CULTURE, TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY: Travel, Fiction, Autobiography

Culture, Transformation and Identity captures the excitement of the nineteen creative and exploratory essays concerning journeys, physical and psychological, in search of knowledge and spiritual peace, escape from oneself or one’s past, a new beginning or a search for roots and identity, adventure and conquest, business or trade. Opening out multidimensional movement of imagination and through cross-cultural dialogue some eminent writers here deal with constructs of identity and nation, community and belonging and open up confined spaces. The relationship of travel to history and knowledge constructs in the Vedic texts, the transformation brought about by the spread of Buddhism, the precolonial and postcolonial points of view of representation of China, the intellectual shifts in life of Gandhi, Iqbal’s and Naipaul’s dilemma of belonging and non-belonging, Hemingway’s love for Spain and bullfighting, Lessing’s view’s about home, memory and identity, Imtiaz Dharkar’s multicultural experiences of Pakistan, India and England, Gilbert’s imbibing of life’s precepts from India and Indonesia and many more cultural transformations and identity crisis are dealt with by renowned creative writers and critics. Traversing a wide range from religion to politics, from personal to the national, from the different markers of culture as cuisine to the different markers of power as trade and empathy these essays express the immense possibilities of human mind as well as interpersonal strategies at work.