ANGLES Volume I

Unhinging Hinglish: The Languages and Politics of Fiction in English from the Indian Subcontinent

Edited by Nanette Hale and Tabish Khair

List of Contents

Editors' Preface

Meenakshi Mukherjee
Fiction in English in a Multi-lingual Society: Location and Perspective

Maryam Khozan and Charles Lock
Touching the Untouchable: On the Reception of Indian Fiction in England in the 1930s

Martin Leer
Odologia Indica: The Significance of Railways in Anglo-Indian and Indian Fiction in English

Nanette Hale
'As if time were telescoped and space dovetailed': Chronotopicity in Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet

Peter Morey
Terrible Beautification: Body Politics in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance

Minoli Salgado
Complexity and the Migrant Writer: Chaotics in Michael Ondaatje's Fiction

Benedict Maher
'Not Quite/Not White/Not Right': A Discussion of Bhabhian Mimicry in Relation to
Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens

Tobias A. Wachinger
The Pitfalls of Cultural Fusion: The Infertility of Hybridity

Tabish Khair
The Knowledge of Loss, the Loss of Knowledge: Jhumpa Lahiri, Shashi Deshpande, Mahasweta Devi

Review

Amrita Bhalla: Tabish Khair's Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels 

Notes on Contributors

EDITORS' PREFACE

Names tend to be misnomers. The title of this number of ANGLES - Unhinging Hinglish: The Languages and Politics of Fiction in English from the Indian Subcontinent - affords a tight fit on the field covered. Although three of the papers included here deal with literature by writers of Sri Lankan and British backgrounds, most of the papers address writing from India or by Indian English authors abroad. We have, however, decided not to draw too fine a line between diasporic writing in English by authors of Indian descent and those of, say, Sri Lankan or Pakistani descent.

While their exemplification falls outside the scope indicated by the title of this collection (employing for illustration the writing of the Sri Lankan- born writers Michael Ondaatje and Shyam Salvadurai), Dr Salgado and Benedict Maher's papers are included for their productive interpretational perspectives on South Asian diasporic writing and Bhabhian mimicry. The inclusion of a paper on Paul Scott highlights the imbrication of the colonial with the postcolonial. Writers like Scott do not fit the traditional paradigms of colonial discourse and hence provide a crucible for interrogations of both the colonial and the postcolonial.

The papers presented in this volume of ANGLES represent a selection of papers from the two-day conference, Fiction in English from the Indian Subcontinent and South Asian Diaspora, held on 6-7th of October, 2000 at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This conference was the second in a series of two, collectively organised and hosted by the English Departments at the University of Aarhus and the University of Copenhagen. The conferences provided a forum for elaboration and exchange on issues currently debated within the field of literatures in English from the Indian Subcontinent and South Asian diaspora. Bearing in mind the creative and critical input in the area in recent years, the conferences naturally attracted a host of papers from scholars all over the world. However, due to shortage of space we have unfortunately not been able to present all the conference papers in this publication.

The papers selected cover a wide range of issues: from the scrutiny of the location of the Indian English reader to the explosion of binaries by theories of complexity and chaotics; from the politics of narration to interrogations of hybridity and national allegories. The conference included two keynote addresses: one by Prof. Aijaz Ahmad (Late Landings and the Fictions of Amnesia) and the other by Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee (Literatures in English in a Multilingual Society), the latter of which we are delighted to publish in this volume.

As organisers of the two conferences and guest editors of this issue, we should like to thank the general editors and publishers of ANGLES for granting us the opportunity to present this selection of papers, thus bringing them to the attention of a wider audience. We should also like to thank the scholars who contributed to the conferences and to this issue. The shine of scholarship reflected in these pages comes from the minds of these exceptional contributors, while any dross of editorial oversights may be attributed to us.

Nanette Hale
Tabish Khair