Contradictory Indianness

As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

As Contradictory Indianness endeavors to show, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. This book's unique contribution lies in an explicit privileging of Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean.

India Abroad analyzes the development of Indian diasporas in the United States and England from 1947, the year of Indian independence, to the present. Across different spheres of culture--festivals, entrepreneurial enclaves, fiction, autobiography, newspapers, music, and film--migrants have created India as a way to negotiate life in the multicultural United States and Britain. Sandhya Shukla considers how Indian diaspora has become a contact zone for various formations of identity and discourses of nation. She suggests that carefully reading the production of a diasporic sensibility, one that is not simply an outgrowth of the nation-state, helps us to conceive of multiple imaginaries, of America, England, and India, as articulated to one another. Both the connections and disconnections among peoples who see themselves as in some way Indian are brought into sharp focus by this comparativist approach. This book provides a unique combination of rich ethnographic work and textual readings to illuminate the theoretical concerns central to the growing fields of diaspora studies and transnational cultural studies. Shukla argues that the multi-sitedness of diaspora compels a rethinking of time and space in anthropology, as well as in other disciplines. Necessarily, the standpoint of global belonging and citizenship makes the boundaries of the "America" in American studies a good deal more porous. And in dialogue with South Asian studies and Asian American studies, this book situates postcolonial Indian subjectivity within migrants' transnational recastings of the meanings of race and ethnicity. Interweaving conceptual and material understandings of diaspora, India Abroad finds that in constructed Indias, we can see the contradictions of identity and nation that are central to the globalized condition in which all peoples, displaced and otherwise, live.

Annotation Who has the right to speak about trauma? As cultural products, narratives of social suffering paradoxically release us from responsibility while demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the circumstances that produce suffering. As a result, the text's act of "speaking havoc" rebounds in unsettling ways. Speaking Havoc investigates how literary and cinematic fictions intervene in the politics and reception of social suffering. Amitav Ghosh's modernist novel The Shadow Lines (1988), A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry, the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Salman Rushdie's postmodernist novel Shame (1983), and the "spectacular" films of Maniratnam each bear witness to social violence in South Asia. These works confront squarely the catastrophes and innumerable minor tragedies that arise from clashes among religious and ethnic communities. Focusing on central events such as the Partition of 1947, the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and more recent religious conflicts between India and Pakistan, Nagappan demonstrates the differing ways that narratives engage the political violence that has marked the last fifty years of South Asian history. Is it possible to tell fully the stories of those who have died and those who have survived? Can writing really act as a counter to silence? In his compassionate engagement with these concerns, Nagappan demonstrates the relevance of literature and literary studies to fundamental sociological, anthropological, and political issues. With its interdisciplinary scope, historical perspective, and lucid style, Speaking Havoc is destined to become a foundational text for scholars of South Asian studies and postcolonial and culturalstudies, and for readers interested in trauma and social suffering as well as in the literature, films, and histories that take this field as their topic.

How was the post-modernist project contested, subverted and assimilated in India? This book offers a personal account and an intellectual history of its reception and response. Tracing independent India’s engagement with Western critical theory, Paranjape outlines both its past and ‘post’. The book explores the discursive trajectories of post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, post-nationalism, post-feminism, post-secularism — the relations that mediate them — as well as interprets, in the light of these discussions, core tenets of Indian philosophical thought. Paranjape argues that India’s response to the modernist project is neither submission, willing or reluctant, nor repudiation, intentional or forced; rather India’s ‘modernity’ is ‘unauthorized’, different, subversive, alter-native and alter-modern. The book makes the case for a new integrative hermeneutics, the idea of the indigenous ‘critical vernacular’, and presents a radical shift in the understanding of svaraj (beyond decolonisation and nationalism) to express transformations at both personal and political levels. A key intervention in Indian critical theory, this volume will interest researchers and scholars of literature, philosophy, political theory, culture studies and postcolonial studies.

Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavors of domestic autonomy. Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective. The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savor the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean.

This Is To Keep The Younger Generation Fully Informed About The Aspirations Of The Freedom Fighters Whose Ceaseless Struggle Brought The Final Glory Of Independence. The Book Provides An Outline On The Most Crucial Period Of Indian History By Incorporating The Fruits Of Recent Researches Both Indian And Foreign On This Subject. In The Revised Edition Special Attention Has Been Focussed On The Contributions Of South India And North-Eastern India To The Struggle For Freedom. Bose-Gandhi Controversy Assumes A New Dimension In The Light Of Recent Unpublished Thesis. The Additional Features Of The Book Are That It Provides Biographical Data Of Prominent Personalities, Chronological List Of Congress Sessions With Dates, Venues And Presidents And Chronological List Of Important Events.The Book Will Not Only Serve The Requirements Of Students Ranging From Secondary To Undergraduate Level But Also The Candidates Appearing In The Civil Services Examination (Both Preliminary And Final) And Other Examinations Of Central And State Civil Services.

Indian Writers attempt to locate diasporic voices in the interstitial spaces of countless ideologies. The anthology provides a critical examination of dislocated diasporic subjects - those who have adjusted to the dislocation well, those who have chosen the hybrid spaces for empowerment, those who are dragged forcefully to various territories, and yet those who gleefully inhabit trans-local spaces. A wide range of voices raise these critical questions: How do we read these voices? How are the voices received in various locations? Are these voices considered Indian? Do they represent Indianness, or some hybridized version of it? What is an authentic cultural identity? What, ultimately, is Indianness, or for that matter, any hard-won national or ethnic identity? Additionally, as more female writers are being read, both in the global south and in the north, the reception of these texts, particularly in an era of globalization, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack in the United States, raises questions on how the «other», the subaltern, is represented and read. Some writers use an assimilationist approach to the cultures of the West to such a degree that they find Indian culture monolithically oppressive, while others continue to romanticize Indianness, yet others eroticize and ethnicize the east for western consumption. The authors of the essays in this anthology examine contemporary debates in postcolonial and transnational literary criticism in an attempt to understand the often complex and hybrid narratives of the diasporic Indian subject.