Human Rights and Indian Literary Communities explores the relation between literature, the public sphere and the notion of personhood as understood through the concept of human rights in India. While discussing the challenges of social equality, the universal notion that everyone is a rights-bearing person, and rule of law in a postcolonial society like India, it outlines the historical trajectories, geographies and social processes that go into the making of human rights.
This edited collection presents various interpretations of the concept of literary communities, highlighting their indispensable role to the demands of human rights discourse. Each chapter analyses narratives as told in various media and environments - from the public sphere and the Constitution to archival letters, novels, poetry and short stories, as well as documentary and feature films. Contributions from human rights and literary scholars and researchers also adopt an intersectional lens, discussing the micro-histories of the anti-colonial struggle, debates within the queer movement, and the relationship between religion and rights. Wide in scope, this book adopts a sharp focus on the capacity of literary communities to collectively equip those with rights with empathy and care.
By demonstrating how a rights-bearing person is written, not simply constructed, into being, this comprehensive text is an ideal resource for researchers of literary, legal, and postcolonial studies.
This book explores the interplay of literature, the public sphere and the notion of personhood as understood through the concept of human rights in India. While surveying the challenges of social equality and rule of law in postcolonial society, it outlines the historical trajectories, geographies and social processes shaping human rights.
Introduction: Writing the Human Part I: Histories
1. The Right to Write:
Ambedkars Literary Criticism of any Political Theology
2. Narrating the
Slave-Caste: Protestant anxieties and textual productions in nineteenth
century Travancore
3. Mantos Language Games: The paradox of partition and
the claims of personhood
4. The Poetics of Suffering: Subjecthood and Satire
in Raag Darbari Part II: Geographies
5. Beyond the Universal Declaration:
Provincialising Global Human Rights through Literature from Indias North
East
6. Beyond Bare Life: Literary Conceptions of Kashmiri Personhood Part
III: Social Processes
7. A Call for Dalit Human Rights in Contemporary India
through Yashica Dutts Coming Out as Dalit
8. Human Rights and the
Vulnerability of Caste in Select Indian Films
9. Human Rights, Journalism,
and the Politics of Representation: A study of Writing with Fire
10. Born,
Dying and Reborn: The Transformations of Literary Community.
Swatie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Her areas of research interest include human rights and literature, literary and critical theory, trauma, war and violence studies, gender and feminism, twenty-first-century American studies, among others. She is an alumna of Delhi University, India, from where she obtained her PhD, and Dartmouth Colleges Futures of American Studies Institute, USA.
