South-Asian Fiction in English Alex Tickell South-Asian Fiction in English

Contemporary Transformations Alex Tickell The Open University, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-137-40353-7 ISBN 978-1-137-40354-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom For Nathaniel ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume developed out of a seminar series and symposium organized by the Open University’s Postcolonial Research Group. The symposium, on Contemporary South-Asian Fiction, was hosted by the Institute of English Studies at Senate House, University of London on 3 November 2012. I am grateful to Jon Millington at the IES for his help in organizing both the seminar series and the concluding symposium. I would also like to express my thanks to the Modern Humanities Research Association for a Conference Grant, which covered organizational costs for the symposium. Special thanks are due to my colleagues in the English Department at the Open University, David Johnson, Susheila Nasta and Suman Gupta, and to Pooja Sinha, E. Dawson Varughese and Ole Birk Laursen, all of whom supported the event. At Palgrave Macmillan I would like to thank Ben Doyle and Tomas René for their encouragement and assistance, and to the anonymous reader who provided perceptive feedback on the initial proposal. I am most grateful, as always, to Rachel Goodyear for her advice and editorial work on this project. * * * Suman Gupta’s chapter Contemporary Indian Commercial Fiction in English is reprinted from Gupta, S. (2015) Consumable texts in contempo- rary : Uncultured books and bibliographical sociology with the permis- sion of the author. An earlier version appeared in Economic and Political Weekly Feb 4, 2012, vol. 47 no. 5, pp. 46–53.

vii CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction 1 Alex Tickell

Part I Regional Formations 19

Of Capitalism and Critique: ‘Af-Pak’ Fiction in the Wake of 9/11 21 Priyamvada Gopal

‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come’: Indian Fiction in English After 1991 37 Alex Tickell

English-Language Fiction of 59 Cara Cilano

Sri Lankan Fiction in English 1994–2014 79 Ruvani Ranasinha

ix x CONTENTS

Part II Contemporary Transformations 101

Writing the Margins (in English): Notes from Some South-Asian Cities 103 Stuti Khanna

Occupying Literary and Urban Space: Adiga, Authenticity and the Politics of Socio-economic Critique 119 Dominic Davies

Contemporary Indian Commercial Fiction in English 139 Suman Gupta

Genre Fiction of New India: Post-millennial Confi gurations of Crick Lit, Chick Lit and Crime Writing 163 E. Dawson Varughese

Vignettes of Change: A Discussion of Two Indian Graphic 181 Pooja Sinha

The New Pastoral: Environmentalism and Confl ict in Contemporary Writing from Kashmir 199 Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency 217 Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Writing South-Asian Diasporic Identity Anew 235 Maya Parmar

Minor and the South-Asian Short Story 253 Neelam Srivastava

Erratum to: Genre Fiction of New India: Post-millennial Confi gurations of Crick Lit, Chick Lit and Crime Writing E1

Index 273 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Cara Cilano is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, in the US. She is author of Post-9/11 Espionage Fiction in the US and : Spies and ‘Terrorists’ (2014), Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English: Idea, Nation, State (2013) and National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction (2011). Dominic Davies completed his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 2015. His thesis focused on the way in which colonial literature written at the height of the British Empire confi gured the relationship between imperial infrastructure and various forms of anti- imperial resistance. He is the Facilitator of the Leverhulme- funded Network, ‘Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’ (2014–2016), and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford researching graphic narrative representations of post/ colonial urban infrastructures. He has published articles in a number of academic and online journals, including the Journal of Commonwealth Literature , Journal of Postcolonial Writing , Kipling Society Journal and Études Littéraires Africaines . E. Dawson Varughese is a global cultural studies scholar who specializes in India. She is the author of Beyond The Postcolonial (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Reading New India (2013). She has recently co-authored a book entitled Indian Writing in English and Issues of Visual Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and is currently preparing a manuscript entitled Genre Fiction of New India: Post- millennial Receptions of ‘Weird’ Narratives . She works on Indian genre fi ction, graphic novels, visual cultures and style in Indian fi ction in English. She is pub- lished in South Asian Popular Culture and Contemporary South Asia . Priyamvada Gopal is Reader in anglophone and Related Literatures at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Churchill College.

xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (2005) and The Indian in English: Nation, History and Narration (2009). Suman Gupta is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the Open University. In 2011–2014 he coordinated, with Richard Allen, a collaborative project on ‘Prospects for anglophone Studies in Indian Higher Education’. Recent books include Globalization and Literature (2009), Imagining Iraq (2011), Consumable Texts in Contemporary India (2015), Philology and Global English Studies (2015) and co-authored (with Allen, Chattarji and Chaudhuri) the volume Reconsidering English Studies in Indian Higher Education (2015). Ananya Jahanara Kabir , Professor of English Literature at King’s College London, is a literary and cultural historian who works at the intersection of mem- ory, embodiment, pleasure and post-trauma in the global South. Previously, she taught at the universities of Cambridge, Berkeley and Leeds. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the British Academy, the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin and the AHRC; as one of the AHRC’s earliest ‘Knowledge Transfer Fellows’ she co-organized, in 2011, ‘Between Kismet and Karma’, a programme of events and exhibitions across the UK involving female visual artists from South Asia working on confl ict. She is the author of, most recently, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (2013), and the director of ‘Modern Moves’, a 5-year research project funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant, which investigates the transnational history and popularity of Afro-diasporic music and dance forms. Stuti Khanna teaches Literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT, Delhi. She obtained her MA degree at Delhi University and her D.Phil. at Oxford University. Her doctoral research was a comparative project on the city in the fi ction of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. She has published exten- sively on Rushdie, in journals such as Ariel , the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing , among others. She is also the author of the monograph The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-conceiving National and Narrative Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her current research focuses on the ways in which postcolonial urbanity in South Asia infl ects and shapes twentieth-century narrative in a crucial, fundamental and formative way, and uses the city of Delhi as the central site of this investigation. Pavan Kumar Malreddy is Researcher in English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. He has previously taught at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, York University, Toronto, the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, and has worked with various research organizations (Canadian Council on Learning, Ottawa; Aboriginal Education Research Center, Saskatoon) as a com- missioned writer and editor. He is the author of Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

South Asian Readings in (2015) and co-editor of Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He has published over twenty academic essays and chapters on terrorism, race and postcolonial theory in journals such as The European Legacy , Third World Quarterly, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Intertexts , among others. He is currently working on a book-length project titled ‘Towards Post-Terrorism: Insurgency, Ecology and Cultures of Violence in Postcolonial Literature’. Maya Parmar is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in English Literature at The Open University, across two projects: ‘Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections’ and ‘Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present’. Her research explores strategies of cultural representation, memory making and the politics of belonging amongst the South-Asian diaspora. Her research interests also include Indian East African twice migration, the networked space of the Indian Ocean and new media as a mode of archiving and online memorialization. She has published her research in the journals Interventions (2015), South Asian Popular Culture (2014) and Atlantis (2013), and has guest co-edited the special issue ‘Re-evaluating the Postcolonial City: Production, Reconstruction, Representation’ for Interventions (2015). Additionally, Maya has an interest in working with audi- ences beyond the academy, and has received funding for her public engagement project ‘Expulsion: 40 years On’ from the Arts Council England and the University of Leeds (2012). Ruvani Ranasinha is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the Department of English, King’s College, London. Her most recent monograph is Contemporary South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (2016), published by Palgrave. Other publications include Hanif Kureishi (2002), South Asian Writers in Twentieth- Century Britain: Culture in Translation (2007) and she is the lead editor of South Asians and the Shaping of Britain, 1870–1950: A Sourcebook (MUP, 2012). She is a part of the Leverhulme-funded International Network on Planned Violence (2014–2016). Pooja Sinha is an independent researcher, having obtained a Ph.D. from the Open University (UK) in 2014. She studied contemporary Indian popular fi ction for her doctorate, exploring the topic with market categories such as detective fi c- tion and the graphic novel. Her research interests include popular fi ction in India and developments in the Indian entertainment and publishing industries, with a special focus on social and cultural shifts in post-liberalization India. Neelam Srivastava is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests include South- in English, Italian postcolonial theories and Italian colonialism. Her most recent publication is a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on ‘Frantz Fanon in Italy.’ She is co-editor with Baidik Bhattacharya of The Postcolonial xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gramsci (2012) and the author of Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English (2008). She is currently com- pleting a book entitled Decolonizing Europe: Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire , to be published by Palgrave. She is also co-editing with Rossella Ciocca a collection of essays on contemporary , entitled Indian Literature and the World: Multi-lingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere , also to be published by Palgrave. Alex Tickell is Senior Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK. His research fi eld includes colonial and postcolonial writing and South-Asian literary history. In 2005, Tickell rediscovered and published the fi rst fi ction in English by an Indian author, Kylas Chunder Dutt, in Selections from ‘Bengaliana’ . He is the author of Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Fiction, 1830–1947 (2012) and has researched terror and insurgency in colonial fi ction and published on Indian terrorist groups in Edwardian London. Tickell also writes on contemporary South-Asian fi ction and is the author of a reader’s guide to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2007), and is working on a monograph titled Civic Fiction: Citizenship and the Novel in the New India . He is editor of Volume 10 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English , which covers the novel in South and South- East Asia since 1945.