Colonial Karma: The Problem of Action in the Indian English Novel - Hardcover

Rege, J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403964009 ISBN 13: 9781403964007

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Synopsis

Colonial Karma tracks the Indian English novel from its colonial origins to the present, each chapter focusing on a particular historical moment. Linking the novel's development with that of Indian cultural nationalism, it argues that nationalism seeks to solve the problem of action for its middle-class subject by redefining the Bhagavad-Gita's concept of karma for political purposes. Two figures serve to exemplify this problem: Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita and Saleem in Midnight's Children . After considering influential early novels in Indian languages, Colonial Karma discusses novels in English by Narayan, Anand, Rao, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Deshpande and Githa Hariharan.

About this title

About the Author:

JOSNA REGE is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College, USA.

Review:

"Josna Rege's "Colonial Karma" is a work that meets the urgent demands of scholarship in the field of postcolonial literary studies, a very major component of which is the Indian novel in English. This book is a major pioneering work in that it provides both a broad historical survey as well as a close historical analysis of the English Indian novel. "Colonial Karma" is admirable not only for the sweep and comprehensiveness with which it outlines a literary history, but also for the nuanced, scholarly, and insightful critical sensibility that informs the readings of individual texts. These are nothing short of masterly. In short, it is my unequivocal opinion that "Colonial Karma" is an important and timely work."--Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Professorial Fellow, Wolfson College and Reader in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1403964009
• ISBN 13: 9781403964007
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 221