First published in 1970, The Novel in India traces the birth and development of prose fiction in Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam. It is addressed not only to academic students of Asian culture but to all who are interested in literary history. India and Pakistan have many great literatures, but they are almost unknown beyond their own boundaries. Language is a formidable barrier, and this book is offered in the hope that it can bridge the cultural divide that language has created. It has a fascinating story to tell of the endeavours, experiments and achievements of writers who deserve to be better known outside their native land.

Explains the Hindi novel’s role in anticipating and creating the story of middle-class modernity and modernization in North India. Vasudha Dalmia offers a panoramic view of the intellectual and cultural life of North India over a century, from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the end of the Nehruvian era. The North’s historical cities, rooted in an Indo-Persianate culture, began changing more slowly than the Presidency towns founded by the British. Dalmia takes up eight canonical Hindi novels set in six of these cities—Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow—to trace a literary history of domestic and political cataclysms. Her exploration of the emerging Hindu middle classes, changing personal and professional ambitions, and new notions of married life provides a vivid sense of urban modernity. She argues that the radical social transformations associated with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social reform, Gandhian nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the Cold War shaped the realm of the intimate as much as the public sphere. Love and friendship, notions of privacy, attitudes to women’s work, and relationships within households are among the book’s major themes.

In the idyllic university town, young women daydreamed as they lay on the grass and gazed up at the clouds. Young men took morning walks at Alfred Park. Hot summer afternoons were for drinking sherbet and eating watermelons, and evenings were meant for reading poetry. It was also a time of stifling social mores, and love was an unattainable ideal seldom realized. Allahabad of the 1940s is the serene backdrop to the turbulence of Chander’s love for his professor’s daughter Sudha. Driven by his passionate belief in the transcending purity of their love, Chander persuades Sudha to marry another man, to devastating consequences. Unhinged by his separation from Sudha and consumed by a restless desire to make sense of love—Is it really about sex? Is the purity of love a lie?—Chander spirals into a destructive affair with the seductive Pammi. Immensely popular since its publication more half a century ago, Chander & Sudha continues to seduce readers with its potent mix of tender passion and heartbreaking tragedy.

Life and works of Bhagwati Charan Verma, b. 1903, Hindi writer.

Having survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career, the author accepts a freelance assignment to go to India, where she finds herself utterly overwhelmed by the place and the language. Before she knows it, she's on her way to Rajasthan to live with a local family and join a language school offering 'total immersion'.

The orientation of academic institutions has in recent years been moving away from highly specialized area studies in the classical sense towards broader regional and comparative studies. Cultural studies points to the limitation of Western approaches to non-Western cultures - a development not yet reflected in actual research and data collections. Bringing together scholars from all over the world with specialized knowledge in both Western and non-Western languages, literatures, and cultures, this collection of essays provides new insights into the agency of non-Western literatures in relation to the West - a term used with critical caution and, like other common binary dualisms, challenged here. Inter-cultural expertise, seldom applied in the combination of Asian, African, and 'oriental' perspectives, makes this compilation of essays an important contribution to the study of colonialism and postcoloniality. Topics covered include postcolonial Arabic writing; T.S. Eliot in contemporary Arabic poetry; Algerian (and Berber) literature; the English language and narratives in Kenyan art; characterization, dialogism, gender and Western infuence in modern Hindi fiction; Naya drama in India; modern Burmese theatre and literature under Western influence; Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and the Vietnamese Novel Without a Name; Western Marxism and vernacular literature in colonial Indonesia; hybridity in Komedi Stambul; and Sherlock Holmes in/and the crime fiction of Siam and Indonesia Contributors: Amina Azza Bekkat; Thomas de Bruijn; Matthew Isaac Cohen; Rasheed El-Enany; Keith Foulcher; Saddik M. Gohar; Rachel Harrison; Doris Jedamski; Ursula Lies; Daniela Merolla; Evan Mwangi; Guzel Vladimirovna Strelkova; Anna Suvorova; U Win Pe