South Asian Literature in Focus – serie

Although, for years, women were portrayed as one-dimensional beings, Indian graphic novels have come a long way from solely idealizing the Hindu/Vedic past to contemporary digital comics with augmented reality, where individual stories of women are shared and politicized. Drawing on a decade of women’s mis/representation across comics, graphic novels, and digital comics, the book would masterfully examine how iconography materializes the intersections between gender and culture in a multiplicity of context including spatial, artistic, historical, and commercial. Within the domain of popular culture, the genre of comics and graphic novels has become a booming publishing industry that has increasingly become more pronounced and arguably a promising avenue for exploring myriad concerns. Centering the correlation between the aesthetics of gender representation and consumer-material practices that has shaped this literature’s new, enduring, and potent form, this book demonstrates how this new aesthetics entail a simultaneous cultural and political retooling of the visual in the context of gender politics. It draws on a wide range of comics scholarship—including graphic fiction, non-fiction, digital and web comics—to illustrate how femininity and masculinity are produced, represented, and received. Thus, this book investigates the graphic parables produced by women creators which has set-in motion a range of debates concerning the ongoing exchange between gender and the politics of representation, production, and consumption. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and language studies, gender studies, comics studies, visual arts, and South Asia Studies.

This volume explores the ways in which religion in the South Asian literary landscape play a significant role in the creation of political structures and secular democracies in South Asia. It highlights how the concepts of nation, nationalism, and secularism in South Asia is frequently determined by the rhetoric of racism, fundamentalism and religious fanaticism, minority politics, issues of caste, class, and ethnic identity, border politics, diaspora, among other factors. This edited volume investigates the extent to which national identities are regarded as potent dimensions of social participation in South Asian literature. It studies key works of many South Asian writers to explicate how the rich national and secular dynamics of the South Asian context remain entwined with questions such as: - How could democratic processes be implemented in independent states by separating politics from religion? - How do certain literary texts depict the notion of nationalism expanding beyond the concept of a single nation due to its intricate ethnic, regional, and cultural offshoots? - How does religious mobilisation in South Asian literary narratives become a carrier of secularism within and beyond South Asian countries? - How can (mis)conceptions regarding religious fundamentalism be understood through the policies and politics of secularism and postcolonial nationalism? Taking readers through literary and cultural analysis of diverse literary productions, this volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of literature, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, identity politics and political philosophy, modern history, and South Asia studies.

This book establishes river fiction as an identifiable genre-fiction. It argues that rivers and riverbeds—through myths and legends, ecological and environmental concerns, geographical and historical realities, politics and economics around them—can provide an underlying framework to understand Indian prose fiction. With essays on river fiction across India, the volume presents a new way of understanding and reading South Asian literature. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism and South Asian studies.

This book traces masculinity in contemporary fiction produced by Indian writers in English. It analyses masculinity and its multiple shades in recent fiction produced by Jerry Pinto, Meena Kandasamy, Manu Bhattathiri, Hansda Sowvendra Shekar, Santanu Bhattacharya, and Devika Rege. This book will be a significant addition to the discourse on gender studies as it will bring the focus on men in Indian fiction. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism and South Asian studies.

This monograph draws on literary and archival texts to explore the variegated experiences of survivors of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. It focuses on muktijouddhas and their mothers, survivors of sexual violence, and women freedom fighters. The chapters analyse freedom fighter memoirs, women’s testimonials, and fictional texts to complicate the dominant nationalist discourse on the Liberation War that celebrates the male muktijouddha while marginalising women’s experiences. In so doing, the monograph provides alternative readings of the Liberation War and South Asian history. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian Literature, Culture and History, as well as Gender Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies.

The volume examines the colonial ethnography of translating nineteenth century European classics into vernacular languages of South Asia through the lens of modernity and knowledge production. It engages with the idea of texts often circulating outside their contexts and thereby provoking debates of purely local and indigenous significance. The essays in the volume unravel the complex transcultural identities of South Asian existence by inscribing translation studies in the conceptual framework of decolonisation.The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, literary and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and translation studies.

This book initiates a dialogue between two discursive fields of study: the Anthropocene and the Subaltern Studies.It highlights communities that bear the brunt of climate precarity and planetary crises and examines critiques of the Anthropocene discourse for grossly overlooking the subaltern communities and failing to integrate their historiography. The essays in the volume retrieve and amplify voices of subaltern communities amid planetary crises, especially in India, to set up new paradigms to engage and tackle the climate crises that confront our times.This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, literary criticism, especially ecocriticism, environmental studies and climate action.

This book establishes river fiction as an identifiable genre-fiction. It argues that rivers and riverbeds—through myths and legends, ecological and environmental concerns, geographical and historical realities, politics and economics around them—can provide an underlying framework to understand Indian prose fiction. With essays on river fiction across India, the volume presents a new way of understanding and reading South Asian literature. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism and South Asian studies.

Although, for years, women were portrayed as one-dimensional beings, Indian graphic novels have come a long way from solely idealizing the Hindu/Vedic past to contemporary digital comics with augmented reality, where individual stories of women are shared and politicized. Drawing on a decade of women’s mis/representation across comics, graphic novels, and digital comics, the book would masterfully examine how iconography materializes the intersections between gender and culture in a multiplicity of context including spatial, artistic, historical, and commercial. Within the domain of popular culture, the genre of comics and graphic novels has become a booming publishing industry that has increasingly become more pronounced and arguably a promising avenue for exploring myriad concerns. Centering the correlation between the aesthetics of gender representation and consumer-material practices that has shaped this literature’s new, enduring, and potent form, this book demonstrates how this new aesthetics entail a simultaneous cultural and political retooling of the visual in the context of gender politics. It draws on a wide range of comics scholarship—including graphic fiction, non-fiction, digital and web comics—to illustrate how femininity and masculinity are produced, represented, and received. Thus, this book investigates the graphic parables produced by women creators which has set-in motion a range of debates concerning the ongoing exchange between gender and the politics of representation, production, and consumption. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and language studies, gender studies, comics studies, visual arts, and South Asia Studies.

Queer Intersectionality is a comprehensive exploration of the complexities and diversities of the queer communities and their lived experiences in South Asia. By focusing on the intersectional lenses of gender, caste, class, religion, and regional identity, it presents a nuanced understanding of queer lives in South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. The volume draws on a wide range of theoretical, cultural, and social perspectives while offering a critical analysis of how queer identities are shaped up and resisted in different regions and subregions of South Asia. The chapters explore not only the challenges faced by queer individuals but also their resilience, resistance, and creative strategies for survival and empowerment. By bringing together voices from activists, scholars, and community members, the book highlights the dynamism of queer intersectionality in South Asia and challenges the dominant narratives of sexuality and identity in the region. The volume will be essential readingfor students of South Asian Literature, Gender Studies, and LGBTQ Studies.

Queer Intersectionality is a comprehensive exploration of the complexities and diversities of the queer communities and their lived experiences in South Asia. By focusing on the intersectional lenses of gender, caste, class, religion, and regional identity, it presents a nuanced understanding of queer lives in South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. The volume draws on a wide range of theoretical, cultural, and social perspectives while offering a critical analysis of how queer identities are shaped up and resisted in different regions and subregions of South Asia. The chapters explore not only the challenges faced by queer individuals but also their resilience, resistance, and creative strategies for survival and empowerment. By bringing together voices from activists, scholars, and community members, the book highlights the dynamism of queer intersectionality in South Asia and challenges the dominant narratives of sexuality and identity in the region. The volume will be essential readingfor students of South Asian Literature, Gender Studies, and LGBTQ Studies.