Author: Alamgir Hashmi
Malashri Lal/Victor Ramraj
Editor(s): Alamgir Hashmi, Malashri Lal & Victor Ramraj
Publisher: Alhamra
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN/UPC (if available): 969516093X
Description
This volume offers important readings in South Asian Literatures in English. Both the scholarly and creative contributions also indicate the main trends, and this book is the first of its kind in more than half a century.
Original English Writing in South Asian Subcontinent was already on a firm footing in the early decades of this century with its rather urbane battery of writes and press, official encouragement, and an attentive audience in the colonial world. It was backed up by a tradition of local English writing, then older than a century.
Following the partition of India, and independence from Britain of both India and Pakistan in 1947, the language and the literary writing in its have flourished, often in ways unforeseen and striking. Alongside substantial development in other languages and literatures of the region, the phenomenal rise in both quantity and quality of writing in English in all forms is evidently the most significant cultural aspect of the post independence era-all the more interesting as it has happened in certain instances contrary to expectation, and even declared government policy, and not just in Pakistan or India, but also in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Contents
ARTICLES
Preface
From Absent Authority to Present Responsibility: An Agenda for Indian (English) Criticism
Transnational Migrations and the Debate of English Writing in/of Pakistan
Dancing in the Rarefied Air: Reading Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature
Courtesy in Conflict: The Strange Character of the Briton in Indian and Pakistan English Fictions
An Interview with Arundhati Roy
Inhabiting Enclosures and Creating Space: The Worlds of Women in Indian and Pakistani Literature in English
Shaking up a Continent: Biography as a Postindependence Response
An Interview with Shashi Deshpande
Am Interview with Khushwant Singh
Itihasa ; thus it was : Mukul Kesavan’s Looking through Glass and the Rewriting of History
Politics and Children’s Literature: A Reading of Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Frontier Fiction: Reading Books in M G Vassanji’s the Book of Secrets
An Interview with Suniti Namhoshi
Some Recent English-Language Poetry from Pakistan
In Desire and in Death; Eroticism as Politics in Arundhti Roy’s the God of Small Things
Figuring the Maternal: Freedom and Responsibility in Anita Desai’s Novels
Consuming India by Graham Huggan
FICTION AND DRAMA
Rabbit’s Retreat (Fiction)
Extracts from The Education of Miss Asia (Drama)
POETRY
Shringara
According to my bond: no more nor less
Partition Ghazal
She bears a gold flute
Houseflies
Mirrored in the Waters
Voyaging at Ten
Collaboration
Disturbed Nights
Flying Home
Old Diseases
The Mosque of Wazir Khan
Single Malt
N B by Alamgir Hashmi
Strange Pleasures
Don’ Ever Kick the Dog
REVIEWS
Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India
Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, eds, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947 -1997
Rosemary Marangoly George. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction
Padmini Mongia, ed, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader
S Shankar, A Map of Where I Live
Alok Bhalla, ed, Stores about the Partition of India
Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose, eds, Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film
Octavio Paz, In Light of India
Malashri Lal, The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English
Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to Millennium
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS