English

Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

Arguing for an expansion of the subject of ecocriticism beyond climate change fiction, this essay examines strategies of representation of vernacular landscapes in contemporary Anglophone South Asian literature from Pakistan and Bangladesh. It suggests that recent writing by Uzma Aslam Khan, Tahmima Anam and Kamila Shamsie recuperates Pakistani landscape from its imbrication within colonial and post 9/11 spatial discourses, enabling a zoecentric re-ordering of regional history, complicating ideas of authenticity, and engaging with deep history in ways that furnish individual affective investments in landscape instead of reiterating the difference-flattening tendency of species-thinking. Finally, it attempts to articulate the geological turn precipitated by the notion of the Anthropocene with frameworks of postcolonial ecocriticism to adapt them to specific contexts in South Asia. © 2021 South Asian Literary Association.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

South Asian Review

Between Glaciers and Fossils: Landscape, Literature and the Anthropocene in Pakistan

This article focuses on the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, founded under the aegis of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in 1910 in Allahabad, and its active bid to establish what can be seen as the first archive of, and in, Hindi. While the Sammelan’s library functioned as a public-facing, community-serving space that housed and issued printed books, periodicals and newspapers in its reading room, the archive was imagined as an accumulation of all materials, print and manuscript, relating to Hindi, with access limited to critics and scholars. The article argues that infrastructure like the library and the archive critically contributed to the process of consolidation and legitimisation of the discourse on Hindi nationalism. It also traces the post-Independence assimilation of this library to the machinery of state bureaucracy, specifically to the institution of the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Act, 1956, and the central government’s Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Act, 1962, which declared the Sammelan ‘an institution of national importance’. How do these acts reflect tensions between the politicisation of Hindi as the national language and democratisation in post-colonial India? Here, the article shows that Hindi was not only being monetarily patronised in the 1950s and 1960s, but was also vigilantly monitored, drawing staunch resistance from the Sammelan, which saw itself as a moral alternative to the state. It traces the history of these legislative processes which ultimately resulted in a petition against the 1962 Act in the Supreme Court in 1973, which declared it invalid. © 2020, © 2020 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

The Hindi Library and the Making of an Archive: The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan from 1911 to 1973

In urbanizing India, walkability and outdoor physical activities are essential for a healthy lifestyle. Urban roads need to be assessed for walkability, and public parks need to be assessed as spaces for physical activities. Not many studies have looked at both the aspects together, and use of GIS is not prevalent. This study demonstrates use of GIS to examine various parameters of walkability and parks in the city of Greater Noida, India. GIS was found highly effective for collecting information before performing survey of selected sectors, post-field data visualization, and data integration to understand spatial variability of walkability and usefulness of individual parks. Only one of the sectors was identified as having better walkability as well as good quality of parks for physical activities. Many low-income sectors did not have parks. Walkability parameters had a spatial pattern within each sector, and urban and rural sectors differed in providing walkability. Copyright © 2020, IGI Global.

World University root node

International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research

Park Quality and Road Walkability in Greater Noida, India: A Case Study Demonstrating GIS for Assessing Barriers to Being Physically Active in Urban Areas

The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions discusses the genre of the novel and its dialogic and dialectical characteristics through an in-depth analysis of some classic English, Russian, American and Indian novels. A collection of lectures by the distinguished scholar of literature, A. N. Kaul, it analyses the exploration of personal voices and histories within a larger socio-political landscape in these works. Drawing examples from the works of Fielding, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, R.K. Narayan and others, who defined and redefined the territories of the novel, this book examines the articulation of the lived social, political and material realities of ordinary individuals in this genre. The lectures situate the novels within their cultural, socio-political, and historical contexts while focusing on their historical continuity and relevance. They further demonstrate how the domain of the novel brings together a multitude of voices while discussing conflicts of class, identity, nationalism, and historiography. The volume includes an insightful critical introduction by Sambudha Sen. It will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of literature, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, literary theory, creative writing, history, and sociology. It will be especially useful for readers interested in studying forms of fiction and the 18th, 19th, and 20th century novel. © 2021 Mythili Kaul.

The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions

The domain of the novel: Reflections on some historical definitions

Elora Halim Chowdhury & Esha Niyogi De, eds, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters. University of Washington Press, 2020, 304 pp., $35, ISBN: 9780295747859.

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

Book review: Elora Halim Chowdhury &amp; Esha Niyogi De, eds, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters

The article discusses Saritā, one of the best-selling Hindi magazines of the 1950s, and the part it played in the establishment of the Hindi 'middlebrow' reader. While a rich and vibrant journal culture in Hindi had existed since the nineteenth century, what distinguishes the post-1947 Hindi popular magazine is the emergence of the middle class as a burgeoning consumer. Saritā defied prescriptions of Nehruvian state building, as well as the right-wing discourses of nationalism and national language prevalent in the post-Independence space. In addition, it reconfigured biases towards gendered reading and consumption processes, as well as encouraging increased reader participation. This article argues for Saritā's role in the creation of a middlebrow reading space in the period immediately following Independence, since it not only packaged what was deemed wholesome and educational for the family as a unit, but also, most significantly, promoted readership in segments, with a focus on each individual's reading desires. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019Â.

Modern Asian Studies

Saritā and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader

This article explores the interplay between two seemingly contrary impulses in David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas: the mythopoeic and the postmodernist. Specifically, the article focuses on the novel’s postmodernist refiguration of the biblical myth of deliverance. Merging its biblical messianism with Nietzsche’s trope of Eternal Recurrence, the novel arrives at the figure of the eternally recurrent messiah. This article argues that the novel’s enigmatic leitmotif—the comet birthmark—serves as a symbol not only for Cloud Atlas’s recurrent messiah, but also for its interpretation of the biblical messiah as iterable, in the poststructuralist sense. The article concludes by identifying the novel’s postmodernist mythopoeia as an instance of metamodernism.

Fulltext

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings

The Iterable Messiah: Postmodernist Mythopoeia in Cloud Atlas

The essay focuses on the uncharacteristically good production quality of the contemporary novels of master crime writer Surender Mohan Pathak by the publishing house Raja Pocket Books since 2009. Placing his novels against the contemporary pulp fiction from the small presses, the essay argues the birth of a pulp novel as an artefact for consumption by the middle classes and the implications it has on the way crime fiction is articulated in Hindi literary and production histories. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories

From the colloquial to the ‘literary’: Hindi pulp’s journey from the streets to the bookshelves

This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions. Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism. Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology, graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to the informed general reader. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

Indian genre fiction: Pasts and future histories

The manifesto proposed new approaches to understanding the translations industry and the distribution and reception of genres, along with alternative ways of conceptualising genre themes and motifs, while reconstructing the historical matrix to analyse differences and similarities between genres. Rieder argues that genre fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and horror, describes an entirely new phenomenon, which the ‘genre as narrative form’ usage/category does not capture. One such expectational outcome in the intersection of the historical and the formal is offered by the ubiquitous use of myth in genre fictionfrom India. Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, as a pioneer of genre fiction in India, was a staunch critic of nationalism, even though he was arguably one of the foremost social reformers of the colonial period. Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories is the one of the first academic engagements on a field that deserves deeper investigation and, in doing so, brings many languages, genres, and perspectives together. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.