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A nation-state, as Benedict Anderson rightly proclaimed, is an ‘imagined community’ invariably galvanized around certain culturally constructed and socio-historically disseminated metanarratives. Infact, the idea of a nation-state is itself an absurd metanarrative forged to gag thousands of dissentious little narratives gushing out of the fringes. Thus, this constant friction between coercive grand narratives and dissentious little narratives epitomizes the dialectics of any nation-state...

Malika Amar Shaikh in her memoir I Want to Destroy Myself, translated from Marathi into English overtly criticizes the gendered discriminatory structure embedded in the apparently democratic and emancipatory Dalit ideology. It problematizes the Phule- Ambedkarite ideals of Dalit movement. Malika’s interrogation explores the double standard of the so-called crusader of freedom. She expresses her disillusionment in her relationship with her husband Namdeo Dhasal, one of the Dalit leaders a...

As a rational and ethical system of God and a grand teleology, Providence has evinced robust faith in both Pagan and Christian cultures over the centuries in the Platonist, Neo- Platonist, Stoic, Epicurean, Catholic and Protestant traditions. Serving as a template for Humanism to align human will and enterprise with the divine moral purpose, necessities of nature and chance, providentialism was eventually played into history. All the large projects of evangelism, imperialism, messianism ...

I want to study the representation of resistance in select contemporary Indian English novels. The “baggy nationalist allegory” that predominated the literary arena in the 1980s and 1990s, sees the abject beings as the passive recipient of society’s injustices and not as a potential threat to the state power. This line of argument implicates a critical fissure in which the mainstream discourses exclude the abjects from the promising resistance discourse. It is also relevant to examine th...

The paper aims to dig deep into the history of Indian Independence and its traumatic effect on communalism through the lens of Daksha and her diary. Mahesh Dattani’s play Final Solutions (1993) revolves around the themes of communal hatred, riots, use of history, memory, partition or migration, religious prejudices, and woman’s identity formation in gender and caste-stricken society. Through the character portrayal of Daksha, Dattani exposes the native or Indian resistance against the Br...

The advent of modernity in the colonial period posed a serious challenge to Indian womanhood. Women1 were expected to transform themselves into an impossible image as it meant being contradictory things at same time. They were expected to emulate the ideals of chastity and purity of Sita and Savitri. Simultaneously, they had to be modern enough to be socially mobile and publicly presentable, i.e., represent tradition and modernity in some ambiguous proportion unfalteringly. Any deviation...

In 1947, the partition of India resulted in the division of Bengal province along the communal line. In Bengal-oriented partition history, literature and films, the trauma and identity crisis of the East Bengali refugees are explored significantly. But how far the exploration of partition engages with the refugee experiences in totality is a relevant query since it is marked by a politics of silence on caste. It appears that the normalization of disengagement with caste identity in study...

Literary representations of the Emergency (c. 1975-1977), one of the controversial periods in independent India’s history, constitute a site of interpretation and negotiation of the Independence and the post-independence Indian polity. If Partition marks the incubation of incipient decay, the Emergency represents its peak contagion. Carolyn Forche in her anthology Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness (1993) has exhorted the poets to bear ‘witness’ to atrocities. Seamus Hean...

In March 1933, on the behest of Muslim fundamentalist organizations in colonial India, the British government banned an Urdu short-story collection (9 short stories and 1 play) called Angaaray (1932; lit. burning coals), by four young writers, Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, and Mahmuduzzafar, who were all in their twenties. Angaaray was a radical work of literature in the short history of the Urdu short story that began in 1908 with Premchand’s first collection of short stories ...