Subcontinental Histories

Book Details

• Author: Jasbir Jain

• Publisher: Rawat Publications

• Binding: Hardback

• Pages: 298

• ISBN: 9788131609286

• Language: English

• Publication Year: 2018

• Sale Territory: India

About the Book

Subcontinental Histories offers a comprehensive exploration of historical events over the last two centuries, analyzed through literary texts—fiction, poetry, and drama—providing a retrospective view that transcends the immediacy of historical occurrences. The literary works featured in this book offer insights into the individual voices, restlessness, discontent, and fissures within the notion of a nation. In addition to literary texts, the book draws on documents such as letters, speeches, and newspaper articles, presenting alternative perspectives on reality when removed from the immediacy of expression.

The Indian subcontinent shares a past of colonialism and the resistance movements it sparked. This work traces India's journey toward freedom, the divisive forces of nationalism that led to the country’s partition, and the enduring consequences of those divisions. The narrative then expands to examine the subsequent manifestations of terror, nuclear arms races, and environmental concerns in India and its neighboring countries.

This exploration includes discussions on influential writers and thinkers such as Jotiba Phule, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Kamila Shamsie, Girish Karnad, Saadat Hasan Manto, and many others. Their works open up a dialogue between the past and present, allowing for a rethinking of the events that have shaped our times.

The book is divided into chapters that address key themes such as the rise of nationalism, the aftermath of partition, political and social shifts, the role of dissent, the ongoing violence in the region, and the complex interplay of history and literature in the subcontinent’s collective consciousness. With its diverse range of topics, Subcontinental Histories is a significant work that calls for a reassessment of the events that have shaped the modern Indian subcontinent and its identity.

Contents

1. Introduction: The Burden of the Past

2. Literature as an Artefact of History: The Turns We Missed and the Reluctant Rise of Nationalism

3. The Mai-Baap Syndrome: Feudalism, Divisive Polity, and the Reluctant Rise of Nationalism

4. Activism and Answerability: Unpicking the Postcolonial Discourse

5. Re-viewing the Renaissance: An Investment in Modernity? Political Shifts and Dialogues

6. The Coming of Gandhi: His Experiential Evolution in the Political World

7. The Aftermath of Divisive Nationalisms in the Subcontinent: A Nation Divided

8. Mass Exodus: Mourning Together or Alone? Shared Histories, Separate Territories

9. The Dialectics of History: Narratives of the Subcontinent’s Participation in the Empire’s Wars

10. Breaking the Silence: Poets, Revolutions, and Politics

11. Dissent and the Performative Medium: IPTA and Ajoka – Violence and Its Continuities

12. Terror: The Many Manifestations of an Abstraction

13. The Travels of Maoism in the Subcontinent

14. Why Did Saeed Mirza Write Ammi? Nuclear Weapons, Development, and Environment

15. Woman as Text: Violence and the Human

16. Baramaha, the Lacanian ‘Real’ and Sealy’s The Everest Hotel

17. Bhoma: The Eternally Resurrected

About the Author

Jasbir Jain is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Rajasthan and has received several prestigious fellowships, including the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship as Writer in Residence, K.K. Birla Fellowship, and many others. She has taught at various universities, including in Copenhagen (Denmark) and Tampere (Finland). A prominent scholar in the fields of literature and culture, Jain has published extensively on a wide range of topics, including feminism, resistance, diaspora, and history. Her significant works include Indigenous Roots of Feminism (2011), Theorising Resistance (2012), The Diaspora Writes Home (2015), and Forgiveness: Between Memory and History (2016).