POSTCOLONIAL INDIAN ENGLISH FICTION: Decentering the Nation

Re-visiting or re-contextualization of India by the Indian Writers in English offered exciting possibilities in fiction since 1980s. India is a huge construct in which each segment of the society feels it owns the totality in much the same way as the whole structure assimilates and celebrates plurality authenticating different marginalized sections and their narratives, the postcolonial way. Of late these voices from margins and their narratives have become integral to the Indian English Fiction scene.

Indian history offered a vast repertoire for Indian fiction writers in English as it happened in the case of African writers in English in the fifties and sixties. Similarly, they subverted English language to make it their own using it in a freewheeling, resonant manner. Salman Rushdie, I. Allan Sealy, Amitav Ghosh, Dina Mehta, Githa Hariharan, Arundhati Roy and a host of other novelists have created a fictional corpus providing space, voice and visibility to marginalized groups in terms of class, community, religion and gender. These resistance narratives could be compared with the best in Regional Literatures in India as well as African English classics.

The twenty-six articles in this anthology, as such, offer re-mappings of perspectives by the postcolonial Indian English Fictionists. These writers have made a habit of re-viewing history, resisting hegemonic perspectives, both imposed and home-grown, while projecting a spirit of liberation in the process. The issues the scholars in this anthology have dealt with are wide ranging, from reconstruction of minority histories, nationalism, communalism, dalit and women perspectives to freedom struggle revisited as reflected in an array of fascinating fictional works.

Contributors
A. S. Dasan
Mohan Ramanan
H. Kalpana
Jagdish Batra
Rajeshwar Mittapalli
P. Shailaja
M. Sridhar
M. Madhusudhana Rao
M. Prabhakar
Mujeebuddin Syed
M. Narendra
V. Nagarani
K. Purushotham
M. Rajagopalachary
K. Yadagiri
G. Sujatha
T. Viswanadha Rao
B. Krishnaiah
K. Damodar Rao
P. Mallikarjuna Rao
Tenneti Shyama Krishna
S. Latha
K.V. Ramana
J. Yellaiah
K.V. Ramana Chary
Jibu Mathew George
Pramod K. Nayar
T. Vinoda
Anuradha Roy
N. Anil Krishna

M. Rajagopalachary is a former Professor of English and presently an Emeritus Fellow at the Department of English, Kakatiya University, Warangal. Recipient of the State Award for Excellence in teaching, he published books on the fiction of Bernard Malamud and Manohar Malgonkar. He has produced a good deal of teaching material for distance education of different universities in the state. His areas of interest include Literary Criticism and Theory, Classics in Translation, and Fiction – American and Indian. He worked as Coordinator, Special Assistance Programme, DRS-I, sanctioned by the UGC. A scholar with a number of articles to his credit and supervision of scores of students for their research degrees, his contribution to English studies is substantial.
K. Damodar Rao is Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, Kakatiya University, Warangal. He published a critical work, The Novels of Aye Kwei Armah in 1993, one of the first critical volumes on the Ghanaian novelist. He jointly edited an anthology of critical essays, Postcolonial Theory and Literature (2003). He had been the Associate Editor of Kakatiya Journal of English Studies. He has published articles on African Fiction in English and Indian English Fiction in literary journals. He has translated extensively from Telugu into English with nine translated books, over hundred and fifty poems, and ten short stories in journals to his credit. He is also the recipient of a Sahitya Akademi prize for translation.