Full Description
This volume explores the instrumental role played by memory in our daily and collective narratives and the manifold ways in which it can destabilize those prevailing in India. It explores manifestations of memory and postmemory through written narratives, within India's social, political, and cultural memoryscape. Drawing on archival research, oral history collection, and textual and critical analysis, the book endeavours to reconstruct Indian experiences in all their richness and diversity, while challenging dominant paradigms and expanding the boundaries of collective memory.
An important contribution, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of history, memory studies, partition studies, sociology, cultural studies, English literature, decolonization, and South Asian studies.
Contents
List of figures vii
List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: Locating Literary and Cultural Registers of Memory,
Identity, and Resistance in India 1
AMAL P MATHEWS AND ELWIN SUSAN JOHN
PART I
Recall: Shadowed and Mapped Memories 19
1 'Cryptopolitics': Memory, Landscape, Identity 21
SAHANA MUKHERJEE
2 The Rebels' Silhouette(s): Reception and Resistance in South Asia 31
RHITAMA BASAK
3 Of Translocal Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in New Town, West Bengal 44
DEBARUN SARKAR
4 Paradesi's Jewish Soul: A Tapestry of Memories Woven in Stone and Spirit 57
LAKSHMIPRIYA P SANTHOSH
PART II
Retell: Reconfigured and Reclaimed Memories 75
5 Memory as Praxis: Reconfigurations of the Home in Select Anglophone Texts from Northeast India 77
SAMRITA SINHA
6 Archives, Indigeneity, and Decolonization in Indian Children's Picture Books 90
SUDEBI GIRI AND BINAY SAWAIYAN
7 Bene Appétit: Consuming Food and Remembering Jewish Identity in the Selected Works of Esther David 109
ANANDHA LEKSHMI NAIR
8 Mythopoeic Menus from the Spice Coast: Food, Memory, and Community in Kerala 124
MEENU JOSE
Index 137
