Banal Sublime of Place in Chandra’s “Dharma” and Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address

What is it about?

Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay testifies to the complexities of postcolonial Indian national history. The narrative originates in the trauma of Partition and manifests itself as a constitutive part of independent Indian identity. Alternately, Amit Chaudhuri, uses an uncanny aesthetic of the banal to unsettle various home-spaces of Calcutta in A Strange and Sublime Address. The entanglement of body and place in postcolonial Indian literature can therefore affect both a sublime surprise through sensory aesthetics, and a traumatic fissure through the repetition and return of the falling body of Indian national identity, underscoring its hybridity.

Featured Image