| This dissertation focuses on some literary and cultural arenas where the contesting definitions of the national-political corpus split along the religious-secular divide find form within the Indian sub-continent. Within the historical framework of post-independence India, I trace the mobilization, closures and margins of narratives of community and belonging. I examine texts which carry the legacy of the emergence of the two nation-states in 1947. This was a moment fraught with the horrific resonance of celebratory nationalisms which were manifest in the violence of Partition riots. The dissertation analyzes the traces of the violent histories of partition and post-partition communal riots in fictional narratives and mythological/religious soap operas broadcast on Indian national television in the eighties. I ask questions about the ways in which these fictions articulate, accommodate and stage the explicit and implicit violences that they narrate. I explore the narrational strategies of coping adopted by literary texts writing about this violence. In doing so, what versions and visions of nationhood do they reverse or revise?; After an introductory chapter which lays out the framework for a discussion of religion and nationalism, chapter two explores the gendered frame of the nationalist agenda through a discussion of the fraught intersections between rape, violence, nation-ness and narrative. Chapters three and four on Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie focus on the self-conscious tensions between history and fiction which their works enact, and the spatial formations that entrench lived identities. I also examine the role of silences that are staged within their narratives and the possibilities they circumscribe. I show how these silences enunciate borders that delimit the kernel of communal identity. In the context of prevalent socio-political networks, in Chapter five, analyzes the role of mass media in India and its collusion in the demarcation of the "other." I examine how the TV serialization of the Mahabharata reinforces the silencing of Other(-ed) histories circumscribed by religion, gender and caste. |
