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This anthology of essays, deliberates chiefly on the notion of locating home through the lens of the mythical idea of Trishanku, implying in-between space and homing, in diaspora women’s narratives, associated with the South Asian region. The idea of in-between space has been used differently in various cultures but gesture prominently on the connotation of ‘hanging’ between worlds. Historically, imperialism and the indentured/ ‘grimit’ system, triggered dispersal of labourers to the various colonies of the British. Of course, this was not the only cause of international migratory processes. The partition of India and Pakistan led to large scale migration. There was Punjabi migration to Canada. Several Indians, particularly the Gujaratis travelled to Africa for business reasons. South Indians travelled to the Gulf for employment. There were migrations to East Asian countries under the kangani system. Again, these were not the only reasons. The process of demographic movement from South Asia, has been complex due to innumerable push-pull factors. The subsequent generations of migrants included the twice, thrice (and likewise) displaced members of the diaspora. Racial denigration and Orientalist perceptions plagued their lives. They belonged to various ethnicities and races, inhabited marginalized spaces and strived to acculturate in the host society. Complete cultural assimilation was not possible, creating layered and hyphenated identities. These intricate social processes resulted in amalgamation and cross-pollination of cultures, inter-racial relationships and hybridization in all terrains of culture—language, music, fashion, cuisine and so on. Situated in this matrix was the notion of Home—a special personal space which an individual could feel as belonging to, very strongly. Nostalgia, loss of home, culture shock and interracial encounters problematized this discernment of belongingness and home. These multifarious themes have been captured by women writers from the South Asian region and this book looks at the various aspects related to negotiating home in their narratives.

The book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization. This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation. He interrogates the spatial desire of anti-colonial and colonial texts across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics. The book is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Literature and Utopia, Literature and Decolonization, Literature and Nationalism, Cultural Geography, and South Asian Studies.

Extending current scholarship on South Asian Urban and Literary Studies, this volume examines the role of the discontents of the South Asian city. The collection investigates how South Asian literature and literature about South Asia attends to urban margins, regardless of whether the definition of margin is spatial, psychological, gendered, or sociopolitical. That cities are a site of profound paradoxes is nowhere clearer than in South Asia, where urban areas simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south. Additionally, because South Asian cities are defined by the palimpsestic confluence of, among other things, colonial oppression, anticolonial nationalism, postcolonial governance, and twenty-first century transnational capital, they are sites where the many faces of empowerment and disempowerment are elaborated. The volume brings together essays that emphasize myriad critical approaches—geospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, subaltern, and others. United in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, the chapters respond to central questions such as: What is the relationship between the politico-economic narratives of globally emerging South Asian cities and the dispossessed? How do South Asian cities stand in relationship to the nation and, conversely, how might South Asians in diaspora construct these cities within larger narratives of development, globalization, or as sources of authentic ethnic identities? How is the very skeleton—the space, the territory—of South Asian cities marked with and by exclusionary politics? How do the aesthetic and formal choices undertaken by writers determine the potential for and limit to emancipation of urban outcasts from their oppressive circumstances? Considering fiction, nonfiction, comics, and genre fiction from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; literature from the twentieth and the twenty-first century; and works that are Anglophone and those that are in translation, this book will be valuable to a range of disciplines. Madhurima Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English, Columbia College Chicago, USA. Umme Al-wazedi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Co-Program Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Augustana College, USA. Table of Contents Introduction Madhurima Chakraborty Section One: Urban Outcasts, Urban Subalterns 1. Recasting the Outcast: Hyderabadi Subjectivities in Two Literary Texts Nazia Akhtar 2. The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction Sourit Bhattacharya 3. \"Someone called India\": Urban Space and the Tribal Subject in Mahasweta Devi’s \"Douloti the Bountiful\" Jay Rajiva 4. \"Stuck at Pause\": Representations of the Comatose City in Delhi Calm Amit Baishya Section Two: The National, The Global, and the Diaspora 5. Unmoored: Passing, Slumming, and Return-Writing in New India Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 6. Lahore, Lahore Aye : Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid’s City Fictions Claire Chambers 7. Between Aspiration and Imagination: Exploring Native-Cosmopolitanism in Adib Khan’s Spiral Road and Mohammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee, Arnapurna Rath and Koshy Tharakan 8. Portrayal of a Dystopic Dhaka: On Diaspora Reproductions of Bangladeshi Urbanity Maswood Akhter Section Three: The Space of the Margins 9. Imag(in)ing the city: A Study of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi Nishat Haider 10. Gendering Place and Possibility in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence and Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours Lauren J. Lacey and Joy E. Ochs 11. Delhi at the Margins: Heterotopic Imagination, Bricolage, and Alternative Urbanity in Trickster City Sanjukta Poddar Section Four: Forms of Urban Outcasting 12. Carl Muller’s Palimpsestic Urban Elegy in Colombo: A Novel Maryse Jayasuriya 13. The fiction of Anosh Irani: the magic of a traumatized community Kelly A. Minerva 14. New Capital? Representing Bangalore in Recent Crime Fiction Anna Guttman

Limiting Secularism probes the urgent topic of secularism and tolerance in Indian culture and life. Priya Kumar unpacks the implications of the Nehruvian doctrine of tolerance—with all of its resonances of condescension and inequality—and asks whether more ethical cohabitation can replace the “arrogant compulsive tolerance” of the state and the majority. Kumar envisions the radical possibilities of going beyond tolerance to living well together.