Nation and Nationalism in South Asian Literature

Introduction: Nations, Nationalism and South Asia

- Goutam Karmakar and Nukhbah Taj Langah

Part I: Narrating the nations: Minoritization, Partition and Intersectionalities

1. Intizar Husain’s Basti, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, and the Evolution of Nationalism since the Partition

- John C. Hawley

2. Reckoning with Risk, Contesting Constraint: Osman Haneef’s Blasphemy and the Parameters of Secular Criticism

- Madeline Clements

3. Reading Kafela as a Counterpublic in a Secular-Liberal State

- Arju Khatun

4. Recuperating Pakistan’s Syncretic Pasts: Decentering Islamic Nationalism in Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone

- Rajender Kaur

5. Heterotopic (Literary) Formations: The Obliterated Body in Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage

-Thilini N K Meegaswatta

6. ‘Destroying the Household’ for Independence: Women’s Counterspaces in Khadija Mastur’s Partition Novels

- Sheelalipi Sahana

7. Re-cartographizing Nationalism: Postcolonial Rhizomatic Interventions into Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight

- Abhisek Ghosal

8. Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses: Questioning Women’s Action Forum’s Secular Ontology

- Muhammad Safdar

9. Dialectics of Art and Activism: Progressive Consciousness in Select Lyrics and Essays of Jyotiprasad Agarwalla

- Dhurjjati Sarma

10. Reimagining Happiness and the Nation in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness      

- Saumya Lal

Part II: Identity, Transnationalism and South Asia

11. A Bihari among the Bengalis: Persecution of Non-Bengali Muslims during the Liberation War of 1971 in Syed Manzurul Islam’s Song of Our Swampland

- Asif Iqbal

12. Salman Rushdie and the Hindu Right: Female Sexuality, Nation, and Censorship in Rushdie’s Novels and its Imprints in Deepa Mehta’s Films

- Lopamudra Basu

13. “How do I speak about my people’s contemporary circumstances?”: Representation and Contestation of Identity in Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s Funeral Nights

- Basil N. Darlong Diengdoh

14. Imagined Micro-solidarity in Search of Belonging: Distant Nationalisms in Channa Wickremesekera’s Distant Warriors

- Sanghamitra Dalal

15. Reconceptualizing the “Barak/ Bengali Identity” in the Indian Nation-state Paradigm: A Study of Select Short Stories from Mithilesh Bhattacharjee’s Desh Bhager Golpo

- Nabanita Paul

16. Confirmation of the Indian Talam: Performing National Identity in Rashma Kalsie’s Play Melbourne Talam

- Khaoula Chakour

17. The Self as the Other: Religious and Secular Sense of Place in Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

- Barnali Sarkar

Biography

Goutam Karmakar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad in India, with affiliations at MESH and GSSC, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He has received prestigious fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt and National Research Foundation awards. His research spans Global South literature, postcolonial and decolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities. Karmakar edits the journal Global South Literary Studies and the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.

Nukhbah Taj Langah joined Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan, after completing her doctorate from the University of Leeds in 2009. She is currently affiliated with the Department of English, University of Malaya, Malaysia. Her research interests include resistance literature from South Asia, translation theory and practice, and South Asian diasporic literature. Her publications include Poetry as Resistance: Islam and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Pakistan (2011). A recent edited volume includes N. Langah & R. Sengupta (eds.) Volume I - Film, Media, and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia (Delhi: London: New York, Routledge 2021), and Literary & non-Literary Responses towards 9/11 (Delhi, London, New York: Routledge, 2019).  She associated with CEIAS Paris (2016-2017) as a research fellow from 2016-2017 and was selected as Charles Wallace Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2018. She is a freelance translator and a political activist voicing the Siraiki community in Pakistan. In 2008, she collaborated with the Poetry Translation Center (London) and co-translated Pakistani Urdu poet Noshi Gillani with the British poet Lavinia Greenlaw (Poems: Noshi Gillani (Enitharmon, 2008). She has recently completed “Archives of Siraiki Cultural and Political History” funded by the Modern Endangered Archives Program (UCLA, USA). Her forthcoming publications include several papers and edited anthologies.