Muses India

With Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, V.S. Naipaul and Kiran Desai winning prestigious awards for their literary output, Indian English literature has gained a voice of its own. Yet, as most readers of criticism of it agree, there is a dearth of serious examination of its authors and their work. This collection of essays attempts a contrapuntal reading of Indian English literature with what Ranjan Ghosh calls the “infusionist” approach. Since a majority of readers are made to stay away from a branded author or work, this book rejects any categorization such as “postcolonial” or “Commonwealth.” It deals with a wide range of issues—which human beings suffer from all over the world—including those that may not have anything to do with the politicized side of “the postcolonial” or “the Commonwealth.”

Chetan Deshmane is associate professor of English at the University of Pune, India. He has published in a number of journals, including The Explicator, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Plath Profiles, South Asian Review, Academic Research, IUP Journal of English Studies and Asian Quarterly.

Edited by Chetan Deshmane

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 228
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2013
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7308-3
eISBN: 978-1-4766-0366-7
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1

Corporate Bodies/Colonial Exchange: Amatory Authority and Familial Extension in The Travels of Dean Mahomet
(Ken Monteith) 11
Claiming Her Own Contexts: Strategic Singularity in the Poetry of Toru Dutt
(Natalie Phillips Hoffmann) 25
The Body as Prism: Trauma Captured and Reflected in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
(Katherine Cottle) 38
“New Old Indias?” Bharati Mukherjee’s Fictional Canon and the Journey Towards The Tree Bride
(Helena Grice) 50
From History to Intertextuality: Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World
(David Callahan) 61
Roland Barthes and the Judgment of History: A Reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
(Senayon S. Olaoluwa) 75
Political Satire in a Detective Mode: Genre Theory and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey
(Kaustav Bakshi) 89
Suicide and Rebirth of Community in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance
(Sukjoo Sohn) 101
Transcultural Scenarios in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and Neil Bissoondath’s A Casual Brutality
(Adriana Elena Stoican) 113
Householder Disintegration and Awakening of Feminine Consciousness: Shashi Desphande’s A Matter of Time
(Mark Fabiano) 125
Identity, Language and Power in Suniti Namjoshi
(Serena Guarracino) 134
Excessive Desire, Shattered Identities: The Outsider’s Agency in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
(Anna Paige Rogers) 146
The Taboo in Indian Literature in English: Expanded Ways of
Writing and Reading Indianness (Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar) 164
The Cultural Overcoat in Lahiri’s The Namesake: Diasporic Experience and the Transnational Moment
(Hrishikesh Ingle) 176
“A Race of Angels”: The Dialectic of Liminality in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss
(Chetan Deshmane) 186

Bibliography 203
About the Contributors 213
Index 215