Reading India in a Transnational Era: The Works of Raja Rao

This anthology demonstrates the significance of Raja Rao’s writing in the broader spectrum of anti-colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic writing in the 20th century. In addition to highlighting Rao’s significant presence in Indian writing, the volume presents a range of previously unpublished material which contextualises Rao’s work within 20th-century modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial trends. Exploring both his fictional and non-fictional works, Reading India in a Transnational Era engages with issues of subaltern agency and national belonging, authenticity, subjectivity, internationalism, multicultural politics, postcolonialism, and literary and cultural representation through language and translation.

A literary volume that discusses gender and identity on both socio-political grounds, apart from dealing with Rao’s linguistic experimentations in a transnational era, will be of interest among scholars and researchers of English, postcolonial and world literature, cultural theory, and Asian studies.

Rumina Sethi, Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Panjab University, Chandigarh, is a member of the General Council of the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. She obtained her PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, and held the British Academy Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Her books include Myths of the Nation (1999) and The Politics of Postcolonialism (2011).

Letizia Alterno, Teaching Fellow of Advance HE, is Honorary Research Fellow in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. She has authored the monograph Raja Rao: An Introduction for the Contemporary Indian Writers Series (2011), Rao’s obituary in The Guardian (2006) and an article on his legacy in The Times of India (2010).