About the Book
beyond postcolonialism: dreams and realities of a nation questions the legitimacy of the frame which postcolonialism imposes on the multi-language Indian literature. Postcolonialism with its concentration on power and resistance, erases the indigenous inheritance as well as marginalizes the experimentation which is an ongoing dialogue with culture, politics and language. The present volume is a study of the Indian novel from 1947 to the present, that is, the early decades of the twenty-first century, across languages. These years have marked several shifts in narrative structures and their interaction with art movements, with location and space as well as with the social realities of caste and community, which continue to dominate our epistemological frameworks.
The novelistic form is historical in its narration and representation, but it simultaneously works as a counter discourse, continuously opening out the hidden layers of history and critiquing them through its narrative voice. Working at multiple levels, the novel is both political and personal. It is a powerful counter discourse and a critique of cultural practices. Working through the dreams of freedom, the division of the country and the brutality that surfaced in the accompanying violence, the study moves through the early diasporic writing, the gender issues and feminism, classical and experiential aesthetics, storytelling and orality to the rhythm of the sound and the aesthetics of listening as it makes a powerful claim for new interpretative strategies and the recognition of new tropes.
Contents
• prologue: from the personal to the political
• resisting the empire
• splitting of the national subject
• falls the shadow: division and exile
• patriarchy in the mirror
• transformational strategies: home and abroad
• experiential versus classical aesthetics
• the end of the twentieth century
• and the beginning of the twenty-first
• epilogue: cultural texts and contexts
• postscript: the limits of postcolonialism and the need to go beyond
About the Author / Editor
Jasbir Jain, Emeritus Fellow, University of Rajasthan and recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship as Writer in Residence, K.K. Birla Fellowship and several other awards, has also taught at various universities abroad including Copenhagen (Denmark) and Tampere (Finland). Jain has an extensive range of research interests across languages and genres and has authored several books, amongst them are Indigenous Roots of Feminism (2011), Theorising Resistance (2012), You Ask, I Tell, a translation of Hansa Wadkar’s autobiography, with Shobha Shinde (2013), The Diaspora Writes Home (2015), Forgiveness: Between Memory and History (2016), Bridge Across the Rivers (2017) co-edited with Tripti Jain and Subcontinental Histories: Literary Reflections on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2018).
