River Fiction of India

Intersectional Flows of Narratives, Geographies, and Histories
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-66253-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Buch, Englisch, 306 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 603 g

Reihe: South Asian Literature in Focus

This book establishes river fiction as an identifiable genre-fiction. It argues that rivers and riverbeds—through myths and legends, ecological and environmental concerns, geographical and historical realities, politics and economics around them—can provide an underlying framework to understand Indian prose fiction. With essays on river fiction across India, the volume presents a new way of understanding and reading South Asian literature. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism and South Asian studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ray, Subhadeep

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Indische & Dravidische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, Märchen, Mythen, Sagen
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften, Biologie: Sachbuch, Naturführer

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: Reading the Indian river fiction: Generic movements and intersectional approaches

PART I: NARRATIVES

1 A tale of woe and displacement: Brahmaputra as the perpetual perpetrator in Rudrani Sarma’s

2 The river bound humans: Narrative deployment of the river in delineating limitations of human worlds in select Bengali short-fiction

3 Living with the river: Analysing aspects of vulnerability and human-nonhuman relationship in The Boatman of the Padma and The Ganga

4 "Those who live beside the river need to be alarmed around the year": Women across rivers in Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hansuli Turn and Kalindi

5 River as the pathway to performative masculine identity: A reading of Atin Bandyopadhyay’s Ekti Joler Rekha O Ora Tin Jon

6 River, cityscape and crime: Navigating the Ganges in Satyajit Ray’s Joi Baba Felunath and Golapi Mukta Rahasya

PART II: GEOGRAPHIES

7 Reading river rites and river resilience in Naga Anglophone novels: An attempt to restore indigenous river rights

8 Separating the waters: Analysing the Partition’s impact upon Bengal’s rivers and chars through select Bengali ‘hydro-fiction’

9 Dammed or doomed rivers?: Interrogating the other side of modernisation and reclaiming the displaced riverine communities’ narratives through Anita Agnihotri’s Mahanadi: The Tale of a River and Mahakantar

10 "What was once a rushing torrent, has become a broad river!": Reflections onviolation of socio-ecological justice in Orijit Sen’s River of Stories and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri

11 "Through the holes in her ears, you could see the hot river and the dark trees that bent to It": En-visioning the river as a subject and tracing the poetics of environmental imagination in The God of Small Things

PART III: HISTORIES

12 Mapping the unknown: An exploration into the challenges of knowledge acquisition in Major James Rennell’s The Journals

13 A portrait of the artist as a riverine fellow: Journey of the self through natural and community history in Subarnarenu Subarnarekha

14 The flowing of the river brings the promise of eternity: Reading Ichamati and river narratives of the Sundarbans

15 The anonymous history of her banks is the living truth: A comparative study of ecology, community and gender in Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titas Ekti Nadir Naam and Harishankar Jaladas’ Jalaputra

16 From labour as legacy to labour as commodity: Reflections from Debesh Ray’s Tista novels

17 Ravaged hinterlands of central India: Capitalism and ecological appropriation in Anita Agnihotri’s Mahanadi: The Tale of a River

Afterword: An author’s perspective: Reinventing a tradition while writing within it

Über Autor(innen)

Subhadeep Ray is an Associate Professor of English at Bidhan Chandra College, Asansol, West Bengal, India, and a Visiting Professor of English at Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal, India.