Locating Indian Literature attempts to explore the category of ‘Indian literature’ in relation to emerging discourses of marginality, region, resistance and the role of translation in the making and unmaking of literary traditions. Interrogating theoretical positions that present Indian literature as an essentialist category, it emphasises the pluralistic and performative elements of Indian literatures. In its first section, E.V. Ramakrishnan articulates the project of ‘provincialising “Indian literature”’ and explores the dialogic interfaces between the abstractions of law and the evaluative role of criticism. It also interrogates the claims of history and the reticence of memories, and the dialectics between the dialect and the region. The second section presents readings of Malayalam literary texts that concretise the plurality of literary traditions. The third section argues for a new approach to the study of texts and traditions with translation forming the fulcrum of cultural and political mediations. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the volume will be of relevance to students and scholars in culture studies, social sciences and humanities.

E V Ramakrishnan is Professor Emeritus in the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. A bilingual writer who has published poetry and criticism in Malayalam and English, he is the recipient of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for literary criticism (1995). Among his other publications are Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry (1995), Terms of Seeing: New and Selected Poems (2006) and The Tree of Tongues: An Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1999).

Section 1: From Mainstream to Margins: Provincialising Indian Literature

1. From the Pedagogical to the Performative: ‘Locating Indian Literature’
2. Grounds of Comparison: Crisis in Comparative Indian Literature
3. The Ideology of Criticism and the Criticism of Ideology: Authority in the Practice of Literary Criticism
4. Ethics of Imagination: History, Memory and Literature
5. Self and Society: The Dalit Subject and the Discourse of Autobiography

 Section 2: Refiguring Region and Resistance: Some Contexts from Malayalam Literature

1. Literature, Society and Ideology: Perspectives on Malayalam Literature of the Twentieth Century
2. Nation and Imagination: The Novel as Resistance and Resistance to the Novel
3. The Novel and the Crisis of the Nation/Nation-State: A Reading of Some Malayalam Novels
4. Plotting Memory, Desire and Modernity: Kumaran Asan’s Poetics of Transformation
5. The Zoo Story: Colonialism, Patriarchy and Malayalam Poetic Discourse

Section 3: The Word in the World: Subtexts in Literary Translation

1. Translation as Resistance: The Role of Translation in the Making of Malayalam Literary Tradition
2. Inventing a Genre: The Novel as Translation
3. Translation as Literary Criticism: Text and Subtext in Literary Translation
4. Translation as Performance: Early Shakespeare Translations into Malayalam in the nineteenth century
5. Translating Indian Poetry into English: Changing Contexts of Poetry Translation

 Index