Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures

In forty-three chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures presents Indian literature as inherently relational and comparative. Focusing on the multilingual richness of the field as constitutive of the idea of modern Indian literature, this volume features cutting-edge literary criticism on texts written in at least seventeen languages and in a range of modern literary genres. The Handbook shows the deep connections and collaborations across genre, language, nation, and region, which produce an array of literatures, mark out diverse contact zones, and engender innovations on form, technique, and literary aesthetics.

List of contents

• About the Volume Editors


• Contributors


• Acknowledgments


• Introduction: Modernity, Multilingualism, and the Literary Canon


• Ulka Anjaria and Anjali Nerlekar


• Part I: Approaches to Indian Modernities


• 1. Literary Multilingualism in the Age of the Vernacular


• Francesca Orsini


• 2. English in India, India in English


• Rajeswari Sunder Rajan


• 3. Concealments and Exposures: Translating Caste in Indian Literature


• Rita Kothari


• 4. The Haunted Present: Contemporary Malayalam Fiction and Kerala's Unaccommodated Pasts


• Udaya Kumar


• 5. Remaking Marathi: Modern Histories of Language and V. L. Bhave's Mahrashtra Saraswat


• Prachi Desphande


• 6. Emergency in Ellipses: Styling Modernity in U. R. Ananthamurthy's Bara


• C. S. Bhagya


• 7. Rhizomatic Entanglements: Nonhuman Representations in Yeshe Dorje Thongchi's "Baah Phulor Gundho"


• Amit Baishya


• Part II: The Indian Modern and its Legacies


• 8. Modernist Poetry and Marathi Modernism: Through the Lens of Dilip Chitre's Multimodal Oeuvre


• Vinay Dharwadker


• 9. Mahasweta Devi and Indian Literature from Below


• Auritro Majumder


• 10. Bilingual Premchand and His Legacy


• M. Asaduddin


• 11. Elites, Subalterns, and the Postcolonial Nation: Indian English Novels of the 1980s and 1990s


• Pranav Jani


• 12. William Jones, George Grierson, Verrier Elwin: Positioning the Horizons of Modern Indian Literature


• G.N. Devy


• 13. A New Literature for a Naya Kashmir: Progressivism and Modernism in Modern Kashmiri Literature


• Abir Bazaz


• 14. The Ambivalent Aesthetics of Muhammad Hasan Askari


• Zain Mian


• 15. The Literary Management of Multilingualism in Postcolonial India: The Sahitya Akademi and the Case of Tamil New Poetry


• Preetha Mani


• Part III: Indian Modern Contact Zones


• 16. Memoir, Autofiction, and the New Indian Humanities


• Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan


• 17. The Haunted Cane Fields of Queer Indo-Caribbean Poetry and Qoolie Poetics


• Rajiv Mohabir


• 18. Ananda Devi's Laughing Goddesses and the Limitless Possibilities of Transnational Fiction


• Srilata Ravi


• 19. Transnational Tamil Literature, Dialect, and Environment


• Rebecca Whittington


• 20. Bengal from Both Sides: Partition in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Mahmudul Haque's Black Ice


• Nasia Anam


• 21. Indian Gulf Writing


• Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil


• 22. Probable, Improbable, and Catastrophic Realisms in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction


• Sangeeta Ray


• Part IV: Counternarratives of the Indian Modern


• 23. Writing and Being Modern: Nation, Caste, Gender, and Women's Fiction


• V. Geetha


• 24. The Rise of a Muslim Voice: Telugu Writing in the Times of Hindu Nationalism


• Afsar Mohammad


• 25. Indian Literary History: Ambedkar and Dalit Literature


• K. Satyanarayana


• 26. Irom Sharmila's Poetry and the Politics of Anthologizing Indian Literature


• Soibam Haripriya


• 27. Representing Caste in Odia Literature


• Raj Kumar


• 28. Toward a Canon of Modern Indian Queer Literature


• R. Raj Rao


• 29. Adivasi Poetry: The Poetics of Indigeneity in Contemporary India


• Joya John


• 30. Green, Red: From Pragati to Jujhar in the Cold War Punjab


• Aditya Bahl


• Part V: Circulations of the Indian Modern


• 31. Romance, Aesthetics and Progressivism in Marathi Literary Culture: Narayan Sitaram Phadke and the Modern Marathi Novel


• Rahul Sarwate


• 32. Encasted Formalism: Notes on Reading Caste Scripts in Fiction


• Vivek Narayan


• 33. Urban Space across Genre: The Cities of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh


• Gregory Goulding


• 34. Pastorals in the City: Space, Tradition and Translation in The Country Without a Post Office


• Huzaifa Pandit


• 35. Ambiguous Journeys and Halfway Homes in Ramanujan, Narayan, Karnad and Ananthamurthy


• Anjum Hasan


• 36. Narrative Authority in the Colonial Novel


• Rochelle Pinto


• 37. The Village in Bengali Modernity


• Supriya Chaudhuri


• Part VI: Modern Indian Forms and Media


• 38. Translation/Adaptation: The Vernacular Storyworld of Byomkesh Bakshi


• Laura Brueck


• 39. Saadat Hasan Manto and the Poetics of the Urdu Short Story


• Jennifer Dubrow


• 40. Voices of Resistance: Exploring Feminist Futurities in Kari and Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection


• Rudrani Gangopadhyay


• 41. How to Play Indian Literature: Indian Videogames as a Literary Form


• Souvik Mukherjee


• 42. "Together in the Leaves of the Book": Notes on a Bengali Modernist Poetics of Desire


• Brinda Bose


• 43. The Poetics of Indian Hip Hop


• Elloit Cardozo


• Index

About the author

Anjali Nerlekar is Associate Professor in the Department of AMESALL at Rutgers University and co-editor of Modernism/modernity. Her publications include Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (2016; Indian edition by Speaking Tiger, 2017), a co-edited special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing ("The Worlds of Bombay Poetry," 2017), and a co-edited special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies on "Postcolonial Archives" in 2021. Her ongoing project (in collaboration with Dr. Bronwen Bledsoe) is the building of an archive of multilingual post-1960 Bombay poetry at Cornell University Library, "The Bombay Poets Archive." She is also currently working on her second book manuscript which examines the multilingual borders of Marathi literature.

Ulka Anjaria is professor of English and director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University, USA, with research specialties in South Asian literature and film, realism and the global novel. She is the author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019), and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021) and the editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015).

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures refutes the Anglocentrism of much literary criticism of the global South by examining "Indian Literature" as a multilingual, dialogic, and plural space constituted by both continuities and divergences. In forty-three chapters and with a team of scholars who exemplify the method of historically situated and theoretically rigorous literary criticism, this volume shows how the idea of Indian literature is a relational and comparative concept. Through readings of a vast diversity of multilingual literature in a range of genres, the chapters highlight contact zones and interchanges across seemingly sedimented boundaries. The Handbook provides an overview of the current state of modern Indian writing and features a range of texts and approaches from across India's many languages and literary traditions, examining and amplifying recent critical attention to the multilingualism that is at the base of any curation of what could be termed, with qualification, "Indian Literatures." The book ranges from the 19th century to the 21st, with especial focus on the centrality of gender and caste to Indian modernism and new generic formations such as graphic novels, autofiction, and videogames.

Product details

• Authors: Ulka (Professor Anjaria
• Assisted by: Ulka Anjaria (Editor), Anjaria Ulka (Editor), Anjali Nerlekar (Editor), Nerlekar Anjali (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 10.09.2024
• EAN: 9780197647912
• ISBN: 978-0-19-764791-2
• No. of pages: 744
• Series: Oxford Handbooks
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Asian / Indic, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary theory, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000