The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (Oxford Handbooks)

"The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship on regional language literary productions (in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), the critical works and the surveys focus only on that particular language and therefore frequently suffer from a lack of comparative breadth and/or global access. Both reflect the paradigm of monolingualism within which much literary scholarship on Indian literature takes place. This handbook instead focuses on the multilingual pathways through which modern Indian literature gets constituted. It features cutting-edge literary criticism from at least seventeen languages, and on traditional literary genres as well as more recent ones like graphic novels. It shows the deep connections and collaborations across genres, languages, nations, and regions that produce a literature of diverse contact zones, generating innovations on form, aesthetics, and technique. Foregrounding themes such as modernity and modernism, gender, caste, diaspora, and political resistance, the book collects an array of perspectives on this vast topic"-- Cover The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures Copyright Contents About the Volume Editors List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Modernity, Multilingualism, and the Literary Canon PART I. APPROACHES TO INDIAN MODERNITIES 1. Literary Multilingualism in the Age of the Vernacular 2. English in India, India in English 3. Concealments and Exposures: Translating Caste in Indian Literature 4. The Haunted Present: Contemporary Malayalam Fiction and Kerala’s Unaccommodated Pasts 6. Emergency in Ellipses: Styling Modernity in U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Bara 7. Rhizomatic Entanglements: Nonhuman Representations in Yeshe Dorje Thongchi’s “Baah Phulor Gundho” PART II. THE INDIAN MODERN AND ITS LEGACIES 8. Modernist Poetry and Marathi Modernism: Through the Lens of Dilip Chitre’s Multimodal Oeuvre 9. Mahasweta Devi and Indian Literature from Below 10. Bilingual Premchand and His Legacy 11. Elites, Subalterns, and the Postcolonial Nation: Indian English Novels of the 1980s and 1990s 12. William Jones, George Grierson, and Verrier Elwin: Positioning the Horizons of Modern Indian Literature 13. A New Literature for a Naya Kashmir: Progressivism and Modernism in Modern Kashmiri Literature 14. The Ambivalent Aesthetics of Muhammad Hasan Askari 15. The Literary Management of Multilingualism in Postcolonial India: The Sahitya Akademi and the Case of Tamil New Poetry PART III. INDIAN MODERN CONTACT ZONES 16. Memoir, Autofiction, and the New Indian Humanities 18. Ananda Devi’s Laughing Goddesses and the Limitless Possibilities of Transnational Fiction 19. Transnational Tamil Literature, Dialect, and Environment 20. Bengal from Both Sides: Partition in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Mahmudul Haque’s Black Ice 21. Indian Gulf Writing 22. Probable, Improbable, and Catastrophic Realisms in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction PART IV. COUNTERNARRATIVES OF THE INDIAN MODERN 23. Writing and Being Modern: Nation, Caste, Gender, and Women’s Fiction 24. The Rise of a Muslim Voice: Telugu Writing in the Times of Hindu Nationalism 25. Indian Literary History: Ambedkar and Dalit Literature 26. Irom Sharmila’s Poetry and the Politics of Anthologizing Indian Literature 27. Representing Caste in Odia Literature 28. Toward a Canon of Modern Indian Queer Literature 29. Adivasi Poetry: The Poetics of Indigeneity in Contemporary India 30. Green, Red: From Pragati to Jujhar in the Cold War Punjab Part V. Circulations of the Indian Modern 31. Romance, Aesthetics, and Progressivism in Marathi Literary Culture: Narayan Sitaram Phadke and the Modern Marathi Novel 32. Encasted Formalism: Notes on Reading Caste Scripts in Fiction 33. Urban Space across Genre: The Cities of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh 34. Pastorals in the City: Space, Tradition, and Translation in Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country without a Post Office 35. Ambiguous Journeys and Halfway Homes in Ramanujan, Narayan, Karnad, and Ananthamurthy 36. Narrative Authority in the Colonial Novel 37. The Village in Bengali Modernity PART VI. MODERN INDIAN FORMS AND MEDIA 39. Saadat Hasan Manto and the Poetics of the Urdu Short Story 40. Voices of Resistance: Exploring Feminist Futurities in Indian Graphic Narratives 41. How to Play Indian Literature: Indian Videogames as a Literary Form 42. “Together in the leaves of the book”: Notes on a Bengali Modernist Poetics of Desire 43. The Poetics of Indian Hip Hop Index The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures refutes the Anglocentrism of much literary criticism of the global South by examining "Indian Literature" as a multilingual, dialogic, and plural space constituted by both continuities and divergences. In forty-three chapters and with a team of scholars who exemplify the method of historically situated and theoretically rigorous literary criticism, this volume shows how the idea of Indian literature is a relational and comparative concept. Through readings of a vast diversity of multilingual literature in a range of genres, the chapters highlight contact zones and interchanges across seemingly sedimented boundaries. The Handbook provides an overview of the current state of modern Indian writing and features a range of texts and approaches from across India's many languages and literary traditions, examining and amplifying recent critical attention to the multilingualism that is at the base of any curation of what could be termed, with qualification, "Indian Literatures." The book ranges from the 19th century to the 21st, with especial focus on the centrality of gender and caste to Indian modernism and new generic formations such as graphic novels, autofiction, and videogames.