Written in the memory of Professor G.K. Das and divided into three sections, this book takes on special significance as India reflects on the ever-changing prospects ahead of the first seventy-five years of independence.
The subject matter in this book outlines the relationship between texts and the larger cultural context that they shape (and that, in turn, shapes them). It also presents a comparison of the relationship between events and the written word, or between lines of inquiry and the various kinds of writing that articulate them. The first section discusses British and Indian writers of the precolonial and colonial periods. The essays in the second section reflect on the question: Does the emergent nation-state seem at all like the visions that presaged it, or does it increasingly resemble the imperialistic nightmare that it seeks to replace? Finally, the last section explores the relationship between literature and human nature and also discusses the framing discourse on literature and the environment. The collection closes with a previously unpublished essay by Professor Das that brings to the forefront one of the most urgent global issues of today – the troubling relationship between humanity and an ecologically fragile environment within which it functions.
Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan)
The subject matter in this book outlines the relationship between texts and the larger cultural context that they shape (and that, in turn, shapes them). It also discusses colonial and non-colonial writings, the relationship between literature and human nature, and the framing discourse on environment and literature.
Introduction
Acknowledgements
I. Precolonial and Colonial Engagements
1. The Clever Wife in Alls Well That Ends Well and Two Indian Texts
2. John Stuart Mills Views on the Teaching of English in India: A
Reassessment from a Postcolonial Perspective
3. Tagores Critique of the Alienation of Pure Art from the Human in Western
Modernity
4. Sultanas Dream and Tagores Nightmare: A Gender Perspective on Dreams for
Social Change
5. The Comprehensiveness of SympathyGender and Species in Tagore
6. An Indian Judge, an English Gentlewoman, and Indias Freedom Struggle
7. Five Approaches to A Passage to India
8. Interrogating History and Myth as Affirmative Strategies in L.H. Myers
The Near and the Far Tetralogy
II. Postcolonial Anxieties
9. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Scholar Extraordinaire
10. Rival Shakuntalas: Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan and Shankars India
11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Mahasweta Devi: A Critique
12. From Haripir to Haripur: Problems of Plurality in The Assassins Song
13. For Pepper and Christ: The Dawn of Indias Colonization
14. English Studies Then and Now: Some Personal Reflections
III. Literature at Large
15. Random Reflections on Literature and the Sacred
16. Poor Parsons Daughters in Jane Austen, the Brontës and Mrs. Gaskell
17. Christy Hero: The Evolution of the Playboy
18. The Strange God?: D.H. Lawrences Quarrel with Christianity and T.S.
Eliot
19. The Circumambient World: D.H. Lawrence and Environment
Notes on Contributors
Index
R.W. Desai was Professor at the University of Delhi, India and Editor of the journal Hamlet Studies from 1970 to 2003.
Christel R. Devadawson is Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She has also been Head of the English Department at St. Stephens College, and at Delhi University.
Rajiva Varma was Professor of English at the University of Delhi, India. He is a founding member and a former President of the Shakespeare Society India.
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