Author: C Vijayashree
Editor(s): C Vijayashree
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 214
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8126019441
Description
This volume explores how the West has been written into Indian literary texts and other cultural productions. The twelve essays included here, written by literary critics, cultural historians and film theorists, examine patterns in India's perception and creative representation of the West, each focusing on a specific linguistic context: Asamiya, Bangala, Hindi, Oriya, Telugu and Urdu besides Indian writing in English.
Though dealing with different regions and languages, most of these papers demonstrate the limits of contemporary postcolonial theorizations and urge the need for a reconceptualization of the theories of colonial encounter in order to account for the ways in which India imagined and imaged the West and its civilization.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Image of the West in Asamiya Literature: 1857-1947
The West Turned Upside Down in a Bengali Satire
May the Sindoor on the Lips Never Perish: The West in Colonial Humour
Imaging the Real: Reading the 19th Century in Bangla
The Virtuous Woman in the Ideal home: Female Identity and the Conduct Book Tradition in Orissa
The White Lady's Love Stories
Splitting the West: Gurajada's Kanyasulkam
Trespassing the Binary Between Modernity and Tradition: Vishwanatha Satyanarayana and Gudipati Venkata Chalam
For Reasons of Their Own: The Image of the West in the Colonial Period
The West in the 19th Century Imagination: Some Reflections on the Transition from Persianate Knowledge System to the Template of Urdu and English
Empire Builders/Empire Breakers: Early Indian Nationalists in Africa
Breaching the Divide - A Post-Colonial Study of Two Films: Reading Images from Junoon (1978) and Lagaan (2001)
Contributors