The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures refutes the Anglocentrism of much literary criticism of the global South by examining ＂Indian Literature＂ as a multilingual, dialogic, and plural space constituted by both continuities and divergences. In forty-three chapters and with a team of scholars who exemplify the method of historically situated and theoretically rigorous literary criticism, this volume shows how the idea of Indian literature is a relational and comparative concept. Through readings of a vast diversity of multilingual literature in a range of genres, the chapters highlight contact zones and interchanges across seemingly sedimented boundaries. The Handbook provides an overview of the current state of modern Indian writing and features a range of texts and approaches from across India’s many languages and literary traditions, examining and amplifying recent critical attention to the multilingualism that is at the base of any curation of what could be termed, with qualification, ＂Indian Literatures.＂ The book ranges from the 19th century to the 21st, with especial focus on the centrality of gender and caste to Indian modernism and new generic formations such as graphic novels, autofiction, and videogames.

Anjali Nerlekar is Associate Professor in the Department of AMESALL at Rutgers University and co-editor of Modernism/modernity. Her publications include Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (2016; Indian edition by Speaking Tiger, 2017), a co-edited special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (＂The Worlds of Bombay Poetry,＂ 2017), and a co-edited special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies on ＂Postcolonial Archives＂ in 2021. Her ongoing project (in collaboration with Dr. Bronwen Bledsoe) is the building of an archive of multilingual post-1960 Bombay poetry at Cornell University Library, ＂The Bombay Poets Archive.＂ She is also currently working on her second book manuscript which examines the multilingual borders of Marathi literature.

Ulka Anjaria is professor of English and director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University, USA, with research specialties in South Asian literature and film, realism and the global novel. She is the author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019), and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021) and the editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015).