Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

This study explores the connections between a secular Indian nation and fiction in English by a number of postcolonial Indian writers of the 1980s and 90s. Examining writers such as Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, and Rohinton Mistry, with particularly close readings of "Midnight's Children", "A Suitable Boy", "The Shadow Lines" and "The Satanic Verses," Neelam Srivastava investigates different aspects of postcolonial identity within the secular framework of the Anglophone novel.; The book traces the breakdown of the Nehruvian secular consensus between 1975 and 2005 through these narratives of postcolonial India. In particular, it examines how these writers use the novel form to re-write colonial and nationalist versions of Indian history, and how they radically reinvent English as a secular language for narrating India. Ultimately, it delineates a common conceptual framework for secularism and cosmopolitanism, by arguing that Indian secularism can be seen as a located, indigenous form of a cosmopolitan identity Book Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 6 Copyright......Page 7 Dedicaion......Page 8 Contents......Page 10 Acknowledgements......Page 11 Introduction......Page 12 1 Theories of secularism......Page 29 2 Minority identity in India: Midnight’s Children and A Suitable Boy......Page 59 3 Secularism and syncretism in The Shadow Lines and The Satanic Verses......Page 81 4 Allegory and realism in the Indian novel in English......Page 99 5 The historical event in the postcolonial Indian novel – I......Page 121 6 The historical event in the postcolonial Indian novel – II......Page 141 7 Languages of the nation in Midnight’s Children and A Suitable Boy......Page 151 8 Cosmopolitanism and globalization in Rushdie and Seth......Page 168 Conclusions: Beyond dialogism?......Page 192 Notes......Page 195 References......Page 201 Index......Page 213 Neelam Srivastava. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [190]-201) And Index.