Re-temporalising the Cultural in India

The book looks at the different ways the temporal features in the existential exigencies of the human located within the definitive boundaries of Indianness. This has been done through an interrogation of different cultural artefacts that have been produced, across the space and time of the Indian nation, to look not only at representations of Time but how time (as the temporal) actually finds a play in them. Each act of the cultural becomes, in a sense, a relation of the very action of time. This way, the volume wishes to think, in a very pointed manner, how this play of the temporal defines the Indian Being and allow narratives, of different kinds and forms, to become. Each chapter in the volume seek to read the temporal action inside the contemporaneity of India's existence since, for better or for worse, the west has taken a hold in. The global interaction that India has had to go through, either as a British colony or a world post-colony, has allowed a meshing in of the western philosophical conceptualisations of time with (and within) the Indian ones. The changes that it has wrought, then, become as important as those that have been rooted in a historical functioning of the nation.

Ritwick Bhattacharjee is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi, New Delhi. His research has been located around fantasy, philosophy, phenomenology, horror fiction, science fiction, Indian English novels and disability studies. He is the author of Humanity's Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy and a co-editor of Horror Fictions of the Global South: Cultures, Narratives and Representations with Saikat Ghosh, What Makes it Pop? Introduction to Studies in Popular Fiction with Srinjoyee Dutta, Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms with Shweta Khilnani and Reclaiming the Disabled Subject: Representing Disability in Short Fiction with Someshwar Sati and G.J.V. Prasad. He has been awarded the Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee Memorial Award for his essay titled 'Politics of Translation: Disability, Language, and the Inbetween' published in the book Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience. His book Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms has been awarded the best academic book published in 2022 by the Federation of Indian Publishers and has been nominated for BLS book of the year and 2023 Idaho University Teaching Literature Book Award.

Dr Srinjoyee Dutta has a PhD in English literature from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is currently teaching in the capacity of assistant professor-II at Amity Institute of English Studies and Research, Noida. She has also worked as assistant professor of English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, New Delhi, for more than six years. Her areas of interest include gender studies, 20th-century continental philosophy, literary theory, translation studies and popular fiction.
She has been the winner of the prestigious C.D. Narasimhaiah Memorial prize, awarded by the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies for the best paper in a conference, for two consecutive years. Her research papers and chapters have been published in journals and books of national and international repute. She is the co-editor of Sophocles' Antigone (2023) and What makes it Pop? An Introduction to Studies in Popular Fiction (2020). She is currently working on a co-authored monograph titled Dangerous Aporia: The Dinosaur in Popular Culture, to be published by Bloomsbury.
She is also an avid translator and translates from Hindi to English. She has translated short stories and excerpts by Sanjeev in Selected Short Stories (2020) and Krishna Sobti in Krishna Sobti: A Counter Archive (2022).