CONTENTS:- Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction: Post-Colonial Criticism: A Transformative Labour; 1. Gothic and Supernatural-Allegories at work and at Play in Kipling's Indian Fiction; 2. E.M. Forester and the Dialogic Imagination; 3. John Masters: Writing as Stating On; 4. The Burden of Representation: Counter-Discourse through Cultural Texts in J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur; 5. The God that Left the Temple: Unravelling the Imperial Narrative in Paul Scoll's Raj Quartet; 6. Post- Colonial Destinations: Spatial Re(con) figurings in Khushwant singh's Train to Pakistan and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance; Bibliography; Index.
DESCRIPTION
Fictions of India explores the relation of narrative technique to issues of power in the work of selected writers dealing with India. It examines the imperial; context in which the writers operate and suggests how historical and ideological assumptions and anxieties may be read into the texts they produce. The study combines aspects of colonial and post-colonial debate with narrative theories to illuminate the work of these writers operating on eighter side of an epistemological divide formed by Indian independence in 1947. The book focuses largely on British writers on India with chapters on kipling, E.M. Forster, John Masters, J.G. Farrell and Paul Scott. A final, comparative chapter traces the issues of narrative and power in the work of two post-independence Indian writers -Khushwant Singh and Rohinton Mistry - and Deals with the burden of storytelling in a post-colonial situation still fraught with communal and neo-colonial abuses. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of how narrative fiction can reflect and confirm, but also contest and dismantle discourses of power.
