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Firmly situated within the analytics of the political economy of a north Indian province, Manuela Ciotti explores self-fashioning in pursuit of the modern amongst low-caste Chamars. More »
ISBN: 978 1 906165 01 7
Format: Paperback
Pages: 330
List price(s): 12.99 GBP 19.99 USD
Publication date: 22 May 2008
Offers an exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to the West. This work features essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and Berlin, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, music, art and literature, politics, race, and cosmopolitanism.
The essays assembled in Clearing a Space , written over the last fifteen years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The writer treats himself as a specimen for an exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to the West. Personal memoir gives readers a glance into a nation's history; his relationship to the West provides insight into India's national relationship to the West; and, his struggle to define 'Indianness' for himself becomes a paradigm of searching for Indian identity.With the same elegance and intelligence for which the author has become known, Chaudhuri writes anecdotally in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and Berlin, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, music, art and literature, politics, race, cosmopolitanism, urban landscapes, Hollywood and Bollywood, Anglophone India, internationalism, globalisation, the Indian English tradition that pre-dates Rushdie, post-colonialism and much more.
Acknowledgements. Introduction: On Clearing a Space. Part One: Towards a Poetics of the Indian Modern. Poles of Recovery. In the Waiting-Room of History: On Provincializing Europe. The Flute of Modernity: Tagore and the Middle Class. The East as a Career: On 'Strangeness' in Indian Writing. Argufying: on Amartya Sen and the Deferral of an Indian Modernity. This is Not Music: The Emergence of the Domain of 'Culture'. 'Huge Baggy Monster': Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel after Rushdie. Two Giant Brothers: Tagore's Revisionist 'Orient'. Travels in the Subculture of Modernity. Thoughts in a Temple: Hinduism in the Free Market. On the Nature of Indian Gothic: The Imagination of Ashis Nandy. 'Hollywood aur Bollywood'. The View from Malabar Hill. Stories of Domicile. Notes on the Novel after Globalization. Anti-Fusion. Part Two: Alternative Traditions, Alternative Readings. Arun Kolatkar and the Tradition of Loitering. Learning to Write: V. S. Naipaul, Vernacular Artist. A Bottle of Ink, a Pen and a Blotter: On R.K. Narayan. 'A Feather! A Very Feather upon the Face!': On Kipling. Returning to Earth: The Poetry of Jibanananda Das. Women in Love as Post-Human Essay. Champion of Hide and Seek: Raj Kamal Jha's Surrealism. Midnight at Marble Arch: On The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Beyond 'Confidence': Rushdie and the Creation Myth of Indian English Writing. Notes. Index.
Amit Chaudhuri was one of the London Observer's Twenty-One Writers for the Millennium. His criticism and fiction have appeared regularly in most of the major journals in the world, and he contributes these days mainly to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Granta. His criticism, essays, and journalism have also appeared in the New Republic, the Guardian, the Observer, the Spectator, and the New Yorker.He has written four novels. The first, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), won the first prize in the Society of Authors' Betty Trask Awards for a first novel and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. The second, Afternoon Raag (1993), won the Society of Authors' Encore Prize. Both books were shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. All three of his novels were published in a single omnibus volume, Freedom Song: Three Novels, by Knopf in America in 1999. This omnibus volume was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an Independent bestseller in America, and was one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember, 2000. His fourth novel, A New World, won the Sahitya Akademi award 2002, India's highest literary honour for a single book.