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“Border” beyond its geographical logic becomes a topic of discussion in the transnational studies from the late twentieth century which challenges the established notion of the nation-state. The rhetoric of border as Anzaldúa (1987) calls “borderlands” and “Nueva Conciencia Mestiza” allow transnational feminists to enter into the new discourse to re-think the terms such as nation, homeland and border in a transnational writing. Fundamentally using the transnational and feminist approach, the paper will look into the negotiation of un/belongingness of a South Asian, transnational brown woman between the “imagined homelands” through a fictional novel French Lover (2002) written by Taslima Nasreen. In this piece of study, the term “imagined homeland” is an experiment but at the same time, it explains the meaning of the space which this term tries to explain. These “imagined homelands” are not merely spatial homelands which could be a land of origin or land of residence. These homelands are metaphorically constructed on the ideology of the collective groups in a “borderless” and “post-national” world. The paper will critically examine the construction of different “imagined homelands” calling them, global feminist group and brown community in this case study, and the negotiation of a south Asian transnational brown woman between these "imagined homelands.”

Manto's writings are hardly as controversial and ground-breaking as his series of short stories about Bombay's prostitutes and the world surrounding them. My paper aims to give at least two readings of the story of Saugandhi and “the insult” she receives when being rejected by a client. Her burst of pent-up rage, helpless but terrible, can be interpreted either as a positive act of realization of her own condition or as a reaffirmation of powerlessness in the face of the dominant. Using the tools of the canonic and original concept of the subaltern, with Gramsci (1916) and Spivak (1985) delimiting its oppressed (non)identity, Saugandhi's consciousness of herself becomes the voice which the subaltern cannot utter. Manto's essays (1955) show major concern with the desperate state of sexual workers, and it is through his feminism that this paper will discard the abstract notion of subalternity and highlight how gender makes “the woman who didn't have a father's shelter, had no education, ...a broken pebble from the pavement” (Manto, 2014: 204). The short story is not, as it may seem in abstract terms, empowering; it is a wretched cry that ends in silence —there is nothing to be done.

This paper explores the theme of fragmentation and focuses specifically on the Sikh massacres of 1984 which followed the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi when she was gunned down by her Sikh body guards. Thirty two years down the line no perpetrators of the mob attacks and mass killings of the Sikhs have been brought to justice. The Indian sub-continent enfolds, within what appears to be the borders of a single nation, a bewildering complex of racial religious, social and cultural identities and any attempt to over-simplify the forces of division and conflict runs the risk of gross misrepresentation. More recently, the deliberated muting of the issues of justice against the Sikhs are apparent in the banning of the two latest films on the subject. In the present paper three short films have been analysed: “Injustice 1984,” directed by Jarnail Singh; “Jagjeet” (2010), directed by Kavanjit Singh and “Kush” (2013), directed by Subhashish Bhutiani. These films depict real-life stories of persons from the Sikh community and explore the impact of religious intolerance and the violence of the Sikh massacres from the perspective of the victims. It seeks to highlight concerns regarding religious intolerance, questions of identity, legal silences and deliberated muting of the subject over the past years and the need for a complex critical evaluation of the responsibility of the state and its socio-institutional bodies towards its citizens.

The paper is an attempt at understanding the mass suicides committed by women during the communal riots instigated by the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Firstly, the position and the role assigned to women are investigated by applying Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bios and zoē within a gendered perspective; this forms the introductory theoretical framework of the topic. The core part of the paper concentrates on one significant event which took place in the village of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district in March 1947, where ninety women took their own lives as a desperate attempt to avoid rape, abduction and religious conversion, thereby averting the ruination of their community’s honour. Bhisham Sahni’s depiction of the episode in his semi-autobiographic novel, Tamas, along with testimonies and print media sources, allows for exploration of the notion of national and religious honour and more importantly whether the suicides were a decision made by a person actively responsible for her own fate or rather someone passively succumbing to the patriarchal expectations of the state and community.

The paper sketches briefly the cultural and political context against which one may study the classical South Indian concert called the Kutcheri. It goes on to trace the development of the modern concert and then concentrates on the devotional poetry of Tyagaraja who is the foremost composer in the tradition. The paper demonstrates the centrality of Bhakti (devotion) as an emotion and its role in creating a link between the composer, the singer, the song and the audience.

Gandhi wanted the Indian economy to center around autonomous village republics rather than work on the back of large-scale industries or consumption expenditure. Gandhi’s principles for formulating his economic thoughts were based on a call to ‘return to the nature’. He would have liked people to reduce their wants in lives and to concentrate instead on development of their faculties for achievement of spiritual goals. This would not require people in villages to madly rush to cities in search of work. All people would live more fulfilling and meaningful lives. He would justify use of machines and industrial production systems in the economy only when the outcomes serviced the fundamental and most basic needs of people. This paper describes Gandhi’s economic principles in order to analyze how they contrast with the free operation of the market today which has created multiple new inequalities in society. The liberalized rapid economic growth model in India has made development of the rural sector secondary to rapid growths in trade and manufactures of consumer commodities in the urban centers. This has gone the opposite way from the paths Gandhi outlined for his country, and it has exacerbated the same societal inequalities he wanted to see reduced.

This paper aims to analyse two major autobiographies of Dalit women’s literature and African American women’s writing – Karukku (1992) by Bama Faustina and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet A. Jacobs – to bring forth the similarities between these two groups of subaltern women. Through the means of autobiography, both writers transmit their own experiences and denounce the gender, race and caste oppression endured. The subaltern theory coined by Antonio Gramsci and developed by Gayatri Spivak will be used to analyse these texts and the way they establish a link between two different worlds as well as how they share the common objective of making their narrators’ exclusion visible in their patriarchal worlds.

This article looks at the asymmetrical bifurcation of gender roles and performativity that is reflected palpably within Bengali juvenile literature of the twentieth century. These writings strove to venerate a cult of hypermasculinity through the portrayal of brave, assertive Bengali heroes who engaged in various escapades in distant lands or in the solving of mysteries and crimes, either alone or accompanied by male confidantes who remain completely devoted to them. This dominant cultural trope was consciously employed as a challenge to the imperial, racist stereotypes of the effeminate Bengali man who was imagined to be inferior to the virile, robust and intellectually superior Englishman. However, the role of women within such diegetic portrayals is liminal or conspicuously absent; female readers are conditioned to “wallow in the reflected glory of their heroes” (Mukherjee para. 13). This paper also looks into the politics of sexuality and nationalism involved within the celebration of male homosocial bonding over heteronormative relationships, thereby leading to the almost complete effacement of female agency.

This paper attempts to draw a cartography of becoming Angry Indian Goddesses as transnational nomadism towards an embodied and material rethinking of women’s friendships from outside the constraints of systemic binaries. The friends are all professional women who are globally wired, whose thinking minds and non-docile bodies detach themselves from any normative modes of belonging in their respective personal and professional realms. They map a post-humanist spatiality of rhizomic linkages with other animate and non-animate entities, throwing up a new ethics of nomadic affect and responsibility. The film begins with a panoramic gaze of the Goan landscape, overlapped with flash images of Hindu goddesses and their animal escorts framed within a power packed song “Kattey”, which intersects Bhanwari Devi’s powerful folk composition of Meera Bai’s 15th century mystic tradition with Haard Kaur’s rap. The crossing of the song and the violent events of rejection that the women face, unbridle a becoming angry goddesses through a pastiche of the anxious goddesses and women sited on an axis of re/de-valorised difference. Goa becomes a potential third space entangled with all of the above, as it dwells on the contemplative scope of this cartography as redemptive and suggests a re-humanization of schizophrenic splintered objects through love and affect.

This paper interprets the way in which transnational writers use the Gothic to investigate concepts like time, space and cultural memory in their ancestors’ culture which nowadays appears foreign to them due to the transterritorialization they suffer. This legacy appears in the form of unresolved memory traces resulting from diasporic migration and is readily figured as an ostranenie which haunts the characters of some South Asian-Canadian or Caribbean storytelling from within and without. The argument involves a revision of the notions of cultural identity and the changing nature of diasporic writing in the last thirty years. This essay tries to analyse these transnational stories which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblance in diasporic writing, for different political and traumatic reasons, in their cinematic deployment of the homeSpace horror, childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to our ancestors’ memories.

In recent years, within the concept of the archive there has been an ever-increasing notion that points to a repository for classification, cultural production, a locus for keeping the records of history, a paying tribute to memory, whilst, simultaneously, registering as much as what is kept as what is lost. My paper is a work-in-progress, and, as such, an exploration of what I call a “living archive,” an archive in the making, where, by recourse to a culturally rich repository of images of Indian women as represented by Indian women artists along the twentieth century, I will address women’s invisibility from official history. Generationally arranged, my choice of painters includes Sunayani Devi (1875-1962), Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) and Nalini Malani (1946-). Women artists in all these cases were privileged and educated, and developed a career in the Fine Arts. They all show a great interest and concern in the role of women within society, and they have portrayed and captured women and women’s relations and work with attention. In most cases, they exhibit a feminist or proto-feminist awareness. From the visual format of the canvas both in historical perspective and at present, I will attempt to discuss how their work and their valuable repository of images is certainly evidence of significant historical and cultural change.

Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others deals with the story of a family during one of the most controversial chapters in the recent history of West Bengal, namely the Naxalite movement and its subsequent repression by the State. The novel examines the reasons why so many young middle-class students decided to join the movement, and the actual impact of their activism. In doing so, it questions Bengali society and the relationship between different social classes. Above all, The Lives of Others is a bourgeois novel which explores and criticizes the contradiction and conflicts within the Bengali middle class. Although the subalterns, especially the peasants, played a significant role in the Naxalite movement, they are at the margins of the novel and are rarely given a voice.This paper will read The Lives of Others as an allegory of Bengali society. Such a reading will primarily look at the dialectics of society in the novel, thus providing a context in which to discuss class conflicts and the paradox represented by a bourgeois novel about a subaltern revolution. The comparison with a well-known novel of the time, Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084, will also be fundamental for the discussion.

The Dalit community has suffered generational, multi-faceted and institutionalised discrimination as a result of the implementation of the Hindu caste system in the Indian society for religious and political reasons. This casteist practice has left a clear mark of social division and inequality and has severely damaged this community’s identity. Mulk Raj Anand, one of the pioneers in addressing this issue, offers a glimpse of what being a Dalit or untouchable entailed in pre-independent India in his short but intense novel Untouchable, in which he narrates episodes of verbal and physical violence and recurrent inter- and intra-caste discrimination, thus depicting the traumatic existence of this oppressed community. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to delineate the aesthetics of Dalit trauma as represented in this short novel and to determine the extent to which this model complies with the pre-existing paradigms of trauma theory or if they need to be reconsidered.

As a colonial author, Naipaul is deeply concerned with the exploration of the nature of the colony from a cultural and a political perspective. Being of Indian descent, his interest in pondering over Indian history and understanding its cultural identity is central to his fiction. In Magic Seeds Naipaul moves from the colonial India under British rule where the protagonist, Willie Chandran, was born to a post-independence rural India besieged by a Maoist insurgent group whose aim was to fight poverty and be trusted by poor villagers. Drawing from Bhabha’s concept of mimicry which holds that the colonized seeks to copy the colonizer thus producing a subject who is "almost the same, but not quite," (Bhabha, 1994:86). This paper seeks to read Magic Seeds as a fictional parody of political mimicry based upon the information on the movement provided by Dipanjan and Debu in India: A Million Mutinies Now. Following Willie Chandran’s trials and tribulations as a member of a Maoist guerrilla in India, Naipaul dissects the divorce between foreign political discourse and Indian cultural heritage.

The aim of this paper is to raise awareness of the humanity of hijras through their autobiographies. The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story (2015) by A. Revathi will shed light on transsexuality in India. The hijra literature in English is gaining space, albeit small, in the literary milieu with its main character, a trans woman, who narrates her story challenging the heteronormative world. Not bending to gender norms, Revathi sought her place in the world, becoming not only a hijra, but also a political agent in her community. Her writing/telling reveals the bruises and wounds of a body violated by a deeply hierarchical society and her activism evidences that trans people are not passive recipients of forces acting upon their lives. They deploy agency in a variety of ways showing how their lives are located at the intersection of caste, class and patriarchies. These structures along with heteronormativity not only oppress them but also make them invisible under the heterosexual, family and reproductive model. In order to understand the hijras communities, it is important to analyze this through the intersectionality of social markers--gender, sexuality, class, caste, generation, region, religion, kinship and etc--interacting them at multiple and often simultaneous levels (Reddy 2005). Moreover, one must think of the terms izzat (honour) and asli (authenticity) that permeate Indian culture.

The present article analyzes Kinetic Drawing, a piece developed by Heather Hansen since 2013, in which dance, yoga and painting are fused through performances. It is the result of the search of how to download the movements directly on the paper in an organic way, using the body as the only instrument, yoga and dance as a creative means and meditation as a process of interiorization and dis-intellectualization to initiate artistic development. As a result of this work, combining dance, painting and yoga, we contemplate Heather Hansen's encounter with herself taking the movement of her body as an element of artistic expression.

This paper argues that Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies highlights the transcultural continuities between indenture in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic slave trade, while simultaneously foregrounding the specificities of servitude in the Indian Ocean World. To do so, it demonstrates the remarkable relevance of Orlando Patterson’s concept of slavery as “social death” to the Indian experience of crossing of the “Black Water,” one that has traditionally been articulated through the cultural trope of death. However, rather than a simple reconfirmation of indentured labour as social death, Ghosh’s novel offers a nuanced, counter-balancing correlative to social death: karmic rebirth as narrative event and metaphoric idiom. By using the double-level of meaning offered by symbolism and allegory, Ghosh is able to sensitively balance exploitation and oppression on the one hand (the “outward” or objective reality of social death) and resistance and agency on the other (the “inward reality” of karmic rebirth). In this sense, his novel is ultimately a reaffirmation of Patterson’s Hegelian insight that slavery is not antithetical to freedom, but is the pre-condition for its emergence.

Since 1989, Ananda Devi, one of Mauritius’ most prolific Francophone writers, has been writing female protagonists who go beyond what Roland Barthes says is the deformed and mythical image of the female, and in the case of Ananda Devi’s 2007 novel, Indian Tango, of the aging female. Set in modern New Delhi, a city tugged herself in multiple directions by politics, religion and globalization, we will examine how Subhadra, mother, wife, daughter-in-law and soon to be grandmother, attempts to reclaim her individuality now replaced by the social isolation of menopause, that is, « par la représentation du vide… ». Subhadra exhumes her female body ignored by her husband and shamed by her mother-in-law along the streets of India’s capital and consequently undergoes a sexual (re) awakening for which neither she nor her family is prepared. This paper will examine how Devi’s female protagonist-outcast uses the sounds and rhythms of the urban complexities of New Delhi to denounce ideologies rooted in patriarchal traditions and restrictions and thus rejecting assumptions menopausal women are asexual and undesirable and consequently underlines how a walk around a New Delhi block in fact (re) defines menopause for Subhadra as a time of liberation and sexual discovery.

Through an innovative methodology that combines the academic essay and poetic creative writing, this paper aims to present an overview of the historical evolution of the adivasi, mainly focussing on the origin of the major problems from colonial times until contemporary days. The focus of study is the adivasi woman of the south-east regions of Orissa, also the santhal woman of West Bengal. Eventually, the major objective is to contribute to the deconstruction of a series of prejudices that still loom over in our popular memory, which are fruit of the impact of colonial legacy and the unstoppable violence of globalization.

The voluntary movement of Africans was concurrent with the involuntary uprooting of these peoples, driven by the slave trade. Trade, colonisation and slavery have been drivers of migration, interconnecting people of diverse ethnicity globally. We assure that Afro-Asian communities are both historic and contemporary and, whilst Afro-diasporic communities in the Atlantic World are well recognised, the diasporas in Asia have only become visible in the last decade. Assimilation to the diversity of the Indian Ocean has contributed to this invisibility. With the loss of patronage due to changing political scenarios, African migrants have become disenfranchised. The dynamics of their identity, shaped by strong cultural memories bring out their African roots. This paper argues that diasporic consciousness of Afro-Asians is expressed through their strong cultural memories. As people with dual belongings, identifying with both the homeland and the hostland, Afro-Asians are able to reconcile their hybrid identities. With the movement of Afro-Asians from the peripheries their subaltern voices are beginning to be heard. Their eclipsed histories and lost narratives are challenging the Atlantic model of African migration.

This paper deals with the representation of India in the murals at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-1940) and the codes and examples used by the author Miguel Covarrubias to show the massive North American audience – generally, poorly interested in India – the people, the Art, the native dwellings and means of transportations, the flora and the fauna and the economy of the Indian subcontinent.

This paper sets out to explore the growth of the Indian diaspora within the UK. First of all, we shall evidence how, despite the humble beginnings of this diasporic community, their strong sense of community and tenacity has helped them gain visibility within British society. From there, we shall look at the complexities of this heterogeneous community and how they have negotiated new spaces within a society that, initially, was hostile to their presence. Despite a prevailing multicultural ethos, we shall then evidence how a system of ‘adjacent cultures’ has been installed within the UK. To further our understanding on this mutual isolation within diversity we shall apply Homi Bhabha’s theories on cultural difference. Then we shall look at a number of biographies and life writings, penned by South Asian authors, so as to elucidate upon this theoretical background.

Ecology and the discoveries of the sciences of the nature are changing human conscience through a “new cosmology”. Consequently we see for the first time a new and objective determination of reality including its place, time, subjects, processes and interrelationships. It is a fact that many of these conclusions are similar to the ones expressed by the ancestral traditions of humanity. For these traditions, free from the Abrahamic anthropocentrism, nature was always a subject of law with its own rights. In India, man was conceived as part of an interdependent whole, millennia before the study of ecosystems did certify this reality. That is why we find in India many symmetries in line with this “new cosmology”. This paper will expose the most important of these symmetries and the projects were ecology and religions do work together in India to draw conclusions on its relevance regarding the ecological problem and our failure in addressing it.

This paper aims at analysing Bharati Mukherjee’s individual positioning as a woman writer by using the female characters caught between two different worlds, homes and cultures present in her works. After having undergone several phases in her life: as an exile from India, an Indian expatriate in Canada, a common immigrant and finally a citizen in the United States, all these diverse selves have been translated into her literary career. The writer thus envisions herself as a pioneer of new lands and literatures, initiating a process of re-forming and de-forming American culture, and redefining diaspora as a process of unhyphenated rehousement in which the cultural landscape in which one lives is no longer divided into a centre and its peripheries. Mukherjee celebrates “racial and cultural mongrelisation” but rejects cultural balkanization in its defence of the local over the national. She is neither ignorant nor insensitive to racism and oppression in the United States, yet her characters are always tenacious and feisty in their struggle to belong. Mukherjee stresses their quality as battlers, moved by the instinct to improve their lives. In her construction of America as the land of opportunity and success Mukherjee rejects homesickness and in so doing she clearly marks a difference from the Indian diaspora, though we consider that in defending this posture she goes to extremes, idealizing the “real” to create a personal and literary migrant cosmos.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919 paved the way for the independence of India and Pakistan. The paper looks at the narrative strategies of representing the incident in two novels that recount it, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers. How do these texts engage with the colonial political situation? How do the two writers see the repercussions of the incident for the time of their narratives?

This paper explains the methods for counting the energy and material flows in the economy, and gives the main results of the Material Flows for the economy of India between 1961 and 2008 as researched by Simron Singh et al (2012). Drawing on work done in the EJOLT project, some illustrations are given of the links between the changing social metabolism and ecological distribution conflicts, looking at responses in Odisha to bauxite mining, at conflicts on sand mining, at disputes on waste management options in Delhi and at ship dismantling in Alang, Gujarat. The aim is to show how a history of social metabolism, of socio-environmental conflicts, and of the changing valuation languages deployed by various social actors in such conflicts, could be written in a common framework.

This paper, which contrasts Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) with Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), is as much a celebration of Bollywood as of Gandhi. It is to the former that the credit for most effectively resurrecting the Mahatma should go, certainly much more so than to Gandhians or academics. For Bollywood literally revives the spirit of Gandhi by showing how irresistibly he continues to haunt India today. Not just in giving us Gandhigiri—a totally new way of doing Gandhi in the world—but in its perceptive representation of the threat that modernity poses to Gandhian thought is Lage Raho Munna Bhai remarkable. What is more, it also draws out the distinction between Gandhi as hallucination and the real afterlife of the Mahatma. The film’s enormous popularity at the box office—it grossed close to a billion rupees—is not just an index of its commercial success, but also proof of the responsive chord it struck in Indian audiences. But it is not just the genius and inventiveness of Bollywood cinema that is demonstrated in the film as much as the persistence and potency of Gandhi’s own ideas, which have the capacity to adapt themselves to unusual circumstances and times. Both Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning epic, and Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munna Bhai show that Gandhi remains as media-savvy after his death as he was during his life.

This paper argues that while it is generally accepted that contemporary Indian literature entered a decisive, cosmopolitan and globally popular phase with the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, this period actually demonstrated a continuation of deep skepticism about nationalism that had originated with Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. The three decades after 1981 have revealed a literature whose mobility and energy has had perhaps a greater impact on English literature than any other. The argument is that this mobility goes hand in hand with skepticism about nation and nationalism that has had a pronounced impact on the perception of the globalization of literature. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004) sketch the trajectory of the contemporary novel’s extension of Midnight Children’s subversion of the grand narrative of nation. Three of these share the status of Rushdie’s novel as a Booker Prize winner and indicating that the impact of India’s nationalist skepticism has been felt globally.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919 paved way for the independence of India and Pakistan. The paper looks at the narrative strategies of representing the incident in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers. How do these texts engage with the colonial political situation? How do the two writers see the repercussions of the incident for the time of their narratives?

This paper, which contrasts Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) with Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), is as much a celebration of Bollywood as of Gandhi. It is to the former that the credit for most effectively resurrecting the Mahatma should go, certainly much more so than to Gandhians or academics. For Bollywood literally revives the spirit of Gandhi by showing how irresistibly he continues to haunt India today. Not just in giving us Gandhigiri—a totally new way of doing Gandhi in the world—but in its perceptive representation of the threat that modernity poses to Gandhian thought is Lage Raho Munna Bhai remarkable. What is more, it also draws out the distinction between Gandhi as hallucination and the real afterlife of the Mahatma. The film’s enormous popularity at the box office—it grossed close to a billion rupees—is not just an index of its commercial success, but also proof of the responsive chord it struck in Indian audiences. But it is not just the genius and inventiveness of Bollywood cinema that is demonstrated in the film as much as the persistence and potency of Gandhi’s own ideas, which have the capacity to adapt themselves to unusual circumstances and times. Both Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning epic, and Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munna Bhai show that Gandhi remains as media-savvy after his death as he was during his life.

This paper explains the methods for counting the energy and material flows in the economy, and gives the main results of the Material Flows for the economy of India between 1961 and 2008 as researched by Simron Singh et al (2012). Drawing on work done in the EJOLT project, some illustrations are given of the links between the changing social metabolism and ecological distribution conflicts, looking at responses in Odisha to bauxite mining, at conflicts on sand mining, at disputes on waste management options in Delhi and at ship dismantling in Alang, Gujarat. The aim is to show how a history of social metabolism, of socio-environmental conflicts, and of the changing valuation languages deployed by various social actors in such conflicts, could be written in a common framework.

This paper argues that while it is generally accepted that contemporary Indian literature entered a decisive, cosmopolitan and globally popular phase with the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, this period actually demonstrated a continuation of deep skepticism about nationalism that had originated with Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. The three decades after 1981 have revealed a literature whose mobility and energy has had perhaps a greater impact on English literature than any other. The argument is that this mobility goes hand in hand with skepticism about nation and nationalism that has had a pronounced impact on the perception of the globalization of literature. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004) sketch the trajectory of the contemporary novel’s extension of Midnight Children’s subversion of the grand narrative of nation. Three of these share the status of Rushdie’s novel as a Booker Prize winner and indicating that the impact of India’s nationalist skepticism has been felt globally.

The article sketches briefly the cultural and political context against which one may study the classical South Indian concert called the Kutcheri. It goes on to trace the development of the modern concert and then concentrates on the devotional poetry of Tyagaraja who is the foremost composer in the tradition. The paper demonstrates the centrality of Bhakti (devotion) as an emotion and its role in creating a link between the composer, the singer, the song and the audience.