Dissenters and Mavericks : Writings About India in English, 1765-2000

Dissenters and Mavericks reinvigorates the interdisciplinary study of literature, history, and politics through an approach to reading that allows the voices heard in writing a chance to talk back, to exert pressure on the presuppositions and preferences of a wide range of readers. Offering fresh and provocative interpretations of both well-known and unfamiliar texts—from colonial writers such as Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke to twentieth-century Indian writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, and Pankaj Mishra—the book proposes a controversial challenge to prevailing academic methodology in the field of postcolonial studies. This study reinstates the author at the centre of the relationship between literature and history. It explores the tension between "discourse analysis" and literary criticism, then discusses writers who have achieved a measure of freedom from the limitations of their historical moments.