The Writing of the Nation by Its Elite

This volume examines the idea of India as it emerges in the writing of its anglophone elite, post-2000. It book maps the explosion of English-language writing in India after the economic liberalisation and points to the nation's sense of its growing importance as a producer of culture.

Autorentext

MK Raghavendra is a writer on culture, literature, and politics, specializing in film, particularly its political side. After getting a master's degree in science and working in the financial sector for over two decades, he has become a full-time writer. He won the National Award, the Swarna Kamal for Best Film Critic in 1997, and received a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000.

He has authored several volumes of academic scholarship from international publishers Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema; Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film; The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation; and Locating World Cinema: Interpretations of Film as Culture. His recent publications also include Philosophical Issues in Indian Cinema: Approximate Terms and Concepts (Routledge, 2020) and a book on politics, The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity (2021). He has also published four volumes of popular film criticism.

His writing has been anthologized internationally, and he has written journalistic pieces on a variety of political and cultural issues for The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Firstpost, and Deccan Herald. He has contributed essays to national-level journals and periodicals including Economic and Political Weekly, Caravan, Frontline, The Book Review, and Biblio: A Review of Books. He is Founder-Editor of Phalanx, an online journal dedicated to debate.

Inhalt

Introduction

1. Politics and Literary Style: Arundhati Roy's Essays and Interviews (200114)

2. The Well-Born Englishman in India: William Dalrymple's White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th Century India (2002)

3. Unfinished Renunciation: Suketu Mehta's Maximum City (2004) and Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis (2012)

4. The Anglophone Hierarchy: Chetan Bhagat's Fiction and Non-Fiction (200414)

5. A Desirable Nation: Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (2005)

6. Taking Sides: Pankaj Mishra and Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and beyond (2006)

7. Nation as Exposition: Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (2007)

8. Past as Pastiche: Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2008)

9. Economics without Politics: Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century (2009)

10. The Other Half: Tarun J Tejpal's The Story of My Assassins (2009)

11. Dharma and Ideology: Gurcharan Das's The Difficulty of Being Good: The Subtle Art of Dharma (2009) and India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong India (2012)

12. Democracy and the Lesser Nation: Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen's An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (2013)

13. Cultural Capital: Jhumpa Lahiri and The Lowland (2013)

14. Rarefied Spaces: Barkha Dutt's This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines (2015)

15. An Unresisting People: Shashi Tharoor's An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (2016).

Afterword