1st Edition
Troubled Testimonies Terrorism and the English novel in India
Since the 9/11 attacks terror has established its permeating hold on society’s psyche. Creative writing, a popular and visible cultural witness to the strain, has taken up this destabilization with remarkable regularity. Troubled Testimonies focuses on the Indian novel in English, deriving inspiration from these disturbances, to essay a unique grasp of the cultural make-up of the times and its reverberations on the sense of self and belonging to the nation. This first full-length study of terror in the subcontinental novel in English (from India) places it in the world context and analyzes the fictional coverage of the spread of terrorism across the country and its cultural fallout. The enigmatic coming together of the contemporary with the anguish of loss and betrayal unleashed by terror occasions a significant redefinition of the issues of trauma, conflict and gender, and opens a fresh window to Indian writing and the culture of the subcontinent, and a new paradigm in literary and cultural criticism termed ‘post-terrorism’.
Lucid and thought provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, history, politics and sociology.
Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Under the Shadow of Terror: The Contemporary Indian Novel Part 1: The Geographical Ambit of the Postterrorist Novel 2. Sad Paradise: Kashmir I 3. The Collapse of Paradise Itself: Kashmir II 4. The Home Story: Terrorism in the Heartlands 5. Terror International: Global Terrorism and the Indian Novel Part 2: Formal and Thematic Ambit 6. Visual Reconstruction: The Graphic Novel and Terrorism 7. Gender and the Postterrorist Novel 8. Trauma and the Postterrorist Novel 9. Conclusion: Let me cry out in that Void: Reckoning Postterrorism in Fiction Bibliography
Biography
Meenakshi Bharat is a writer, translator, reviewer and critic and teaches at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She is President of the International Federation of Languages and Literatures, FILLM (UNESCO), and Treasurer of the Indian Association of Australian Studies. Her interests include cultural, postcolonial and English studies, children’s literature, women’s fiction and film studies – areas which she has extensively researched and written about. Among her publications are The Ultimate Colony (2003), Desert in Bloom (2004), Filming the Line of Control (2008), Rushdie the Novelist (2009), three volumes of Indo-Australian stories entitled Fear Factor: Terror Incognito (2010), Alien Shores: Tales of Refugees and Asylum Seekers (2012), A House for Mr Biswas: Critical Perspectives (2012), Only Connect: Technology and Us (2014), and a children’s book, Little Elephant Throws a Party (2014).
