Author: Meenakshi Mukherjee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 212
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195662709
Description
This volume is an insightful collection of essays that provide a fresh perspective on Indian writing in English. This is perhaps the first attempt to relate Indian English texts to texts in other Indian languages and see this phenomenon as part of a composite cultural mosaic.
In the first part of the book, Mukherjee awakens the general amnesia about Indian writing's nineteenth century beginnings through meticulous archival research and in the second, traces its sporadic development in the twentieth century, two final chapters explore the end-century euphoria about its global visibility.
The author probes the role of literature in imagining the national at different periods of time, also examining the politics of language in the process. Analyses of texts (Rajmohan's Wife, The Shadowlines, Haroun AND THE Sea of Stories) alternative with studies of authors (Krupa Satthianadhan, Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Nirad C Chaudhuri) and speculations on broader issues of culture, history, language, readership and translation. Theoretically informed, but written in jargon-free language, this book will be of interest to specialists in literature as well as readers in other areas like post colonialism, history and cultural studies.