Homage from the Universitat de Barcelona

Homage to Geoff Davis from the Universitat de Barcelona

Midnight's Children Come of Age. Some Indian Novels of the Past Decade

The ending of the British Raj and the emergence of an Independent India in 1947 raised some debate as to the future of the English language and the future of Indian literature writtten in English competing, as it would be, with so many other rich indigenous languages. Would the distinguished Indian writers writing in the 1950s and 60s be the last to do so in English? This article discusses the novels of six Indian writers born in the post-colonial decade of the 1950s whose first work appears in the 1980s: Rohinton Mistry, Boman Desai, I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Taroor, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth, all of whom have contributed to the maintenance of the Indian novel in English. There are, however, aspects of Indian life which do seem better reflected in other Indian languages which call for more translation in order to reach a wider, non-Indian readership

Han Suyin’s Cold War fictions: Life-writing, intimacy, and decolonization

This article asks how the distinctive use of life-writing and focus on inter-ethnic intimacy in Han Suyin’s popular middlebrow romance fictions A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) and The Mountain is Young (1958) constitute a critique of decolonization and align with her radical politics as a spokesperson for Bandung-era non-alignment. The author suggests that in these two major fictions of the Cold War era Han reprises what Christina Klein identifies as a familiar “Cold War Orientalist” trope of inter-ethnic love but repurposes it so that the genre’s characteristic objectifying treatment of (largely passive) Asian women desired by western men is reversed. In the process Han’s tactical re-imagining of inter-ethnic romance provides a vehicle for political satire, feminist self-realization, and figuring of new postcolonial/decolonial identities and subject positions