Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
22 - The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Fantasy fiction seems to have little to do with the fantastic in a literary-theoretical sense – as defined by Todorov for instance – although it lives in constant tension with it. In general, there seems to be a divide between fantasy fiction and fantastic literary fiction (such as magic/al realism): while both inevitably seep into one another, they tend to be read, critiqued, and sold separately. One can argue that in the European context, this divide replicates the old eighteenth and nineteenth-century tension between “fancy” and “imagination,” as well as “low” and “high” cultures. In the non-European context, the matter gets even more convoluted, partly but not only because of matters of anglocentric discursive hegemony and the colonial gaze (as examined by John Rieder in the context of science fiction). For instance, as Khair has noted with reference to magic realism, no matter what the intentions of the authors and the interpretations of theorists, twentieth-century magic realism, from Carpentier to Rushdie, echoed a prevalent European mode of looking, ranging from ancient Roman histories to medieval and colonial accounts, in which non-Europe was often portrayed as a mix of the magical and the real, the fantastic and the mundane (Khair, Gothic).
Hence, before we can even get to grips with fantasy fiction in English from India, we will have to put on record the fact that a dominant mode of literary fiction – often called magic realism – employs similar thematic and stylistic modes as fantasy fiction. But while the latter is usually bunched together with popular genre fiction, even pulp at times, the former enjoys the prestige of being considered “high” “literary” fiction. After all, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children features elements from Eastern epics and myths, as do the fantasy novels of writers such as Amish Tripathi. Shashi Tharoor's critically acclaimed The Great Indian Novel (1989) is a rewriting of the Mahabharata, but so, for instance, is the “Krishna Coriolis” series by Ashok Banker, who is often also called the Dan Brown of Indian English pulp. All such acclaimed “literary” novels share a mix of the fantastic and the “real” that is also the province of usually much less acclaimed fantasy fiction.
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- A History of the Indian Novel in English , pp. 337 - 347Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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