Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity

Indigenous Imaginaries argues for a redefinition of humanities from a comparative perspective anchored in the regional literary traditions of India. These indigenous traditions have negotiated hegemonic structures of power over centuries through creative engagements with differences and dogmas. The central argument here concerns the need to reconfigure epistemologies that do not accommodate the compulsions of creativity and critical reflection in a multilingual society. Translation functions throughout this volume as the telos of a dialogic, interdisciplinary mode of cognition that questions the exclusivist claims of Euro-centric formulations of the literary. It argues that the act of reading becomes an act of recovery when prescriptive protocols and absolutist dictums are subverted through an intimate involvement with the subliminal, the unwritten and the inarticulate embedded in literary texts. The book analyses the moral imaginaries that animate the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Bhalchandra Nemade, Anand, M. Mukundan, N. S. Madhavan, Agha Shahid Ali and Jean Arasanayagam as evidences of revisionist ways of radical rethinking that can propel us in the direction of an interdisciplinary domain of comparative humanities. It acknowledges the emergent cosmologies of the Global South that demand a self-critical and self-reflexive idiom that questions the binaries of pre-modern/modern, modern/postmodern, ‘enlightened’ West/impoverished East, region/nation, and global/local.