Abstract
In what ways does the short story inform or disrupt our understanding of South-Asian literary history? In this chapter, I examine the South-Asian short story as a form of ‘minority literature’, in Deleuze and Guattari’s celebrated formulation, a genre that effects a de-territorialization of the terrain of prose fiction, which has been traditionally dominated by the novel (Deleuze and Guattari 1986).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Recent critical work has focused on the postcolonial short story, a relatively neglected genre within postcolonial studies; see, for example, Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell’s recent collection, The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays (Palgrave, 2012). Shital Pravinchandra in particular explores the role of this form as a way of reflecting on the ‘place of non-Anglophone literatures in the field of postcolonial studies’ (Pravinchandra 2014, p. 425). She identifies the presence of a ‘master text’ in Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), namely vernacular short fiction by Rabindranath Tagore and Phanishwarnath Renu. Her work opens up a productive space for thinking about the dialogue between the South-Asian short story in the vernacular and Indian Anglophone literature. In critical terms, this dialogue can yield a more ‘comparative’ and ‘inter-lingual’ intertextual reading than one based on the usual model of ‘writing back’ to the colonial literary canon.
- 2.
As Ana Miller notes, ‘anthologies have a potentially valuable role to play in expanding the circulation and awareness of regional literatures that struggle to travel’ (Miller 2015, p. 117).
- 3.
Here I draw on Gyanendra Pandey’s discussions of the subaltern citizen as a disenfranchised member of a national population who seeks political and historical agency. ‘Citizen’ acts as a qualifier of the subaltern, indicating the ‘political quality of all subalternity’ (Pandey 2008, p. 277). This is an obvious shift from the idea of the subaltern as a ‘Third World peasant’ at the centre of the Subaltern Studies project, to the idea of a minority citizen (lower-caste, tribal, immigrant) who is nevertheless part of what Partha Chatterjee calls ‘political society’, a wider and more inclusive group than ‘civil society’ (which he mainly conceives of in bourgeois terms). This citizen is barely a rights-bearing subject, and yet works to brings about his/her own political agency (Chatterjee 2004).
- 4.
Asked about his lack of interest in the diasporic theme, Mueenuddin replied that ‘I am not really an immigrant. My mother is American and father is Pakistani. I have traveled between the cultures, but I have never been an immigrant’ (Jahangir 2010).
Works Cited
Advani, R. (2009). Introduction: Civility, civilization, and chivas regal. In R. Advani (Ed.), Written for ever: The best of Civil Lines (pp. xiii–xxv). New Delhi: Penguin/Viking.
Advani, R., Hutnik, I., Kesavan, M., & Kumar, D. (1994). Introduction. Civil Lines: New Writing from India, 1, 1–4.
Awadalla, M., & March-Russell, P. (2012). The postcolonial short story: Contemporary essays. London: Palgrave.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Caruth, C. (2007). From trauma and experience. In M. Rossington, & A. Whitehead (Eds.), Theories of memory: A reader (pp. 199–205). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). What is a minor literature? In G. Deleuze, & F. Guattari (Eds.), Kafka: Toward a minor literature (Dana Polan with a foreword by Réda Bensmaïa, Trans., pp. 16–27), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Devi, M. (1993). Shishu (‘Children’) (P. Bhattacharya, Trans.). In S. Tharu & K. Lalita (Eds.), Women writing in India: 600 BC to the present. Vol. II: The twentieth century (pp. 236–251). Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Devi, M. (1998). Shishu (‘Little ones’). In Bitter soil (I. Chanda, Trans., pp. 1–21). Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Dhareshwar, V. (1993). Caste and the secular self. Journal of Arts and Ideas, 25–26, 115–126.
Ghosh, A. (1994). The Indian story. Civil Lines: New Writing from India, 1, 35–50.
Hanson, C. (1989). Introduction. In C. Hanson (Ed.), Re-reading the short story (pp. 1–27). London: Macmillan.
Hunter, A. (2007). The Cambridge introduction to the short story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jahangir, J. (2010, February 23). Interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin. Beyond the margins [Online]. Available from http://beyondthemargins.com/2010/02/interview-with-daniyal-mueenuddin/. Accessed 15 Feb 2015.
Koshy, S. (2011). Minority cosmopolitanism. PMLA, 126(3), 592–609.
Lahiri, J. (2000). Interpreter of maladies: Stories. London: Flamingo.
Lazarus, N. (2011). The postcolonial unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
March-Russell, P. (2009). The short story: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Miller, A. (2015). Circulating the peripheries: Small publishers, short story collections and Madinah: City stories from the Middle East. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50(2), 115–132.
Mistry, R. (1991). Tales from Firozsha Baag. London: Faber.
Mueenuddin, D. (2009). In other rooms, other wonders. London: Bloomsbury.
Pandey, G. (2008). Introduction: Subaltern citizens and their histories. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 10(3), 271–284.
Poe, E. A. (1842/1976). Review of Twice-told tales. In C. E. May (Ed.), Short story theories (pp. 45–51). Athens: Ohio University Press.
Pravinchandra, S. (2014). Not just prose: The Calcutta chromosome, the South Asian short story and the limitations of postcolonial studies. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16(3), 424–444.
Procter, J. (2011). ‘To see oursels as others see us!’: Seepersad Naipaul, modernity and the rise of the Trinidadian short story. In L. Evans, M. McWatt, & E. Smith (Eds.), The Caribbean short story (pp. 163–176). Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.
Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary homelands. London: Granta.
Rushdie, S. (1994). East, west. London: Vintage.
Tharu, S., & Lalita, K. (1993). The twentieth century: Women writing the nation. In S. Tharu, & K. Lalita (Eds.), Women writing in India: 600 BC to the present. Vol. II: The twentieth century (pp. 43–116). Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Trussler, M. (2002). On the short story and the short-story cycle. Contemporary Literature, 43(3, Autumn), 598–605.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Srivastava, N. (2016). Minor Literature and the South-Asian Short Story. In: Tickell, A. (eds) South-Asian Fiction in English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-40353-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40354-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)