Madness and Discontent:: The Realist Imaginary in South Asian Literature

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Ulka Anjaria, PhD | 20

Madness and Discontent: The Realist Imaginary in


South Asian Literature

Ulka Anjaria, PhD

In 1936, at the All-India Progressive Writers’ Conference in Lucknow,


Urdu-Hindi writer Premchand argued for a turn to realism. “In earlier
times we might well have been impressed by fairy tales, ghost stories
and accounts of star-crossed lovers but those have little interest for us
anymore”, he declared. “In order to produce an impression in literature
it is necessary for it to be a mirror on life’s truths [jeevan ki sachaiyon
ka darpan]” (Premchand 75). Here, Premchand connects realism with
political resistance, anti-colonial nationalism and the continuing fight
for social justice.

However, what does it really mean for literature to be “a mirror on life’s


truths”? What assumptions about realism are embedded in that phrase?
Is realism merely mimesis or an accurate representation of reality? Or
might realism have an epistemic project as well – one which asks us to
reorder our very conventions of knowledge and meaning-making?

This paper argues that understanding the role of literature in political


resistance movements requires a complex theory of what literary
realism is and how it works. Even Premchand, who talked about the
importance of including marginalized characters in his novels and
short stories (Dalits, prostitutes and so on), was acutely aware of how
his realism was conditioned by the limitations his poor and subaltern
characters had to full subjecthood. Thus, his 1936 Hindi novel Godaan is
split into two parts which never quite reconcile: one for the impoverished
rural characters whose lives get worse and worse and one for the urban
characters living lives of relative luxury. Although the characters meet,
they remain – until the very end – representatives of two distinct worlds.
A novel with such a split structure asks us to complicate our idea of
realism as straightforward, unvarnished representation. We learn as
much from the gaps in representation as from the details about the rural
and urban worlds that Premchand presents to us. We see this in a range
of realisms in modern South Asia. Fakir Mohan Senapati published his
Odia novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) in 1899 and
the work will surprise many contemporary readers with its nuanced
consideration of the relationship between power and knowledge in an
era long before Foucault. Consider this passage, which describes the
21 | THAAP Journal 2015: Culture, Art & Architecture of the Marginalized & the Poor

novel’s protagonist, Mangaraj, a wily Brahmin landowner who fleeces


his tenant farmers with high rents and generally corrupt behavior:

Just behind Mangaraj’s house, there was a large orchard opening onto
a big pond, with coconut trees planted all around its edge and banana,
jack-fruit, mango and ou trees further behind. A fence of young bamboo
surrounded the orchard like a fortress wall. Few people are as selfless
and altruistic as Mangaraj: even the market in Gobindapur owed its
existence and prosperity to him. Without his orchard’s bounty of fruits
and vegetables – coconuts, bananas, brinjals, pumpkins, green chilies and
so on – the market would have presented a much sorrier sight. Nor was
anyone allowed to put his vegetables up for sale until the produce from
the zamindar’s orchard had all been sold. That was of course as it should
be. Would it have been fair to sell inferior goods before high-quality
produce? Besides, the market belonged to the zamindar, and the gifts of
pumpkins, brinjals and bananas he received on festive occasions, such as
the Oriya New Year, all went straight to the market (Senapati 42).

The narrator’s critique of Mangaraj is discernible under the thin veneer of an


obsequious narrator, who in telling us how great and generous Mangaraj
is, ends up conveying precisely the opposite. Thus, we learn that he dumps
his own produce on the market ensuring that there is no competition and
even goes so far as to sell fruit he receives as gifts, on the market for a
profit. The narrator’s seeming realism: his description of the marketplace
using myriad details and his sly use of rhetorical questions – “Would it
have been fair to sell inferior goods before high-quality produce?” – in
fact here become clever ruses for social critique. The narrative itself is thus
mobilized as a source of political power, which contests the power of the
landowner it describes by means of language itself. Here is another way
realism can be a form of resistance, though not in a simplistic or naïve way
as merely representing injustice or the hardships faced by its characters.

In what follows, I take a cue from Premchand’s and Senapati’s complex


realist writings to suggest that realism is not a straightforward mode, even
when marshalled in the service of political protest. Looking at two authors
who push realism to its limits, Saadat Hasan Manto and Mohammed
Hanif, I argue that their works use madness as a way of representing social
dysfunction and of imagining a political futurity that might transcend it. In
doing so, they not only critique the histories of Partition and contemporary
Karachi, respectively, as “mad” but delineate an epistemic space from
which to imagine, if not alternative worlds, then at least momentary spaces
outside madness – spaces of the everyday, of intimacy and tenderness – that
Ulka Anjaria, PhD | 22

pierce through the veil of madness to expose the kernel of truth that lies
within it. These works, thus, offer a new way of imagining political dissent
in literature outside the limited category of “social realism”. Together with
Senapati and Premchand, these texts tell the story of a rich South Asian
literature of resistance, literature that is a political democratic project to
represent the struggles of the poor and the disenfranchised – yet one that is
also powerfully aware of representation as a perennially incomplete project.

Manto’s Madness

Manto’s account of the madness of Partition in Toba Tek Singh is well-


known and well-studied and of course, by setting his story of Partition
in an actual psychiatric asylum, Manto makes literal the madness with
which he characterizes the event in other stories as well. In Thanda Gosht
for instance, Manto describes an encounter between Ishwar Singh and
Kalwant Kaur -- two lovers enjoying a tryst in the middle of the Partition
riots while earning some money from the looting taking place around
them. The commodified erotic energy that marks their relationship is
diminished one night as Ishwar seems preoccupied and Kalwant pushes
him for the truth of what she suspects is his infidelity. Only by piercing him
with his kirpan (ceremonial sword or dagger) does Kalwant elicit Ishwar’s
confession – but it is not what she expected. Ishwar describes how he had
kidnapped a beautiful Muslim girl and raped her. But soon afterwards, he
tells Kalwant, he discovered that “woh… woh mari hui thi… lash thi… bilkul
thanda gosht [she… she was dead… she was a corpse… just cold flesh]”.
However, Manto highlights that hers is not the only cold flesh. The last
line of the story reads, “Kalwant Kaur ne apna haath Ishwar Singh ke haath
par rakha jo barf se bhi zyaada thanda tha”. Through the trope of “thanda
gosht”, the story connects the dead flesh of the murdered and raped girl
with that of the rapist, suggesting that even though he is officially alive, his
life has become a sort of living death, which contests the euphoria of the
couple’s sexual relations and the pleasure and wealth they have gained
through the riots. Although the tragedy might seem to be that the girl was
raped and/or dead, that of course is not the point of the story: it is that in a
world of such brutality, life itself is a form of death.

We see a similar theme in Khol Do, another Manto story about the sexual
violence of Partition. The kernel of this story involves an incident that is
not narrated in the story but left implicit – which is the gang rape of Sakina,
a young abducted woman, not by her abductors but by her rescuers. We
read about her rescue and then the narrator details her father’s frantic
23 | THAAP Journal 2015: Culture, Art & Architecture of the Marginalized & the Poor

search for her and only when father and daughter are reunited do we
begin to ascertain what happened to her in the intervening time. In the
hospital bed, where she lies semi-conscious, the doctor tells the nurse to
open a window. Upon hearing that command, “Sakina ke murda jism mein
zubish hui. Bejaan haathon se usne izaarband khola aur shalwar neeche sarkaa
di”. The story is entitled Khol Do to emphasize how these two seemingly
innocent words – open it – become the site not only of the crime, to the
girl who is repeatedly asked to open her shalwar, but also of the memory
of the crime, where we and the doctor understand what happened to her
only when we see her reaction to those words. Again, the violence here
is not only in the gang rape but in the way words themselves carry the
story of unspeakable violence. The violence is not an isolated incident
but has pervaded language itself.

“A Magic Race”

Can Manto’s stories be called realist? Critics who focus on the horrors of
Partition violence read these stories as a sort of record or testimony of the
brutal realities of the time – and in the examples I have discussed here,
that is at least partly the case. However, the core of both these stories lies
in something else, which is the transposition of the individual crime into
the realm of representation itself. Both stories rely on a double-meaning
of their titular phrases – and that word play is precisely the point (this is
why it is so disheartening to see the translation of Khol Do in the English
collection Mottled Dawn titled “The Return”; the point conveyed by the
title is completely lost). In both cases, language itself becomes the site of
violence. Among other things, this raises the question of the author’s role
in political critique. If words bear the trace or taint of violence, then how
can language ever be used in the service of political critique?

Manto addresses this question through a realism that is not merely a


transparent conveyer of meaning but where words have a materiality of
their own. While the actual rape is not represented in the narrative of Khol
Do, the words are powerful enough that they conjure the reality of the act
for Sakina – who automatically repeats the action of opening her shalwar
upon hearing them – and eventually, for the readers, who now interpret
those heretofore innocent words as carrying in them unspeakable violence.
This is, I suggest, as realist as the bifurcated form of Premchand’s Godaan
or the loquacious, sly narration of Chha Mana Atha Guntha – however, it is
realism not merely as a referential project but as an epistemic one as well.

Ulka Anjaria, PhD | 24

This is an unconventional interpretation of realism because it complicates


conventional timelines of literary history drawn from the Anglo-American
model (but often transposed to South Asia) to suggest that realism was
a phase -- a temporary stopping-point on the road to modernism. In this
narrative, realism belongs to a prior age when authors naively believed in
the referentiality of language; by contrast, modernism belongs to the 20th
century for its aesthetic innovations and meta-fictional qualities. Modernist
authors are seen to question the assumptions embedded in realism: of
representational mimesis, the one-to-one correspondence between word and
text and the belief that writing can do political work. A writer like Salman
Rushdie is a case in point; all his novels express a certain rush of freedom
that comes from a break from realism. In his 1995 novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh,
Rushdie specifically decries the earnest mimeticism of the earlier generation
of social realists through the character of Aurora Zogoiby, the protagonist’s
artist-mother, who struggles, in the decades following Independence,
between painting “imaginary worlds” on one hand and deploying “a clear-
sighted naturalism that would help India describe herself to herself” (173) on
the other. Aurora is a fictionalized colleague of “Premchand and Sadat [sic]
Hasan Manto and Mulk Raj Anand and Ismat Chughtai, committed realists
all” – but she moves, Rushdie tells us, beyond their limitations because of
“her instinctive dislike of the purely mimetic” and begins to represent in
art “not only… her dreams but… the dream-like wonder of the waking
world. ‘We are not a nation of “averages”’”, she begins to understand, “‘but
a magic race’”. As her lover Vasco Miranda affirms, “Will you spend your
life painting boot-polish boys and air-hostesses and two acres of land? Is it
to be all coolies and tractor-drivers and Nargis-y hydroelectric projects from
now on?... Forget those damn fool realists! The real is always hidden – isn’t
it? – inside a miraculously burning bush! Life is fantastic!” (174).

Here, Rushdie ventriloquizes Vasco Miranda to offer his own critique
of realism, which he reduces to the representation of “boot-polish
boys”, “coolies” and “hydroelectric projects” – referring both to the
pre-Independence writings of authors such as Mulk Raj Anand and
to early post-Independence films such as those of Raj Kapoor and the
iconic Mother India. Even within this somewhat polemical passage
where Rushdie celebrates the fantastic over a putatively staid political
realism, he remains significantly more ambivalent about Manto, whom
he cannot place easily in either category:

But even in [these writers’] work there were elements of the fabulous,
for example in Toba Tek Singh, Manto’s great story of the partition of the
sub-continent’s lunatics at the time of the larger Partition. One of the
25 | THAAP Journal 2015: Culture, Art & Architecture of the Marginalized & the Poor

crazies, formerly a prosperous landlord, was caught in a no-man’s land


of the soul, unable to say whether his Punjabi home town lay in India
or Pakistan, and in his madness, which was also the madness of the
time, he retreated into a kind of celestial gibberish, with which Aurora
Zogoiby fell in love. Her painting of the tragic final scene of Manto’s
story, in which the hapless loony is stranded between two stretches of
barbed wire, behind which lie India and Pakistan, is perhaps her finest
work of the period, and his piteous gibberish, which represents not
only his personal communications breakdown but our own, forms the
picture’s long and wonderful title: Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay
dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain” (Rushdie 173-4).

Rushdie wants to redeem Manto from the scourge of realism here but
formally, this description functions as a bulge or distention in what is
otherwise a straightforward polemic celebrating fantasy over realism. On
one hand, Rushdie wants to lump Manto with Premchand, Anand and
Chughtai but at the same time he wants to distinguish Toba Tek Singh as
distinct from the “committed realists” because of its innovativeness. He
wants to put Manto in a different – I will say higher – category because
of his exploration of the psychological realms of madness, which for
Rushdie bespeaks a more profound engagement with the problem of the
real. Yet, at the same time, in his passage he asserts the realism of the
story twice: when he states that Toba Tek Singh’s madness “was also the
madness of the time” and that the breakdown in his speech “represents
not only his personal communications breakdown but our own”.

Rushdie’s simultaneous embrace and disavowal of realism is, I argue,


a central, though repressed, aspect of his work as a whole. His jubilant
and self-reflexive modernist style wants to distinguish itself from
realism even as it wants to lay claim to a certain referentiality – which
he believes is more profound than the simplistic material world of the
realist imagination. However, as the examples of Premchand, Senapati
and Manto show, the realist imaginary has never been simplistic but
has always included a consideration of the way we know alongside
actually conveying knowledge. Once this kind of self-consciousness
is folded into our understanding of realism, the political stakes of the
term change dramatically.
Ulka Anjaria, PhD | 26

“His Own Family Put Him There”

Mohammed Hanif’s 2011 novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti takes up this
question of realism, madness and social protest that Rushdie leaves open
and unresolved in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Contesting the linear narrative
by which realism must necessarily be transcended by modernism, Hanif
brings a deadpan, dark humor to his representation of Alice Bhatti, a
Replacement Junior Nurse at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Karachi. The
novel’s mode is a gritty realism – where violence is represented without
hysterics and without the usual invocation of pity or sympathy, even
when describing the most brutal scenes of torture, violence and death.
Characterization is also, for the most part, flat – we do not get to know
the characters in all their dimensions and therefore, we do not particularly
sympathize with them in the way we might in conventional realism. Rather,
characterization is exteriorized – so the body becomes a key indicator of
character, rather than interiority or the psyche. Take the following passage:

Alice Bhatti first sits on the edge of the chair, feels dizzy, then fears
that the chair might slip from under her and she will end up sprawled
on the floor with her legs splayed in the air. She moves back in the
chair, the chair squeaks and she puts the file in her lap, then picks it up
and clasps it to her chest. Then realizing that she is making a spectacle
of herself, she puts it back in her lap and thrusts her hands under her
thighs, to stop them from trembling (Hanif 5).

This passage appears early in the novel; we know nothing of Alice yet.
However, we learn a great deal from it nonetheless: about her own
feelings of vulnerability as well as the culture of violence – in particular
violence against women – which she inhabits; thus in her nervousness
at the job interview she imagines herself “sprawled on the floor with
her legs splayed in the air” as a perennially potential victim of sexual
violence. Her fear of being a “spectacle” and her need to efface herself
by hiding her hands in various recesses of her body register the effaced
subjectivity of her womanhood on the surface of her body. Thus,
although we never know Alice Bhatti, her body becomes an index to
the social crisis – in Karachi, in Pakistan – at large.

There is another element to this description, which is the question of
Alice’s sanity, called into doubt by her dizziness, her trembling and her
“fears that the chair might slip from under her”. As any reader of Rushdie
will notice, this is quite different from the kind of magical realism that
allows Saleem Sinai to hear voices in his head or that prevents Moraes
27 | THAAP Journal 2015: Culture, Art & Architecture of the Marginalized & the Poor

Zogoiby from growing physically, leaving him a strange man-child. In


contrast to these magical realisms, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti’s dark humor,
its investment in dreams and its hint at the supernatural suggests clinical
madness, exemplified by the charya ward of the Sacred Heart Hospital
into which Alice makes an early foray, despite the fact that she is told
“That’s no place for a decent woman like yourself’” (30). Indeed, Alice’s
experience in the psychiatric ward is more than she bargained for.
Besides seeing “occasional streaks of foam rubber remain[ing]” on the
walls, “which makes it look like the walls have developed a skin rash”
and “what appears to be a bird’s nest in one corner” which is actually “a
nest the size of a football made of grey human hair with a live rat at its
centre.” (33) – the inmates accost her with their quasi-mystical nonsenses:
“Dard aur, dawa aur, dard aur, dawa aur” and “‘She knows how we live
and how we die. She knows. She knows.’” (33-5) and so on.

Although startling, Alice does not come away from the charya ward
swearing never to return. Rather – and here we see clear echoes of
Manto – the critique here is not of the mad but of the sane and Alice,
herself potentially tottering on the edge of insanity (as all the novel’s
“sane” characters are), feels not different but a strange solidarity with
those she meets inside. This is so much the case that although she
initially sees Teddy Butt, who appears to rescue her from the inmates,
as “the chief charya” (35) – a belief which is never disproven – she ends
up marrying him. Thus is borne out what Sister Hina Alvi warns her
about, which is not so much the exceptionality of the psych ward but its
lack thereof: “the whole country is a nuthouse”, she tells Alice. “Have
you read Toba Tek Singh? Nobody reads around here anymore. Manto
wrote about the nutters in a charya ward and then ended up in one
himself. His own family put him there.” (28-9)

Sister Alvi’s statement is not so much a critique of Manto’s sanity as of the


whole society which Manto himself was criticizing – in which, as he makes
very clear in “Toba Tek Singh”, madness can quickly slip into sanity and
sanity into madness. In his seminal study of madness, Foucault questions the
idea that madness is antithetical to reason, suggesting instead that madness

is a kind of reason in action. In short, under the chaotic and manifest


delirium reigns the order of a secret delirium. In this second delirium,
which is, in a sense, pure reason, reason delivered of all the external tinsel
of dementia, is located the paradoxical truth of madness (97)… Madness
begins where the relation of man to truth is disturbed and darkened (104).
Ulka Anjaria, PhD | 28

Foucault urges us to see the imbrication of madness and reason not


negatively – where madness is only the “breakdown” of truth – but as
allowing for the emergence of new representations, including those “in
which imaginary objects are taken for realities, or else real objects are
falsely represented” (105) – in short, a new realism.

The representational mode of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti seems to confirm this
possibility. Madness hovers just under the surface of the text in a number
of forms, aside from the literal presence of the charya ward exerting a
metonymic pressure on the entire world of Sacred Heart. Characters are
constantly dreaming; their dreams often are starker imagines of reality
than the absurd world they encounter every day. Dreams are the kernels
where reason resides; everyday life is, by contrast, madness. Madness is
banal; it has become folded into everyday existence. This means, of course,
the madness of everyday violence – the daily harassment Alice faces, the
perennial possibility of sexual violence, the daily oppression of being a
Christian minority in Pakistan and additionally bearing the stigma of
untouchability. This is a world where her lover Teddy can fire a lovelorn
shot into the air which shuts down Karachi for three days, and where

there was not a single day – not a single day – when she didn’t see a
woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt,
hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his
honor, father protecting his honor, feuding farmers settling their water
disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments,
it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body (96).

Avoiding this fate involves an intense regimen of self-discipline, of


control over her own body, which makes her earlier episode on the
creaky chair look unremarkable by contrast.

She avoids eye contact; she looks slightly over people’s heads as if
looking out for somebody who might come into view at any moment.
She doesn’t want anyone to think that she is alone and nobody is
coming for her. She sidesteps even when she sees a boy half her age
walking towards her, she walks around little puddles when she can
easily leap over them; she thinks any act that involves stretching her
legs might send the wrong signal…. She never eats in public. Putting
something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove
something horrible down your throat (98-9).
29 | THAAP Journal 2015: Culture, Art & Architecture of the Marginalized & the Poor

In a world such as this, how do we draw the line between insanity and
simple pragmatism? Yet, following Foucault, Hanif mobilizes a dialectic
concept of madness, which is not only presented as a loss or as something
to be mourned; perennial madness also elicits moments of surprising
tenderness, born in the “pure reason” that lies at the heart of madness.
Teddy, for instance, is “a crime-scene cleaner, comforter, errand boy,
towel holder, cheerleader, doorstopper, gun-cleaner, replacement court
witness, proxy prisoner, fourth card player… and a companion for the
passengers on their last journey” (101) – that is, to their death but it is
he who elicits the only “tender moment” (81) in Alice’s short life or who
makes her feel when he ushers her with eyes closed out of a rickshaw for
their surprise wedding that “she wishes for a lifetime of alighting from
rickshaws with his hand on her back” (87). These are not moments of
break from the larger madness but are enabled only by the twisted world
of those conditioned by incessant insanity (who else would get married
on a nuclear submarine?). Alice’s earlier misrecognition of Teddy for a
“charya” thus reveals itself not as misrecognition at all but as a moment of
recognition, both of a world of everyday madness and as the possibility
for love that lies within it. As Teddy tells her, justifying his line of work,
“‘We live in dangerous times. We live in a dangerous place. It’s better to
know the danger, to work with it, to tame it’” (162). This could be read as
another form of madness – like Alice’s paranoia, or even, at its extreme,
Kulwant Kaur and Ishwar Singh’s exuberant eroticism amidst Partition
looting: a means of getting by, rather than battling the system. However,
Hanif does not present it only as resignation – or, to be more accurate, it
is a futurity that lies within resignation. It might not be a political protest
or a battle but it is a means of invigorating the everyday with meaning.

This can have explicitly political implications; Police Inspector Malangi,


in charge of police encounters and torture against suspected criminals,
deliberately confuses his men on the way to a scene of encounter killing
because “he doesn’t want any of them to lose their mind in the future and
come sniffing back to relive the memory” (124). Here, in its extreme, losing
one’s mind is presented as a means of exposing the violence of the state
but more often, madness pervades the everyday to produce what might at
its worst be called an everyday sociopathic, and at best, a means of getting
by. Hanif’s realist narration conveys that socio-pathology by refusing to
flinch, describing scenes of the most graphic violence with a deadpan
calm. This is a world in which you get “the news of a death before you can
see it with your own eyes. A death before birth” (164); a “life [that] begins
with a compromise” (181). This is the type of logic by which jail, for Alice,
“was… [where] she first felt free” (115). These constitute the opposite of
Ulka Anjaria, PhD | 30

modernist shock; they are not meant to present horrific scenes to shake
readers out of their political apathy – they comprise, rather, an aesthetic
of numbness but not without a political purpose. Through this numbness
we see more clearly than ever the reality of everyday violence; we register
it simultaneously as a breakdown of realism and a prerequisite for a new
realist vision that emerges out of it. That madness is sanity and sanity is
madness which is simultaneously bleak and reassuring – that was Manto’s
realist vision. Hanif’s, too, is a realist vision branded by everyday violence
– that is at once devastating and simultaneously optimistic.

Thus, we can read the novel’s ending not as a strange recourse to the
supernatural but a following through on the productive epistemologies
of madness. The possibility of a vision of the divine perceived on the
horizon is no more insane than a world of self-inflicted wounds, dead
babies coming back to life or sweepers finding slime-covered peacocks
in city sewers and where people count themselves “lucky enough not
to have the worst job in the city” (64). This is the new realist imaginary.

References
• Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
• Hanif, Mohammed. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Noida: Random House, 2011.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Colder Than Ice [Thanda Gosht]. Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches
and Stories of Partition. Trans. Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1997. 23-29.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Khol Do [Hindi]. http://naikahaniyan.wordpress.
com/2010/12/05/urdu-short-story-khol-do-by-sadat-hasan-manto-in-hindi/,
accessed October 15, 2014.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. The Return [Khol Do]. Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and
Stories of Partition. Trans. Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1997. 11-14.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Thanda Gosht [Hindi]. http://adaabarz.wordpress.
com/2010/12/05/urdu-short-story-thanda-gosht-by-sadat-hasan-manto-in-hidni/,
accessed October 15, 2014.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Toba Tek Singh. Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing,
1947-1997. Eds. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1997. 25-31.
• Premchand. Godaan: The Gift of a Cow. Trans. Gordon C. Roadarmel. New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2002.
• Premchand. Sahitya ka Uddeshya [The Purpose of Literature]. People’s Art in the
Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice. Delhi: Jana Natya Manch, 2000. 74-87.
• Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Vintage, 1995.
• Senapati, Fakir Mohan. Six Acres and a Third (Chha Mana Atha Guntha). Trans. Rabi
Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, Paul St. Pierre. New Delhi:
Penguin, 2006.

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