1st Edition

Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism

Edited By Sk Sagir Ali, Goutam Karmakar, Nasima Islam Copyright 2022
196 Pages
by Routledge India

196 Pages
by Routledge India

196 Pages
by Routledge India

This volume studies the representation of religion in South Asian Anglophone literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It traces the contours of South Asian writing through the consequences of the complex contesting forces of blasphemy and secularization. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach, it discusses various key issues such as religious fundamentalism, Islamophobia,... Read more

Introduction

 

Part 1

Religion, Agency and Cultural Memory

 

1.      Fear of the Other: Narrator and Narratives in Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness and Jihadi Jane.

Farddina Hussain

 

2.      Kurukshetra and Karbala: Mahabharata in Intizar Hussain’s Fiction.

Haris Qadeer

 

3.      The Return of the Goddess: Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and the Manasamangal

Swati Moitra

 

4.      “All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own” : Faith, doubt and poetics of secularism in The Enchantress of Florence.

            Sk. Sagir Ali

 

Part 2

Ethnicity, Myth, Caste and Censorship

 

5.      The Poetics and the Politics of Kashmiriyat: A Study of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator and The Book of Gold Leaves.

Somjyoti Mridha

 

6.      Thinking the Body, Figuring (the) Woman Religion, Caste, Gender and Identity in Literary Representations.

Arunima Ray

 

7.      Death of an author: Dissecting the notion of religious hurt sentiment vis-à-vis literary-political censorship in India through One Part Woman.

Nasima Islam

 

8.      Religious Hegemony and Literature: Appropriation of Subaltern’s Parables in Amitav Ghosh’ The Hungry Tide.

Jai Singh

  

Part 3

War, Trauma and History

 

9.      The “Long Shadow” of Bangladeshi Liberation War: Religion and Nationalism in Tahmima  Anam’s Bengal Trilogy.

Rimi Nath

 

10.  Situating Religiosity in 19th Century Assam: Reading Tilottama Mishra’s Swarnalata.

Sibsankar Majumdar

 

11.  A Historian under Siege: Rethinking Secular Historiography.

Kaushani Mondal

 

12.  “First a Friend and Then an Enemy”: Trauma, Fetish, and Binary Politics in The Black Coat.

Avijit Basak

 

13.  Religion as the Messianic “Other” of Secular Modernity: Locating Habermas’ Post-Secular Society in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.

Swayamdipta Das

 

          

 

Biography

Sk Sagir Ali is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Midnapore College (Autonomous), West Bengal, India. 

Goutam Karmakar is Assistant Professor, Department of English, BBTM College under Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, West Bengal, India.

Nasima Islam is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Acharya Girish Chandra Bose College, under University of Calcutta , Kolkata, India.