Writing India: Transnational Narratives

The global visibility of South Asian writers has changed the face of contemporary English literature. Many writers from the Indian subcontinent continue to narrate tumultuous events that surrounded the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan with independence from British imperial rule. Their writings join utopian imaginings and legacies of the past with dystopias and thwarted aspirations of recent decades. More promising visions currently prevail. This seminar addresses themes of identity, fragmentation, hybridity, memory, and alienation that link South Asian literary production to contemporary writing from postcolonial cultures in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Accounts of South Asian communal violence reflect urgencies resonant with those expressed in literatures of the Holocaust. The cultural space of India has been repeatedly transformed and redeployed according to varied cultural projects, political interests, and economic agendas. After briefly considering representations of India in travel chronicles of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, Greek adventurers, and Turko-Persian conquerors, we explore modern constructions of India found in excerpts from Kipling, Forster, Orwell, and other writers of the British Raj. The central focus of the seminar is on India as remembered and imagined in selected works of writers, including Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy. We use interdisciplinary critical inquiry as we pursue a literature that shifts increasingly from narrating the nation to narrating its diasporic fragments in transnational contexts.