A Literature of the Sublime in Late Colonial India
Author: Guriqbal S. Sahota
Publisher:
Published: 2006
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
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Late Colonial Sublime
Author: G. S. Sahota
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2018-01-15
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 0810136503
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTaking cues from Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary writings on literary-historical method, Late Colonial Sublime reconstellates the dialectic of Enlightenment across a wide imperial geography, with special focus on the fashioning of neo-epics in Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in British India. Working through the limits of both Marxism and postcolonial critique, this book forges an innovative approach to the question of late romanticism and grounds categories such as the sublime within the dynamic of commodification. While G. S. Sahota takes canonical European critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the outskirts of empire, he reads Indian writers such as Muhammad Iqbal and Jayashankar Prasad in light of the expansion of instrumental rationality and the neotraditional critiques of the West it spurred at the onset of decolonization. By bringing together distinct literary canons—both metropolitan and colonial, hegemonic and subaltern, Western and Eastern, all of which took shape upon the common realities of imperial capitalism—Late Colonial Sublime takes an original dialectical approach. It experiments with fragments, parallaxes, and constellational form to explore the aporias of modernity as well as the possible futures they may signal in our midst. A bold intervention into contemporary debates that synthesizes a wealth of sources, this book will interest readers and scholars in world literature, critical theory, postcolonial criticism, and South Asian studies.
Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860-1920
Author: Hayden J A Bellenoit
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-09-30
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1317315065
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContributes simultaneously to both British imperial and Indian history. This work demonstrates that missionary understandings and interactions with India, rather than being party to imperial ideologies, often diverged from metropolitan and imperial norms.
The Idea of Indian Literature
Author: Preetha Mani
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2022-08-15
Total Pages: 413
ISBN-13: 0810145014
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIndian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon can be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English. Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani—imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
Reform and Modernity in Islam
Author: Safdar Ahmed
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-05-30
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 0857733737
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe debate over Islam and modernity tends to be approached from a Eurocentric perspective that presents Western norms as a template for progress - against which Islamic societies can be measured. This misses the historical development of Muslim reformist thought that actively engages with the world around it and seeks to reconfigure Islam within the diverse conditions of modernity. Safdar Ahmed paints a complex and nuanced picture that goes beyond the idea that Muslim reformers have either reproduced or reacted against Western ideas. Rather, Ahmed argues, they have reconstructed and appropriated these ideas, and so the thread of Western influence runs through modern Islamic thought on nationalism and sovereignty, femininity and gender. Ahmed uncovers new historiographical perspectives by critically examining the work of prominent intellectuals, such as Muhammad Abduh, Qasim Amin and Abdul A'la Maududi.
Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization
Author: Sandeep Banerjee
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-21
Total Pages: 176
ISBN-13: 0429686404
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization. This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation. He interrogates the spatial desire of anti-colonial and colonial texts across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics. The book is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Literature and Utopia, Literature and Decolonization, Literature and Nationalism, Cultural Geography, and South Asian Studies.
Dissertation Abstracts International
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 554
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEnglish Writing and India, 1600–1920
Author: Pramod K. Nayar
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-03-25
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 113413150X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of India. Looking specifically at the aesthetic modes of the marvellous, the monstrous, the sublime, the picturesque and the luxuriant, Nayar marks the shift in the rhetoric – from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the ‘shikar’ memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s extreme exotic. English Writing and India provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of new lands and cultures.
Life Under the Palms
Author: Paul Van Der Velde
Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
Published: 2020-09-15
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9789813250826
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLiving under palm trees is not without its consequences . . . J. G. von Goethe, Jacob Gotfried Haafner (1754-1809) was a Dutch citizen who spent more than twenty years of his early life living outside of Europe, in India, Ceylon, Mauritius, Java, and South Africa. On his return to Europe he transformed himself into one of the most popular Dutch writers of the early nineteenth century, for his travel writing in the Romantic mode. Books like his popular Travels in a Palanquin were translated into the major European languages, and his essays against the work of Christian missionaries in Asia stirred up great controversy. Haafner worked to spread understanding of the cultures he'd come to know in his journeys, promoting European understanding of Indian literature, myth, and religion, translating the Ramayana into Dutch. With the help of generous excerpts from Haafner's own writings, including material newly translated into English, Paul van der Velde tells an affecting story of a young man who made a world for himself along the Coromandel Coast, in Ceylon and Calcutta, but who returned to Europe to live the last years of his life in Amsterdam, suffering an acute nostalgia for Asia. This will be compelling reading for anyone interested in European response to the cultures of Asia.
Language Ideologies and the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia
Author: Nishat Zaidi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2023-09-29
Total Pages: 398
ISBN-13: 1000930424
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume critically engages with recent formulations and debates regarding the status of the regional languages of the Indian subcontinent vis-à-vis English. It explores how language ideologies of the “vernacular” are positioned in relation to the language ideologies of English in South Asia. The book probes into how we might move beyond the English-vernacular binary in India, explores what happened to “bhasha literatures” during the colonial and post-colonial periods and how to position those literatures by the side of Indian English and international literature. It looks into the ways vernacular community and political rhetoric are intertwined with Anglophone (national or global) positionalities and their roles in political processes. This book will be of interest to researchers, students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, Indian Writing in English, Indian literatures, South Asian languages and popular culture. It will also be extremely valuable for language scholars, sociolinguists, social historians, scholars of cultural studies and those who understand the theoretical issues that concern the notion of “vernacularity”.
