar's memoir about her Dalit identity. The next two chapters delve into the literary history of selfhood in India---canonical writers such as the Hindi novelist Agyeya, the Urdu novelist Ismat Chughtai, and the Bengali novelists Saratchandra Chatterjee and RabindranathTagore are discussed. The last chapter revisits these concerns through the many voices employed by the Hindi novelist Krishna Sobti, whose career straddles the second half of the twentieth century.
Additional text
Nikhil Govind's book is an original, innovative and rigorous foray into the diverse and bewilderingly complex world of subcontinental fiction in the last hundred years...The scholarly relevance of the book cannot be emphasized enough. This is because it provides a novel entry point into the vast ambit of modern Indian literature without being too mechanical about it. The eloquent and erudite discussion of literary texts is ideal even for those readers who may not be familiar with all these writers and their literary backgrounds. The overarching Levinasian framework vis-à-vis self and subjectivity that undergirds Govind's chef-d'oeuvre is an immaculate example of how Indian texts can be analysed through Western theoretical paradigms without reading odd or awkward. Inlays of Subjectivity is thus a welcome addition to the hitherto existing parameters for evaluating the richness and heterogeneity of modern Indian literature.
