Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism

Description

This volume studies the representation of religion in South Asian Anglophone literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It traces the contours of South Asian writing through the consequences of the complex contesting forces of blasphemy and secularization. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach, it discusses various key issues such as religious fundamentalism, Islamophobia, religious majoritarianism, nationalism, and secularism. It also provides an account of the reception of this writing within the changing conceptions of racial "Others" and cultural difference, particularly with respect to minority writers, in terms of ethnic background and lack of access to social mobility. The volume features chapters on key texts, including The Hungry Tide, The Enchantress of Florence, In Times of Seige, One Part Woman, Anil’s Ghost, The Book of Gold Leaves, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, The Black Coat and Swarnalata, among others. An important contribution to the study of South Asian literature, the book will be indispensable for students and researchers of literary studies, religious studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, and South Asian studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of contributors Introduction: religion in South Asian literature: fictions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Part 1 Religion, agency, and cultural memory 1 Fear of the other: narrator and narratives in Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness and Just Another Jihadi Jane 2 Kurukshetra and Karbala: Mahabharata in Intizar Hussain’s fiction 3 The return of the goddess: Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and the Manasamangal 4 “All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own”: faith, doubt, and poetics of secularism in The Enchantress of Florence Part 2 Ethnicity, myth, caste, and censorship 5 The poetics and the politics of Kashmiriyat: a study of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator and The Book of Gold Leaves 6 Thinking the body, figuring (the) woman: religion, caste, gender, and identity in literary representations 7 Death of an author: dissecting the notion of religious hurt sentiment vis-à-vis literary-political censorship in India through One Part Woman 8 Religious hegemony and literature: appropriation of subaltern parables in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Part 3 War, trauma, and history 9 The “long shadow” of the Bangladeshi liberation war: religion and nationalism in Tahmima Anam’s Bengal Trilogy 10 Situating religiosity in nineteenth-century Assam: reading Tilottama Misra’s Swarnalata 11 A historian under siege: rethinking secular historiography 12 “First a friend and then an enemy”: trauma, fetish, and binary politics in The Black Coat 13 Religion as the messianic “other” of secular modernity: locating Habermas’ post-secular society in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Index