Author: E V Ramakrishnan
Editor(s): E V Ramakrishnan
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 412
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8126020725
Description
The papers collected in this volume were presented originally at a national seminar organized by the Akademi on The Novel in Search of a Nation. The various sessions of the seminar addressed issues such as the region and the nation, articulating the local, rewriting, rereading history, women and the nation, limits of the nation and the nation and beyond. The papers included here were selected solely for their value for a larger audience consisting of both general readers and specialists in Indian literature.
The papers in the first section of the book deal with some general issues regarding narratives of the nation. They map the larger contexts for subsequent sections. The focus of the second section is on certain collectivities. Themes such as the Partition, representation of women, treatment of Dalit experience and region and the nation are discussed. The third section turns to individual texts for detailed analysis.
This volume will stimulated further debates and enquires regarding the relationship between the Indian novel and the thematic of nationhood.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
SECTION 1: NATIONS AND NATIONALISM: CONTEXTS OF CULTURE AND POWER
Searching for a Narrative in Times of Globalisation
Imagining a Future: The Narrative in Search of Secular Space
Recent Nation Theory and the Nationalist Quest in Indian Novel
SECTION 2: ARTICULATING COMMUNITY: MEMORY, HISTORY, IDENTITY
Memory, History and Fictional Representation of the Partition
The Partition of India and the Hindi Novel
The Re/Discovery of India: The Engagement of Contemporary English Novel with Indian History
Region-Country dialectic in Punjabi novel
The Other Voice: Women’s Writing in India
The Nation in Search of Narration: a Note on the Dalit Novel in Malayalam
The Lead Melts and Severed tongues Find voice: A Note on the Emergent Gujarati Dalit Novel
SECTION 3: NATION AND IMAGINATION: FROM TEXTS TO PEOPLE
Early Formulations of the Nation: Govardhanram Tripathi’s Sarasvatichandra in Gujarati
Reading Indulekha: Muslim in the Processes of Nation-Translation
Nationalism, the Novel and Premchand
The Village and the Nation: Satinath Bhaduri’s Dhonrai Charit Manas
Narrating Nation, Narrating Communities: construction of Muslim Identity in Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag ka Darya
The Ethics of Witnessing: Vaikom Muhammad
Basheer and the Subject of Historical Narration
The Tin Drum Not Stop to Beat: A New Reading of Anand’s Aalkkoottam
Caste, Class and Gender in Mahasweta: Douloti as a National Allegory
The National and the Anglo-Indian: A Study of The Trotter-Nama
The Novel and the Crisis of the Nation/Nation-State: A Reading of some Malayalam Novels
CONTRIBUTORS