This book redefines modern Indian literature from a cosmopolitan comparative perspective inclusive of literature in English from India and the diaspora, in native languages, and works by non-Indians. Its aesthetic approach of modern classics as well as popular, regional or minority texts treats Indianness as a world model in construction.

Didier Coste is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne. He has taught in Belgium, Australia, France, Spain, the United States, Canada, and Tunisia and was twice a fellow of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His book Narrative as Communication (1989) has become a Narrative Theory classic. The collection Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (Routledge 2022) co-edited with Christina Kkona and Nicoletta Pireddu was awarded the René Wellek Prize 2023 of the ACLA for the best edited collection in Comparative Literature and is prolonged by the Migrating Minds Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism. Coste's methodological sum A Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature: Against Origins and Destinations (Routledge 2023) laid the theoretical foundations for the present book. Coste is also a trilingual poet and novelist; Indian Poems, his latest collection, was published by the legendary Writers Workshop of Calcutta in 2019. As a literary translator, he was the recipient of a major French award in 1977.

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction:

Indialab and the Wild Kromosome

Part 1 - Sites of Literary Thought: Theorizing with "India"

Introduction:

Complexity as Cliché and as Field Extension

1 Indian Literature as a Comparative Exercise

2 World Literature: Home and/or the World?

3 Postcoloniality: Beyond and Besides

4 Rasa, Dhvani, Raga, Reading

Part 2 - Versatile (Mis)understandings

Introduction:

Marabar Caves Forever-a Mystique of Unknowing?

5 Firangi Visions

6 Divided Togetherness: Maitreyi and Mircea

7 Elusive, Liminal and Imagined Indiannesses

Part 3 - Transmission, Transformation, Transgression

Introduction:

Indian Untranslatables and Transmission

8 Transnation, Translation, Heteroglossia

9 Transgender and Transgenre

10 Form and Metamorphoses in Poetry

Part 4 - Fictional and Argumentative Aesthetics

Introduction:

Aesthetic Dimensions in Practice

11 Aesthetics of Disorder and Disaster

12 Aesthetics of Blood and Flesh

13 Participation and Embodiment in Arundhati Roy's Non-Fiction

Part 5 - Benefiting from Loss

Introduction:

Days of Future Past and Past Futures

14 Gods and Ghosts in Our Backyard

15 History into Fiction or Vice Versa

16 Comparative Exclusions

17 Unfulfilled Femininities

Postscript:

Vagrant Non-Endings: A Conversation with Dr. Gautam Chakrabarti

Work Cited

Index