AT HOME IN INDIA: GEOGRAPHIES OF HOME IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN NOVELS Alexandra Fiona Barley lIDs thesis explores the geographies of home in contemporary Indian literature in English through an in-depth reading of mainstream Indian novels by a number of prominent writers including Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Shobha De, Shama Futehally, Raj Kamal Jha, Pankaj Mishra, Jaishree Mis~ and Rohinton Mistry. Concepts of home are explored including identity, self, nation, and how these are reflected in the narratives and genre of the novels. Chapter one introduces the thesis by outlining the thematic focus and reviewing the literature on home. Chapter two outlines the reading strategies used in the thesis: concepts of worldliness and affiliation, to examine the discourses of home in the novels. These provide the foundation for the subsequent exploration of home in the novels in chapters three, four and five, where each chapter considers 'home' at different scales: self, family, nation and diaspora. Chapter three examines the conflict of identity between the self and the nation in the novels showing the failure of the home. Chapter four considers the family and addresses how the Indian middle classes are adapting to changes in Indian society such as globalisation, and economic and cultural changes. These novels in this chapter demonstrate the ambivalence of the old middle class towards these changes expressed as feelings of fear and nostalgia. Chapter five explores how particular groups experience displacement and marginalisation in the nation on the grounds of caste, gender and religion. The focus of the novels in this chapter is on the 'State of Emergency' in the 1970s and the Hindu nationalism of the 1980s and 1990s rendering the changing political situation in India textually. Chapter six focuses on how the gendered discourses of daughter, wife and mother place limitations on the spatial mobilities of the female protagonists. Through attention to themes of courtship and marriage, the chapter also considers how these Indian novels destabilise the genre of domestic novels by portraying protagonists going against the grain of domestic discourses by not marrying, or by divorcing. Finally, the conclusion in Chapter Seven draws together these different threads of home by placing them in the wider South Asian context in literature and film, and ends with an examination of the film Monsoon Wedding showing how domestic themes are captured on screen.

At home in India : geographies of home in contemporary indian novels

Women Writing in India, 600 B.C. to the Present. 1: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century

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The house in South Asian Muslim women's early anglophone life-writing and novels

Over the past two centuries, nationalism has narrated its own identity with exceptionally compelling power and resilience. Despite increasing predictions of the demise of the nation in the 1960s and 1970s, nationalist struggles are among the most trenchant issues to occupy our attention in the daily press. The air rings with virulently jingoist slogans coughed up by conservative parties in Austria, Switzerland, England, and the United States, among others. And, if it did not follow literally centuries of warfare as well as responding to a rich symbolic iconography (William Hogarth’s Calais Gate, or the Roast Beef of Old England comes to mind), the current food ght between Britain and France might be considered as comic relief in this increasingly heated nationalist moment. But it does, and, as a journalist recently remarked, lamenting the fact that one cannot seem to praise one’s own country without simultaneously damning all others, ‘There is no such thing as a purely positive denition of [national] identity’ (Raven, 1999). Nations take shape by a process of exclusions, and it is the Other that ultimately denes the Self, the margin that determines the centre, as Edward Said pointed out many years ago (Said, 1978). My question here is not so much the debate on the nation as imagined community, which has been thoroughly discussed in other sources, or why created identities can produce ideologies that have led to unimaginable horrors over the centuries (see, among others, Eley and Suny, 1996; Hutchinson and Smith, 1994; Boswell and Evans, 1999). As Anderson formulated the problem, the power of the national narrative springs directly from the practice by which the nation formulates its own existence, creating an identity through imagining that its people are bound to the same territory. He stressed:

Frida Kahlo Remaps the Nation

This article investigates representations of gender and class inequality in Attia Hosain’s classic novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and her short story collection Phoenix Fled and Other Sto

Gender and social class in India: Muslim perspectives in the fiction of Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally:

A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective willÂ—except in a dream we all agreed to dream. Â—Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (129-130)

Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

Papers

Multiple Forms of (National) Belonging: Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column