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 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933997 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper 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 Literatures 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 India: 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 Bangladesh 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 Novels 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 Literature 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 Pakistan: 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 Novel 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