Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
14 - Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In our time, when intimacy saturates all aspects of the public sphere, from politics to culture to law, its regimes and temporalities are certainly as instrumental in pacifying the citizenry and securing social cohesion as were those of the workplace when work ruled the land.
– Laura Kipnis, “Adultery” (p. 29)Intimacy is not solely a private matter: it may be protected, manipulated, or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory, or estranged by critique.
– Svetlana Boym, “On Diasporic Intimacy” (p. 228)Much scholarship both in India and abroad has explored how Anglophone South Asian fiction represents women and female agency in colonial and postcolonial India. Including a consideration of writers from the colonial period such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as postcolonial writers such as Attia Hosain, Anita Desai, Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee, and Salman Rushdie, literary and cultural criticism on gender in nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asia has largely revolved around the relationship between women and nationalism in these works. In particular, the work of feminist and subaltern studies scholars such as Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Recasting), Sangeeta Ray (En-Gendering), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (In Other), Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing), and Partha Chatterjee (Nation), among others, has been influential in two principal ways: first, it has mapped the aesthetics and politics of texts in which women are represented either as victims of Indian patriarchal discourses or as symbols of national and cultural community. How ethnicity, religion, caste, and class shape these representations of women has been important to elucidating a complex, historical analysis of women in Indian literature. Second, this work has collectively foregrounded how the modern representation of Indian women – of their voice and agency – shores up relations of neocolonial power between men in national and international contexts. This scholarship has thus called for greater self-reflexivity and care around questions of representation, voice, and subalternity in the Indian nation.
In this chapter, I will not review this important and by now canonical scholarly analysis of cultural representations of women and nationalism in modern India; instead, I will use it as a starting point to signal two directions for future scholarly consideration of gender and sexuality in the Indian novel.
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- A History of the Indian Novel in English , pp. 221 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015