Indian Genre Fiction

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is a researcher at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (Finfar, Finland) and Editor at the Museum of Science Fiction’s Journal of Science Fiction (MOSF, Washington, D.C.). He has formerly taught at the Universities of Oslo and Delhi, and has been visiting researcher at the Science Fiction Foundation at the University of Liverpool and the Evoke Lab (Calit2)/Department of Informatics at the University of California-Irvine.Aakriti Mandhwani is a researcher at the Department of South Asia, Faculty of Languages and Cultures, SOAS, University of London, UK. She works on North Indian middle-class reading practices through the archive of the post-1947 commercial magazine and paperback in Hindi. Her areas of interest include book history, popular literature, intellectual history and urban studies. Her works include articles in Modern Asian Studies and a volume on Hinglish edited by Francesca Orsini and Ravikant Sharma (both forthcoming in 2018). Anwesha Maity is a researcher at the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies (CLFS), University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, from where she also obtained her doctoral degree. Her research interests include science fiction and genre fiction, postcolonial criticism, translation studies, and Sanskrit aesthetics. She has published in Science Fiction Studies, Studies in the Fantastic and Jadavpur University Essays and Studies.

‘Genre fiction, particularly but not only in English, has been growing in popularity in India. This anthology is significant and necessary . . . It maps overlaps and contrasts between genre fiction in seven major Indian languages, and well combines literary exegesis with theoretical and historical readings . . . Drawing upon both Indian and non-Indian theoretical texts, the book does not just test Western definitions of genre fiction against the hard reality to genre texts from India, it also opens up space for a re-definition of such Western perceptions . . . A pioneering study that is interesting and well-timed.’ Tabish Khair, author and Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark

• Introduction — Indian Genre Fiction: Languages, Literatures, Classifications PART I. Emergence of Distinctions 1. Literary and Popular Fiction in Late Colonial Tamil Nadu 2. Homage to a ‘Magic-Writer’: The Mistrīz and Asrār Novels of Urdu 3. A Series of Unfortunate Events: Natural Calamities in 19th-Century Bengali Chapbooks 4. Explorers of Subversive Knowledge: The Science Fantasy of Leela Majumdar and Sukumar Ray PART II. Postcolonial Reassertions 5. Hearts and Homes: A Perspective on Women Writers in Hindi 6. Genre Fiction and Aesthetic Relish: Reading Rasa in Contemporary Times 7. Community Fiction: Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone PART III. Genres in the 21st Century 8. Post-Millennial ‘Mythology-Inspired Fiction’ in English: The Market, the Genre, and the (Global) Reader 9. Expanding World of Indian English Fiction: The Mahabharata Retold in Krishna Udayasankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva 10. When Bhimayana Enters the Classroom… 11. From the Colloquial to the ‘Literary’: Hindi Pulp’s Journey from the Streets to the Bookshelves