Frontiers of South Asian Culture

This book is the first of its kind to significantly concentrate on trans-nation, transnationalism and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Taking the absence of discussion on transnationalism in South Asia as a conspicuous lacuna as well as a point of intervention, this book pushes the boundaries of scholarship further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism. It opens itself up for many cross-border movements, formulating the trans-South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary, theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prisms of literature and cinema and traces the many modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation. <p>List of Contributors</p><p>Introduction</p><p>- Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya</p><p>Part I: Nation and Its Porous Frontiers</p><p>Chapter 1: The Politics of Spectatorship: Textual Traditions, Cinematograph and the Moral Dilemma of the Natives of Assam in British India (1900–1935)</p><p>-<i>Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan</i></p><p>Chapter 2: Then and Now: Nation and Transnational Identity in Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s <em>Joymati</em> (1935) and Jahnu Barua’s <em>Ajeyo</em> (2014)</p><p>- Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri</p><p>Chapter 3 Humour and Cinema: A Study of Language Politics in Assam</p><p>-<i>Simona Sarma and Sukrity Gogoi</i></p><p>Chapter 4: The Transnational City of Pondicherry: Elite Indian Identity Crisis and Cortes’ Receding French Image</p><p>-Andrea Rodrigues</p><p>Chapter 5: Cartography of Goa: Analysis of the Tangible Loci of Culture in the Sketches of Mario Miranda </p><p>- Amrita Biswas </p><p>Part II: Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-Nation: The Cinematic Imagi-Nation</p><p>Chapter 6: That Which Flows</p><p>- Moinak Biswas</p><p>Chapter 7: Ray at Large: Cinema In and Out of Literature in Region, Nation, Transnation</p><p>- <i>Kaushik Bhaumik</i></p><p>Chapter 8: Beckett and Avikunthak: Lineages of the Avant-Garde</p><p>-Brinda Bose</p><p>Chapter 9: The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971 and National Identity Formation in Tanvir Mokammel’s Films</p><p>- Fakrul Alam</p><p>Part III: Nation, Cultural Histories, Trans-Nation: The Literary Imagi-Nation</p><p>Chapter 10: Region, Nation, Border: Histories of Land and Water</p><p>- Supriya Chaudhuri</p><p>Chapter 11: Travelling On: Bengali and English Literatures of Transnational Worlding</p><p>- Arka Chattopadhyay</p><p>Chapter 12: Capitalist World-Ecology, Food Crisis, and Embodied Aesthetics in in Kamala Markandaya’s <em>Nectar in a Sieve</em></p><p>- Sourit Bhattacharya</p><p>Chapter 13: Modernity on Wheels: Reading Trains as Sites of Encounter and Disaster </p><p><em>- Anuparna Mukherjee</em></p><p>Chapter 14: "The lights cut out quickly": Nation, Nationalism and City-lit during 1980–1990s</p><p>- Dibyakusum Ray</p><p>Part IV: South Asian Transactions: Between Subcontinental Flow and Transnational Frictions</p><p>Chapter 15: Tagorean Cosmopolitanism and Ceylonic Indigenization Movement</p><p>- Saman M. Kariyakarawane and S. S. A. Senevirathne</p><p>Chapter 16: From Villain to Superhero: Reimaginings of Ravana in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Sri Lanka</p><p>- Kanchuka Dharmasiri</p><p>Index</p>