Postcolonial Indian Fiction in English and Masculinity

During the post-Independence period Indian masculinity has undergone a major transformation. But this new psychological and social phenomenon has not been adequately analysed or intellectually accounted for. Postcolonial Indian discourses tend to bypass masculinity in spite of its enormous importance. Literary criticism too has been no exception. Informed studies of Indian masculinity within the field of literature have been near totally absent despite masculinity occupying the centre stage in a large number of fictional works. This book makes an honest attempt to fill the lacuna to an extent by studying, from multiple perspectives, the depiction of Indian masculinity in Indian fiction in English of the postcolonial period. Most of the novels studied in this volume faithfully reflect the new social mores, everyday ideology and popular psychology of the urban Indian middleclass and boldly address the unconventional issue of masculinity and its changing contours.

The writers considered here include G.V. Desani, Shashi Deshpande, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Nagarkar, Shobha Dé, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Mulk Raj Anand and some of the themes that have been explored are: queer autofiction, marriage, sexual violence, gender-power hierarchy, discontents of masculinity, sexual politics, masculinity vs. femininity, inferiority and cultural determinism. It is hoped that this book will significantly contribute to the discussion in India of masculinity as an academic subject and in the process prove useful to literary scholars as well as social scientists.