Аннотация:Contemporary Indian literature remains largely unknown in the United States, in spite of its considerable present-day energy and diversity. The few writers who have made an impression (R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth) are inevitably read in a kind of literary isolation: texts without context. —Salman Rushdie (“Damme,” 50) I begin a course on the Indian English-language novel with this quotation from Salman Rushdie. It raises the question, just what is the context of the Indian novel? If college syllabi posted on the Internet are any guide, Indian novels are being read today mostly in the context of global post-colonialism. In the classroom at least, in the West, the context for Rushdie and other Indian English-language writers seems to be the literatures of the Carribean, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, read under the aegis of Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. For all its obvious attractions,...
