SUBCONTINENTAL HISTORIES: literary reflections on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Subcontinental Histories is an exploration of the historical events of the last two centuries, interpreted here through literary texts – fiction, poetry and drama – works which move away from the immediacy of history to analyse it in retrospect. They represent the individual voices, the restlessness and discontent as well as the fissures in the idea of a nation. Documents such as letters, speeches and newspaper articles, similarly offer a different view of reality when freed from the immediacy of the expression.
The subcontinent has a shared past both of the colonial experience and the resistance movements it generated, and of the many efforts to imagine and construct a nation. Beginning with India’s past and the many causalities of ideas and ideologies on the way to freedom, the present work goes on to look at the aftermath of divisive nationalisms leading to the partition of the country, before moving to the many manifestations of terror in India and its neighbouring countries, the race for nuclear weapons and environmental concerns.
Several writers and thinkers of this period have been discussed – Jotiba Phule, Henry Derozio, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra, Mahatma Gandhi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Kazi Nasrul Islam, Pash, Kamila Shamsie, Girish Karnad, Shahid Nadeem, Badal Sircar, Intizar Husain, Saadat Hasan Manto, Attia Hosain, Allan Sealy, Nadeem Aslam, Githa Hariharan, Mumtaz Shahnawaz – to enable a dialogue between the past and the present.
This work opens up the past to a rethinking and reassessment of events that have moulded our times and need to be interrogated.