Inlays of Subjectivity

Description

Inlays of Subjectivity is an incisive exposition of the theme of subjectivity and selfhood in modern Indian literature.

Scholarship in Indian literary studies tends to be divided along the lines of region, language, chronology, class, and caste. This book traverses and connects these contentious lines to examine some of the most influential literary texts to emerge from India in the last hundred years. It analyses literary expressions of intense emotionality—suffering, humiliation, creativity, and strife—while inhabiting the linkages between justice, speech, and affect.

Nikhil Govind interprets a range of influential novelists such as Rabindranath Tagore and Saratchandra Chatterjee (Bengali), Agyeya (Hindi), Ismat Chughtai (Urdu), Krishna Sobti (Hindi), Urmila Pawar (Marathi), and K.R. Meera (Malayalam), to unearth narrative continuities of reflexive subject positions in relation to ongoing debates around free speech and egalitarianism.

About the Author

Nikhil Govind is associate professor and Head, Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy for Higher Education (MAHE). His doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, was on the consonance between revolutionary and literary form in strands of Bengali and Hindi literature. He is the author of Between Love And Freedom: TheRevolutionary In The Hindi Novel (2014, reprinted 2018). He is a working editor and on the Editorial Board of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME). He writes regularly for mainstream media on Indian literature, cinema, higher education, and contemporary culture.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Prelude

First Study: Injustice and the Self

Second Study: Ambition and Ach ievement

Third Study: Modes of the Bildung-Humour and the Lyric

Fourth Study: Desire as Inner Mutuality

Fifth Study: A Skein of Voices

Coda

Bibliography

Index

About the Author