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This book establishes river fiction as an identifiable genre-fiction. It argues that rivers and riverbeds - through myths and legends, ecological and environmental concerns, geographical and historical realities, politics and economics around them - can provide an underlying framework to understand Indian prose fiction.
List of contents
AcknowledgementsForewordIntroduction: Reading the Indian river fiction: Generic movements and intersectional approaches
PART I: NARRATIVES
1 A tale of woe and displacement: Brahmaputra as the perpetual perpetrator in Rudrani Sarma's
2 The river bound humans: Narrative deployment of the river in delineating limitations of human worlds in select Bengali short-fiction
3 Living with the river: Analysing aspects of vulnerability and human-nonhuman relationship in
The Boatman of the Padma and
The Ganga4 "Those who live beside the river need to be alarmed around the year": Women across rivers in Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay's
The Tale of Hansuli Turn and
Kalindi5 River as the pathway to performative masculine identity: A reading of Atin Bandyopadhyay's
Ekti Joler Rekha O Ora Tin Jon6 River, cityscape and crime: Navigating the Ganges in Satyajit Ray's
Joi Baba Felunath and
Golapi Mukta RahasyaPART II: GEOGRAPHIES
7 Reading river rites and river resilience in Naga Anglophone novels: An attempt to restore indigenous river rights
8 Separating the waters: Analysing the Partition's impact upon Bengal's rivers and
chars through select Bengali 'hydro-fiction'
9 Dammed or doomed rivers?: Interrogating the other side of modernisation and reclaiming the displaced riverine communities' narratives through Anita Agnihotri's
Mahanadi: The Tale of a River and
Mahakantar10 "What was once a rushing torrent, has become a broad river!": Reflections onviolation of socio-ecological justice in Orijit Sen's
River of Stories and Sarnath Banerjee's
All Quiet in Vikaspuri11 "Through the holes in her ears, you could see the hot river and the dark trees that bent to It": En-visioning the river as a subject and tracing the poetics of environmental imagination in
The God of Small ThingsPART III: HISTORIES
12 Mapping the unknown: An exploration into the challenges of knowledge acquisition in Major James Rennell's
The Journals13 A portrait of the artist as a riverine fellow: Journey of the self through natural and community history in
Subarnarenu Subarnarekha14 The flowing of the river brings the promise of eternity: Reading
Ichamati and river narratives of the Sundarbans
15 The anonymous history of her banks is the living truth: A comparative study of ecology, community and gender in Adwaita Mallabarman's
Titas Ekti Nadir Naam and Harishankar Jaladas'
Jalaputra16 From labour as legacy to labour as commodity: Reflections from Debesh Ray's Tista novels
17 Ravaged hinterlands of central India: Capitalism and ecological appropriation in Anita Agnihotri's
Mahanadi: The Tale of a RiverAfterword: An author's perspective: Reinventing a tradition while writing within it
About the author
Subhadeep Ray is an Associate Professor of English at Bidhan Chandra College, Asansol, West Bengal, India, and a Visiting Professor of English at Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal, India.
Summary
This book establishes river fiction as an identifiable genre-fiction. It argues that rivers and riverbeds — through myths and legends, ecological and environmental concerns, geographical and historical realities, politics and economics around them — can provide an underlying framework to understand Indian prose fiction.
