Imagining Indianness

Diana Dimitrova is Professor of Hinduism and South Asian Religions at the University of Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Western Tradition and Naturalistic Hindi Theatre (2004), Gender, Religion, and Modern Hindi Drama (2008), and Hinduism and Hindi Theater (2016). She is the editor of Religion in Literature and Film in South Asia (2010) and The Other in South Asian Religion, Literature and Film: Perspectives on Otherism and Otherness (2014).Thomas de Bruijn is an independent scholar and author of Ruby in the Dust: History and Poetry in Padmāvat by the South Asian Sufi Poet Muḥammad Jāyasī (2012) and co-editor of Circulation of Culture: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India (2014).

“This edited collection by Diana Dimitrova and Thomas de Bruijn is an important addition to the field since it brings debates and ideas of ‘Indianness’ … . Importantly, Imagining Indianness: Cultural Identity and Literature is a timely publication as once again, we are called to consider more recent, post-millennial literary and cultural production and its interface with an ever-changing sense of ‘Indianness.’” (E. Dawson Varughese, Asiatic, Vol. 11 (2), 2017)

• Chapter 1. Of many Indias: alternative nationhoods in contemporary Indian poetry.- Chapter 2. Reviewing Nirmal Varma, Jaidev and the Indianness of Indian Literature.- Chapter 3. Indianness as a category in literary criticism on Nayī Kahānī.- Chapter 4. Imagining “Indianness” and modern Hindi drama.- Chapter 5. The Indian contexts and subtexts of my text.- Chapter 6. Kishorilal Gosvami’s Indumatī.- Chapter 7. Indianness, absurdism, existentialism, and the work of imagination: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Naukar kā kamīz.- Chapter 8. ‘Subah kī sair’ and ‘Dūsrī duniyā’, two short stories by Nirmal Varma.