| This dissertation historicizes the contemporary emergence of a post-modern perspective in the post-colonial Indian novel in English. By reading novels from across the post-colonial period against the twists and turns of post-colonial modernity, "Before Rushdie" marks key ideological and formal shifts in the genre and challenges the prevalent notion that the post-modern, post-nationalist tilt of contemporary Indian English literature is a necessary product of "post-coloniality" or "cosmopolitanism" itself.; In the early post-colonial period, cosmopolitan writers like Kamala Markandaya and Nayantara Sahgal wrote realist novels centered around an engagement with the national question---despite sharp differences in their assessments of Indian modernity. But the representations of the nation, the cosmopolitan figure, and "the people" in the Indian English novel shifted drastically after the late 1960s and 1970s, as a developing-yet-crisis-ridden Indian modernity produced a new cosmopolitan subject with expanded opportunities in India and abroad and a cynical view about national liberation. The writings of Vikram Chandra, Arundhati Roy, Rushdie, the later Sahgal, and Shashi Tharoor---marked by a general dismissal of national liberation and a dazzling and eclectic style that eschews linear narratives---have met the ideological and formal requirements of the new cosmopolitanism by turning their artistic focus from society to subjectivity.; In short, the attempt is to redefine the post-colonial as a historical category, not an ontological one. The six novels discussed in detail are: Nayantara Sahgal's A Time to Be Happy (1958), The Day in Shadow (1971), and Rich Like Us (1985), Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day (1980), Midnight's Children , and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). These close readings are ensconced in theoretical questions about national liberation and nationalism, cosmopolitanism, subalternity, and the link between form and ideology. By tying its analysis of literary representations to the history of the Indian nation-state, further, this study suggests that a critical understanding of national liberation---of its deep, emancipatory impact and its limiting structures---is crucial to grasping both the textual content and social context of post-colonial literature. |
