Inlays of Subjectivity

Abstract

Inlays of Subjectivity is an incisive exposition of the question of subjectivity in modern Indian literature. Seeking to foreground subjectivity through literary expressions of intense emotionality, whether suffering, humiliation, creativity or strife, it also raises the timely question of the relation of justice and speech. This book studies select influential Indian literary texts across the last hundred years in various Indian languages to find overlapping preoccupations with selfhood. As the first chapter on K. R. Meera’s fiction demonstrates, it is the experience of felt injustice that first opens up the realm of subjectivity. Subjectivity is equally opened up by intense negative affect—such as the experience of humiliation—the memoirs of the Dalit writer Urmila Pawar testify to this in the second chapter. The next two chapters trace the historical and literary origins of this question of subjectivity through the novels of canonical writers such as Agyeya, Ismat Chughtai, Saratchandra Chatterjee, and Rabindranath Tagore. The fifth chapter turns to the subtle and powerful writer Krishna Sobti to bring together all these strands of subjectivity, affect and moral agency required in navigating an unequal and harsh world. The book thus hopes to provoke questions of the literary modes for exploring subject positions in a defined Indian literary milieu, and to reflect upon the relationship of literature, subjectivity, and affect.