Personal And National Destinies In Independent India

Personal and National Destinies in Independent India is an innovative analysis of the interface between individual lives and national history, between citizen and state in modern India, as reflected in contemporary fiction. It critiques the selected works of a host of distinguished Indian English novelists such as Gurcharan Das, Arun Joshi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Meher Pestonji, Kiran Desai, Vikas Swarup, David Davidar, Aravind Adiga, Manjula Padmanabhan and Tarun Tejpal. The author offers a new interpretation of twelve major novels with reference to the enormous framework of nearly seventy years of the history and politics, culture and economy of independent India. This is a study of fiction that re-writes the grand Indian narrative from a genuine, subaltern point of view and pays tribute to the heroism of ordinary Indians in times of extraordinary transformation. In these times of conflict and disparity which threaten democratic values, these novelists advocate an inclusive and humane India with a strong moral core instead of aggressive or elitist nationalism. They represent an era of painful introspection, an attempt to keep the soul of the nation alive. This unique project would be of interest to students and scholars of Literature, Political Science and History, especially Post-colonial studies. The vast scope of the time period, geographical expanse, social groups, writers and works covered here makes the work comprehensive and contemporary; very few such works on recent Indian history and fiction exist as of now.

Today, Indian writing in English is a fi eld of study that cannot be overlooked. Whereas at the turn of the 20th century, writers from India who chose to write in English were either unheeded or underrated, with time the literary world has been forced to recognize and accept their contribution to the corpus of world literatures in English. Showcasing the burgeoning field of Indian English writing, this encyclopedia documents the poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists of Indian origin since the pre-independence era and their dedicated works. Written by internationally recognized scholars, this comprehensive reference book explores the history and development of Indian writers, their major contributions, and the critical reception accorded to them. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English will be a valuable resource to students, teachers, and academics navigating the vast area of contemporary world literature.

Science fiction, as a literature of fantasy, goes beyond the mundane to ask the question: what if the world were different from the way it is? It often challenges the real, builds on imagination, places no limits on human capacities, and encourages readers to think outside their social and cultural conditioning. This book presents a systematic study of Indian women’s science fiction. It offers a critical analysis of the works of four female Indian writers of science fiction: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Manjula Padmanabhan, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Vandana Singh. The author considers not only the evolution of science fiction writing in India, but also discusses the use of innovations and unique themes including science fiction in different Indian languages; the literary, political, and educational activism of the women writers; and eco-feminism and the idea of cloning in writing, to argue that this genre could be viewed as a vibrant representation of freedom of expression and radical literature. This ground-breaking volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literature. It will also prove a very useful source for further studies into Indian literature, science and technology studies, women’s and gender studies, comparative literature and cultural studies.

This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this book by established and emerging international scholars. Drawing their arguments from literary works rooted in the neoliberal period, the chapters show how the extractive ideology of neoliberalism invades the cultural, political, economic, and social spheres of postcolonial South Asia. The book explores different forms of “precarity” to investigate the vulnerable and insecure life conditions embodied in the everyday life of South Asia, enabling the reader to see through the rhetoric of “rising Asia”.

World Views examines literary representations of spatial form within the contexts of the emerging disciplines of geography, geopolitics, and international relations, positing that modernism's experimental engagements with space intended to imagine alternatives to the new world order.

Ranbir Singh Chowdhary, b. 1914, politician from Haryana, India; contributed articles.

Negotiating China's Destiny explains how China developed from a country that hardly mattered internationally into the important world power it is today. Before World War II, China had suffered through five wars with European powers as well as American imperial policies resulting in economic, military, and political domination. This shifted dramatically during WWII, when alliances needed to be realigned, resulting in the evolution of China's relationships with the USSR, the U.S., Britain, France, India, and Japan. Based on key historical archives, memoirs, and periodicals from across East Asia and the West, this book explains how China was able to become one of the Allies with a seat on the Security Council, thus changing the course of its future. Breaking with U.S.-centered analyses which stressed the incompetence of Chinese Nationalist diplomacy, Negotiating China's Destiny makes the first sustained use of the diaries of Chiang Kai-shek (which have only become available in the last few years) and who is revealed as instrumental in asserting China's claims at this pivotal point. Negotiating China's Destiny demonstrates that China's concerns were far broader than previously acknowledged and that despite the country's military weakness, it pursued its policy of enhancing its international stature, recovering control over borderlands it had lost to European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and becoming recognized as an important allied power with determination and success.

What America Did for India's Independence.