Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures

What is it about?

Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures builds a model for writing a literary history for South Asia in the 20th century. I focus on select representative novels from India and Sri Lanka where villages figure as metonyms for the nation-state and are often mapped out on the lines of a binary: as utopia or dystopia. By using the trope of the rural (and not the ubiquitous city), I follow the intersecting trajectories of select key writers and their texts to argue for a very particular definition of utopia in the South Asian context, a definition that ties up the literary traditions of the subcontinent with its religious histories (Hindu-dominant in India; and Sinhala-Buddhist-dominant in Sri Lanka). Recent fiction from South Asia has, however, deconstructed such a binary, impelled partly by the dissatisfactions of post-colonial nationalisms, and partly by the drive to represent in writing a positive vision of cosmopolitanism untethered to only the urban and metropolitan. Following, but also nuancing, Michel Foucault, I call this emergent body of writing heterotopic.

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Photo by Balaji Srinivasan on Unsplash

Photo by Balaji Srinivasan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The monograph was nominated for the Balakian Prize, the ICAS Book Prize, and the MLA First Book Prize (2013), and reviews of the work have appeared in preeminent journals/websites.