Indian Literature and the World. Multilingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere

Indian Literature and the World is a collection of critical essays featuring up-to-date scholarship on the most vibrant yet under-studied aspects of Indian writing today. Multilingualism, current debates on postcolonial versus world literature, the impact of translation on an “Indian” literary canon, and Indian authors’ engagement with the public sphere all shape the orientation of our volume. The essays cover political activism and the North-East Tribal novel; the role of work in the contemporary Indian fictional imaginary; history as felt and reconceived by the acclaimed Hindi author Krishna Sobti; Bombay fictions; the Dalit autobiography in translation and its problematic international success; development, ecocriticism and activist literature; casteism and access to literacy in the South; gender and diaspora as dominant themes in writing from and about the subcontinent. Troubling Eurocentric genre distinctions and the split between citizen and subject, we wish to approach Indian literature from the perspective of its constant interactions between private and public narratives, thereby proposing a method of reading Indian texts that goes beyond their habitual postcolonial identifications as “national allegories”.