Imaginary Homelands

South Asian writers win prizes. Ever since Salman Rushdie catapulted to international fame with the Booker Prize in 1981, writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have become the mainstay of not only literary prize cultures and the festival circuit but also U.S. university campuses. What has made South Asian literature so popular, especially when it deals with somber questions of anticolonial resistance, postcolonial nation-building, violence, and loss?This course will introduce students to twentieth and twenty-first century South Asian Literatures in English characterized by exciting stylistic innovations in magical realism, modernist language games, lyrical prose, and biting satire. By examining novels, short stories, poems, political writing, and films, we will ask, how has literature shaped both the promise and failure of the postcolonial nation-state? What might South Asian writing teach us about the global project of democratic world-making? Topics of discussion will include gender, caste, empire, globalization, migrancy, and environmentalism.

Select Texts:

M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj

 Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable

B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

Selections from Ismat Chugtai and Saadat Hassan Manto

 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

 Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes