India has a rich literary assemblage produced by its many different regional traditions, religious faiths, ethnic subcultures and linguistic groups. The published literature of the 20th century is a particularly interesting subject and is the focus of this book, as it represents the provocative conjuncture of the transitions of Indian modernity. This reference book surveys the major regional literatures of contemporary India in the context of the country's diversity and heterogeneity. Chapters are devoted to particular regions, and the arrangement of the work invites comparisons of...

In this study, Nyla Ali Khan focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four contemporary Anglophone writers: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, Khan offers a critical dialogue between these works and the contemporary history they encounter, using history to interrogate fiction and using fiction to think through historical issues. In doing so, Khan argues that in the mixed, heterogeneous space of transnationalism, cultural and linguistic authenticity...

The Dark Age Ridiculed, by Nila.kantha, Beguiling Artistry, by Kshemendra, The Hundred Allegories, by Bhallata

Written over a period of nearly a thousand years, these works show three very different approaches to satire. Nila.kantha gets straight to the point: swindlers prey on stupidity.

The artistry that beguiles Kshemendra is as varied as human nature and just as fallible. We are off to a gentle start Sanctimoniousreally no more than a warm-up among vices but soon graduate to Greed and Lust. From there it's downhill all the way, as unfaithfulness...

Designed as a companion to Rabindranath Tagore's 'Ghare-Baire' (The Home and the World), the ten essays in this volume cover the novel in terms of the complexity of colonial modernity. Taking into account Tagore's critique of religious nationalism and the historical processes, in which the novel is embedded, the authors examine questions of gender, nationalism and the novel form. Issues of gender such as the creations of modern selfhood, the problems of representing the woman as the nation and the crises of masculinity are discussed. Similarly, Tagore's critique of Hindu nationalism is...

Designed as a companion to Rabindranath Tagore's 'Ghare-Baire' (The Home and the World), the ten essays in this volume cover the novel in terms of the complexity of colonial modernity. Taking into account Tagore's critique of religious nationalism and the historical processes, in which the novel is embedded, the authors examine questions of gender, nationalism and the novel form. Issues of gender such as the creations of modern selfhood, the problems of representing the woman as the nation and the crises of masculinity are discussed. Similarly, Tagore's critique of Hindu nationalism is...

The book presented here is the first work of Western literary criticism to examine the Hindi laghukathā - a modern Indian prose genre that has been published since the 1970s in Hindi newspapers and magazines and is characterised by its concise form (500 words on average) and socio-political agenda. The importance of the genre within the Hindi literary scene lies in the fact that the laghukathā is based on indigenous genres which have been modernised, whereas the Hindi short story and the novel are Western genres that have been appropriated and Indianised.

A thorough...