The Feuding Families Of Village Gangauli

A Masterpiece Of Hindi Literature In An Acclaimed Translation Rahi Masoom Reza’S Honest And Controversial Novel Unfolds During The Latter Years Of The Raj And The First Decade Of Independence And Portrays The Rival Halves Of A Zamindar Family, Their Loves, Fights And Litigations. It Attacks The Creation Of Pakistan And Explores The Abolition Of The Zamindari System And Its Impact At The Village Level. A Semi-Autobiographical Work Set In The Author’S Village Of Gangauli, In Ghazipur District On The Fringes Of Avadh, A Village Divided, Previously Published As The Feuding Families Of Village Gangauli, Is Full Of Passion And Vibrancy, A Powerful Record Of The Meeting Of Muslim And Hindu Cultural Traditions That Bound Indian Society Together. ‘The Portrayal Of Partition And The Trauma Involved In It Has Been Very Convincing…Ms Wright Has Done Justice To The Translation Of The Book.’ —Hindustan Times ‘This Novel Can Be Indisputably Cited As A Brilliant Tour De Force In What A Third World Narrative Is Or Should Be.’ —Tribune ‘[Gillian Wright’S] Translations … Are Singular Contributions, Providing Larger Audiences To Masterpieces That Would Otherwise Have Remained Confined.’ —Indian Express

This book interrogates representations – fiction, literary motifs and narratives – of the Partition of India. Delving into the writings of Khushwant Singh, Balachandra Rajan, Attia Hosain, Abdullah Hussein, Rahi Masoom Raza and Anita Desai, among many others, it highlights the modes of ‘fictive’ testimony that sought to articulate the inarticulate – the experiences of trauma and violence, of loss and longing, and of diaspora and displacement. The author discusses representational techniques and formal innovations in writing across three generations of twentieth-century writers in India and Pakistan, invoking theoretical debates on history, memory, witnessing and trauma. With a new afterword, the second edition of this volume draws attention to recent developments in Partition studies and sheds new light as regards ongoing debates about an event that still casts a shadow on contemporary South Asian society and culture. A key text, this is essential reading for scholars, researchers and students of literary criticism, South Asian studies, cultural studies and modern history.

Covers the relationships between Hinduism and Christianity.

This book is about the most vibrant yet under-studied aspects of Indian writing today. It examines multilingualism, current debates on postcolonial versus world literature, the impact of translation on an “Indian” literary canon, and Indian authors’ engagement with the public sphere. The essays cover political activism and the North-East Tribal novel; the role of work in the contemporary Indian fictional imaginary; history as felt and reconceived by the acclaimed Hindi author Krishna Sobti; Bombay fictions; the Dalit autobiography in translation and its problematic international success; development, ecocriticism and activist literature; casteism and access to literacy in the South; and gender and diaspora as dominant themes in writing from and about the subcontinent. Troubling Eurocentric genre distinctions and the split between citizen and subject, the collection approaches Indian literature from the perspective of its constant interactions between private and public narratives, thereby proposing a method of reading Indian texts that goes beyond their habitual postcolonial identifications as “national allegories”.

This valuable resource explores the important role which the minority traditions play in the religious life of the subcontinent.

The dark legacies of partition have cast a long shadow on the lives of people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The borders that were drawn in 1947, and redrawn in 1971, divided not only nations and histories but also families and friends. The essays in this volume explore new ground in Partition research, looking into areas such as art, literature, migration, and notions of ‘foreignness’ and ‘belonging’. It brings focus to hitherto unaddressed areas of partition such as the northeast and Ladakh.