Fiction as Window: Critiquing the Indian Literary Cultural Ethos since the 1980s

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Fiction in India has witnessed great changes since the 1980s. Written, critiqued, read, patronised and translated from the myriad subject positions that Indian culture is teeming with, fiction is a valuable site from which to critique the Indian literary cultural ethos. Fiction as Window, in its first part, uses the fiction produced across languages in India during this vibrant period to critically look at the issues that criticism, patronage and translation of fiction throws up. Cutting across languages, in its second part, the book analyses novels from various Indian languages and those written in or translated into English and Hindi in an attempt to see how these issues are fictionalised. The book cuts new ground with its blend of the literary and the aliterary and its analyses of awards foundations as sites of production of a cultural tradition.

V. Padma obtained her BA and MA in English literature from Stella Maris College, Chennai, India. She went on to do her doctoral research as a UGC Junior Research Fellow at the University of Madras, Chennai. Her areas of interest include Indian literature, mythology and criticism. She has published in all these areas in both national and international journals and books such as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Criticism, Littcrit and the CIEFL Bulletin.

She currently teaches at the Department of English, Stella Maris College, Chennai, India.

The introduction to India's Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (2004) edited by Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia begins with what can be read as an admirable summing up of the basic conditions of the literary scene in India since the 1980s:

Ever since Clifford Geertz transformed the drama of Balinese cock- fighting into a text, and new historicism made the complementary gesture of returning culture to the center of literary studies, students of literature, history and culture have shared a common vocabulary. key concepts and points of reference. This convergence has led to a reorientation in the study of literary history. The periodisation, assessment and attribution that characterized earlier literary historiography have been replaced by an effort to understand the place of literature in history, largely through an analysis of textual production of cultural meaning and the socio-political conditions of creating texts.

The field of literary studies in India since the 1980s has seen a decisive shift towards greater interdisciplinarity. Neither is literature any longer merely a connoisseur's delight nor is literary criticism any more barely an exercise in aesthetic interpretation. Subversive conceptual changes occurring in various spheres of Indian society and culture-economics, politics, the publishing industry etc.-have made it impossible for literature to remain an isolated creative activity. Literary criticism has perforce to encompass these changes and study their relation to the prevailing forms, themes and techniques in literature today using an integrated methodology. Even as creative literature is fast becoming a discursive space where pressing issues and concerns can be debated and discussed, literary criticism is compelled to turn ideological and is showing an increasing awareness, in a self-reflexive manner, of the paradigms and assumptions that inform its own activity.

This study aims at examining the literary cultural ethos in India during this stimulating and perhaps even turbulent period. It attempts to (a) identify recurrent leitmotifs and issues in the literary culture of the period, (b) analyse the implications of these leitmotifs for criticism and (c) examine the ways in which certain works of fiction (across languages) produced in this period engage with the issues identified.

**Contents and Sample Pages**