Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature (Hardbound-2023)

About the Book

The book is a study of literature in India in the context of recent discussions on modernity and its theoretical extensions such as the everyday and the social imaginary. It is a critique of the aesthetics and politics of modernity as they are embodied in Indian bhasha literature of the past two centuries. The primary objective of the book is to explore the trajectory of modernity after Indian literature encountered colonialism in the early 19th century. The intricate ways in which the bhasha imagination negotiated questions around concepts such as colonialism, aesthetics, the literary, the historical, and the social, have received focused attention in the analysis. Although the study acknowledges the European provenance of modernity as a historical idea, it also recognizes the inherent complexity of the concept and its equivocal connotations when used with reference to the polyphonic bhasha communities in India. Theoretical issues debated in relation to modernity such as its conceptual affinities with the western enlightenment project, its ideological investment in European aesthetics, and its implication for the evolution of what might be called the hermetic aesthetic are significant to this study. The work also examines the regional strengths of the social imaginary that render a conventionally conceived modernity inadequate in explaining the uniquely modern strengths of the Indian bhasha imagination.

About the Author
PP Raveendran, bilingual critic and currently the Vaikom Muhammed Basheer Chair Visiting Professor at the University of Calicut, was formerly Professor and Director, School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. He is the author of, among others, 'Texts Histories Geographies: Reading Indian Literature' (Orient BlackSwan, 2009), 'Kamala Das' (Sahitya Akademi, 2017), and the coedited volume, 'The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Malayalam Literature' (Oxford University Press, 2017). His work in Malayalam titled 'Adhunikatayude Pinnampuram' (The Backyard of Modernity, 2017) won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Literary Criticism for the year 2018.