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"East Indians in literature"
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Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing
Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing explores recent writing by a variety of South African authors of Indian descent. The essays highlight the sociality and patterns of connectedness that are being forged between South Africa's hitherto divided communities.
eBook
Understanding Bharati Mukherjee
\"Bharati Mukherjee was an important, bold, pioneering American writer. Born in Calcutta, India on July 27, 1940 to Sudhir Lal Mukherjee and Bina (née Chatterjee), a Bengali Brahmin couple, the young Bharati--the middle of three daughters--enjoyed a privileged early life. Mukherjee's father was a biochemist who ran a successful pharmaceutical company and supported a wide network of some fifty relatives all based within the same house in Ballygunge, south Calcutta. A precociously intelligent child, Mukherjee was always highly literate, stimulated by her parents to read and study. Consuming books in a quiet corner was often a refuge from the claustrophobic demands of traditional Indian joint family living, and she began writing stories as a young child. Mukherjee was inspired by the storytelling of her paternal grandmother and her mother. Indeed, she consistently paid tribute to Bina, who proudly defended and encouraged Mukherjee and her two sisters, Mira and Ranu, against a patriarchal backdrop of ridicule from Bina's older, female in-laws for having borne Sudhir no sons\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The Language of the Gods in the World of Men
In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.
eBook
Indography : writing the \Indian\ in early modern England
\"Indography: Writing the \"Indian\" in Early Modern England considers literary and non-literary representations of Indians in early modern English writing in relation to processes of globalization and race formation\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Commerce with the Universe
Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a new history of Africa's encounter with slavery, colonialism, migration, nationalism, development, and globalization. Rather than approach literature and culture from a nation-centered perspective, Desai connects the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic nations to the fertile exchange taking place across the Indian Ocean.
eBook
Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century
At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in turn, reveal translation's truer function as a locus of power. In Imperial Babel, Padma Rangarajan explores translation's complex role in shaping literary and political relationships between India and Britain. Unlike other readings that cast colonial translation as primarily a tool for oppression, Rangarajan's argues that translation changed both colonizer and colonized and undermined colonial hegemony as much as it abetted it. Imperial Babel explores the diverse political and cultural consequences of a variety of texts, from eighteenth-century oriental tales to mystic poetry of the fin de siecle and from translation proper to its ethnological, mythographic, and religious variants. Searching for translation's trace enables a broader, more complex understanding of intellectual exchange in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced awareness of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenth-century literature. Rangarajan argues that while bearing witness to the violence that underwrites translation in colonial spaces, we should also remain open to the irresolution of translation, its unfixed nature, and its ability to transform both languages in which it works.
eBook
Untouchable Fictions
William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in PMLA \"Some Time between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature\" May 2011 issue of PMLA Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit (\"untouchable caste\") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce? Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text and its radical critique with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia. Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to its unique and groundbreaking literary interventions while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment in the literary genealogy of the 20th and 21st centuries. This book, grounded in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian literatures, and cultural studies, makes a crucial intervention into studies of literary realism and will be important for all readers interested in the problematic relations between aesthetics and politics and between social movements and cultural production.
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Flesh and fish blood
In Flesh and Fish Blood Subramanian Shankar breaks new ground in postcolonial studies by exploring the rich potential of vernacular literary expressions. Shankar pushes beyond the postcolonial Anglophone canon and works with Indian literature and film in English, Tamil, and Hindi to present one of the first extended explorations of representations of caste, including a critical consideration of Tamil Dalit (so-called untouchable) literature. Shankar shows how these vernacular materials are often unexpectedly politically progressive and feminist, and provides insight on these oft-overlooked—but nonetheless sophisticated—South Asian cultural spaces. With its calls for renewed attention to translation issues and comparative methods in uncovering disregarded aspects of postcolonial societies, and provocative remarks on humanism and cosmopolitanism, Flesh and Fish Blood opens up new horizons of theoretical possibility for postcolonial studies and cultural analysis.
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What Are You Reading?
This book offers a material critique on various aspects of Indian literary production and its reception by its audiences. Taking a historical and contemporary lineage into account, the author variously discusses the social, political, and economic factors that impact upon and determine choices in the publishing world.
Examining the constructions of the archive of postcolonial works by Indian writers in relation to nationalist histories, language wars, and the relationship between economic policies and literature, the book forcefully argues that why we read what we read is more than coincidental. Placing the rights of minoritized and disadvantaged communities at the heart of the analysis of India's decolonization and industrial projects, the book attempts to address not just inequalities in the publishing world, but also social inequities engendered by global capitalism. Offering a critique of academics who act as cultural gatekeepers of intellectual production, the book finally underscores the disconnect between the academic theory and practice of scholars of postcolonial studies who argue against inequality and marginalization while simultaneously supporting hegemonic academic practices.
This book will be of interest to scholars of development studies, cultural studies, literature, postcolonial studies, economics, and those studying globalization, as well as the interested lay reader.
eBook