Logo

Re-visiting or re-contextualization of India by the Indian Writers in English offered exciting possibilities in fiction since 1980s. India is a huge construct in which each segment of the society feels it owns the totality in much the same way as the whole structure assimilates and celebrates plurality authenticating different marginalized sections and their narratives, the postcolonial way. Of late these voices from margins and their narratives have become integral to the Indian English Fiction scene.

Indian history offered a vast repertoire for Indian fiction writers in English as it happened in the case of African writers in English in the fifties and sixties. Similarly, they subverted English language to make it their own using it in a freewheeling, resonant manner. Salman Rushdie, I. Allan Sealy, Amitav Ghosh, Dina Mehta, Githa Hariharan, Arundhati Roy and a host of other novelists have created a fictional corpus providing space, voice and visibility to marginalized groups in terms of class, community, religion and gender. These resistance narratives could be compared with the best in Regional Literatures in India as well as African English classics.

The twenty-six articles in this anthology, as such, offer re-mappings of perspectives by the postcolonial Indian English Fictionists. These writers have made a habit of re-viewing history, resisting hegemonic perspectives, both imposed and home-grown, while projecting a spirit of liberation in the process. The issues the scholars in this anthology have dealt with are wide ranging, from reconstruction of minority histories, nationalism, communalism, dalit and women perspectives to freedom struggle revisited as reflected in an array of fascinating fictional works.