River Fiction of India Intersectional Flows of Narratives, Geographies, and Histories

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reading the Indian river fiction: Generic movements and intersectional approaches

PART I: NARRATIVES

1 A tale of woe and displacement: Brahmaputra as the perpetual perpetrator in Rudrani Sarma’s Kahibunor Malita 

Dhurjjati Sarma

2 The river bound humans: Narrative deployment of the river in delineating limitations of human worlds in select Bengali short fiction

3 Living with the river: Analysing aspects of vulnerability and human–non-human relationships in The Boatman of the Padma and The Ganga

4 "Those who live beside the river need to be alarmed around the year": Women across rivers in Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hansuli Turn and Kalindi

5 River as the pathway to performative masculine identity: A reading of Atin Bandyopadhyay’s Ekti Joler Rekha O Ora Tin Jon

6 River, cityscape, and crime: Navigating Satyajit Ray’s Joy Baba Felunath and Golapi Mukta Rahasya

Ivana Chowdhury

PART II: GEOGRAPHIES

7 Reading river rites and river resilience in Naga Anglophone novels: An attempt to restore indigenous river rights

8 Separating the waters: Analysing the Partition’s impact upon Bengal’s rivers and chars through select Bengali "hydro-fiction"

9 Dammed or doomed rivers?: Interrogating the other side of modernisation and reclaiming the displaced riverine communities’ narratives through Anita Agnihotri’s Mahanadi: The Tale of a River and Mahakantar

10 "What was once a rushing torrent, has become a broad river!": Reflections on violation of socio-ecological justice in Orijit Sen’s River of Stories and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri

11 "Through the holes in her ears, you could see the hot river and the dark trees that bent to It": En-visioning the river as a subject and tracing the poetics of environmental imagination in The God of Small Things

PART III: HISTORIES

12 Mapping the unknown: An exploration into the challenges of knowledge acquisition in Major James Rennell’s The Journals

13 A portrait of the artist as a riverine fellow: Journey of the self through natural and community history in Subarnarenu Subarnarekha

14 "The flowing of the river brings the promise of eternity": Reading Ichhamoti and river narratives of the Sundarbans

15 The anonymous history of her banks is the living truth: A comparative study of ecology, community, and gender in Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titas Ekti Nadir Naam and Harishankar Jaladas’ Jalaputra

16 From labour as legacy to labour as commodity: Reflections from Debesh Ray’s Tista novels

Indra Sankar Ghatak

17 Ravaged hinterlands of central India: Capitalism and ecological appropriation in Anita Agnihotri’s Mahanadi: The Tale of a River

Rakhi N P and Sheena John

Afterword: An author’s perspective: Reinventing a tradition while writing within it

Biography

Subhadeep Ray is an Associate Professor of English at Bidhan Chandra College, Asansol, West Bengal, India, and a Visiting Professor of English at Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal, India.

"Rivers are the arteries of human existence; they nurture lives and civilisations. Although literature has dealt with rivers, river fiction as a genre is an emergent field. This is surprising especially in a country like India where one of the most ancient human civilisations flourished on the banks of the Indus, and rivers are deified and worshipped. This volume which brings together multiple perspectives on river fiction thus addresses a serious lack in literary scholarship and is sure to make a seminal contribution to the field. It puts the human in conversation with
the non-human, by bringing together human narratives that are played out against the background of rivers and other natural forces. What makes it more valuable is this acknowledgement of the intersectional nature of riverine ecology, emphasising the inter-connectedness of our existence on this fragile planet."

Mini Chandran, Professor of English, & Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India

 

"Rivers have been running through the human landscape since time immemorial; they meander through spaces both mythical and actual, enlivening lives both quotidian and fantastic. In India, where rivers create labyrinths of communication and culture, it is no wonder that there must be an attempt to trace their literary and cultural cartography through rivers. This is what Subhadeep Ray has done in his edited book River Fiction of India: Intersectional Flows of Narratives, Geographies, and Histories (Routledge). The book offers an alternative approach to Indian literature and defies the long practice of literary historiography that follows the grand narratives of History. For this book, History becomes ‘Histories’, pluralistic and fragmented, which appears as the final section of the book; the previous two sections are ‘Narratives’ and ‘Geographies’. The structure of the book thus resembles the course of a river, where local and individual narratives commingle to form a mighty stream that flows through various cultural and cartographical geographies of India, finally submitting itself to the innumerable waves of temporality. The book provides a fresh and innovative way of looking at Indian literatures and cultures, including contemporary issues of environment and ecology. Researchers and scholars working on South Asia may find this book interesting."

Parthasarathi Bhaumik, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, & Associate Professor (Visiting), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan