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Description of  Affect and the Performative Dimension of Fear in the Indian English Novel: Tumults of the Imagination

1527506053 pdf This volume provides a critical reading of Khushwant Singhs Train to Pakistan (1956), Neel Mukherjees The Lives of Others (2014) and Rohinton Mistrys A Fine Balance (1995) to provide a literary account of three fundamental moments in Indias history: the Partition of 1947, the Naxalbari movement, and Indira Gandhis Emergency. These novels provide literary interpretations of the ways in which feelings of fear and insecurity connected with ethno-religious rivalries, as well as with new power shifts in Indian socio-economic structure, gave a significant contribution to the formation of the political landscape in post-colonial India. More specifically, defying any kind of identitarian juxtaposition (be it related to ethnic belonging, religion, sexuality, or social class), the present work reads those three major novels in Indian English fiction to investigate how episodes of violence, in the first three decades after Indias independence from the British Empire, were enacted under the influence of cultural images and affects which legitimised different social groups to claim for themselves the right to prevail over others, or even take their lives. The volume starts with a reflection on the spreading of rumours during Partition in Train to Pakistan (1956) and their power to turn friendly communities into sworn enemies. The analysis proceeds then to discuss how the newborn governments struggle to stifle the Naxalbari movement, as it described in The Lives of Others, was partly sustained by paranoiac feelings projected by the new metropolitan bourgeoisie on the people living in the rural parts of the country. The historical itinerary concludes with an analysis of A Fine Balances description of the two main political objectives of the Emergency: the beautification of India and the reduction of the countrys population. Both appear to be revealing moments of a predatory character present in the new Indian democratic institutions, transmitted as a kind of bodily contagion. Read more