Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English

ISBN-13: 9780415402958 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 224 str.

Srivastava Neel; Neelam Francesca Rash Srivastava

Opis

This study explores the connections between a secular Indian nation and fiction in English by a number of postcolonial Indian writers of the 1980s and 90s. Examining writers such as Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, and Rohinton Mistry, with particularly close readings of Midnight�s Children, A Suitable Boy, The Shadow Lines and The Satanic Verses, Neelam Srivastava investigates different aspects of postcolonial identity within the secular framework of the Anglophone novel. The book traces the breakdown of the Nehruvian secular consensus between 1975 and 2005 through these narratives of postcolonial India. In particular, it examines how these writers use the novel form to re-write colonial and nationalist versions of Indian history, and how they radically reinvent English as a secular language for narrating India. Ultimately, it delineates a common conceptual framework for secularism and cosmopolitanism, by arguing that Indian secularism can be seen as a located, indigenous form of a cosmopolitan identity.

Spis treści

Introduction Chapter One: Theories of Secularism Chapter Two: Minority Identity in India: Midnight’s Children and A Suitable Boy Chapter Three: Secularism and Syncretism in The Shadow Lines and The Satanic Verses Chapter Four: Allegory and Realism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel Chapter Five: The Historical Event in the Postcolonial Indian Novel –I Chapter Six: The Historical Event in the Postcolonial Indian Novel – II Chapter Seven: Languages of the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy Chapter Eight: Cosmopolitanism and Globalization in Rushdie and Seth

O autorze

Neelam Srivastava is lecturer in postcolonial literature at Newcastle University, UK. She has published on Indian literature in English and anti-colonial cinema, and has co-edited a special issue of the journal Interventions on colonial and postcolonial Italy.