Clearing a space : reflections on India, literature and culture / Amit Chaudhuri.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chaudhuri, Amit, 1962-

Series:

Past in the present (Oxford, England)

The past in the present

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indic literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Indic literature.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

330 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Peter Lang, 2008.

Summary:

In the essays assembled in Clearing a Space, Chaudhuri draws on his own experiences to offer an acute exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to history. Often beginning with the personal, he inquires into the nature of the secular in India, into the history of such categories as the West, the foreign, the global and the exotic, and into the frequently torn and self-divided nature of modern Indian identity. With the same elegance and intelligence for which he has become known, Chaudhuri writes in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and New York, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, the place of the everyday in Indian creativity, music, art and literature, politics, race, cosmopolitanism, urban landscapes, Hollywood and Bollywood, Anglophone India, internationalism, globalisation, the Indian English tradition that predates Rushdie, post-colonialism and much more.

Contents:

Introduction: On Clearing a Space 11

Part 1 Towards a Poetics of the Indian Modern

Poles of Recovery 39

In the Waiting-Room of History: On Provincializing Europe 57

The Flute of Modernity: Tagore and the Middle Class 69

The East as a Career: On 'Strangeness' in Indian Writing 85

Argufying: On Amartya Sen and the Deferral of an Indian Modernity 100

This is Not Music: The Emergence of the Domain of 'Culture' 109

'Huge Baggy Monster': Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel after Rushdie 113

Two Giant Brothers: Tagore's Revisionist 'Orient' 122

Travels in the Subculture of Modernity 140

Thoughts in a Temple: Hinduism in the Free Market 160

On the Nature of Indian Gothic: The Imagination of Ashis Nandy 165

'Hollywood aur Bollywood' 170

The View from Malabar Hill 182

Stories of Domicile 189

Notes on the Novel after Globalization 195

Anti-Fusion 214

Part 2 Alternative Traditions, Alternative Readings

Arun Kolatkar and the Tradition of Loitering 221

Learning to Write: V.S. Naipaul, Vernacular Artist 235

A Bottle of Ink, a Pen and a Blotter: On R.K. Narayan 243

'A Feather! A Very Feather upon the Face!': On Kipling 251

Returning to Earth: The Poetry of Jibanananda Das 265

Women in Love as Post-Human Essay 279

Champion of Hide and Seek: Raj Kamal Jha's Surrealism 295

Midnight at Marble Arch: On The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid 301

Beyond 'Confidence': Rushdie and the Creation Myth of Indian English Writing 308.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [312]-316) and index.

ISBN:

9781906165017

1906165017

9781906165062

1906165068

OCLC:

212432026