This article argues that development economics, pioneered in the 1950s and early 1960s, provides a productive analytical framework for postcolonial scholars interested in understanding literary narratives of development in the moment of decolonisation. The article focuses on the work of Saint Lucian economist and Nobel Prize winner W. Arthur Lewis and former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to explore the period's optimistic belief in the benefits of economic development. Despite their different backgrounds and public roles, both Lewis and Nehru agreed that newly independent nations could achieve significant economic growth and alleviate chronic poverty and inequality through rapid industrialisation and agricultural modernisation. Their writings offer postcolonial scholars a richly detailed picture of post-war economic thought and enable a historicised analysis of fictional narratives of development. This article undertakes such an analysis by examining three Indian novels: Nayantara Sahgal's This Time ofMorning (1965) and Storm In Chandigarh (1969) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's Shadow from Ladakh (1967). These novels interrogate the impact of Nehru's economic policies on people's daily lives, as well as the period's intense interest in development economics more generally.
The persistence of religion's public presence and the surging instances of majoritarian violence have impelled scholars of South Asia to approach the question of religion anew. In the study of Anglophone literature this renewed interest is reflected in the attempts to salvage an idea of plurality by contrasting or-thodoxy to more fluid forms of religious co-existence. This article argues that the attempts to explain majority-minority tension through recourse to notions such as orthodoxy-heterodoxy are underwritten by a secular logic, resulting in the ossification of re-ligion as a cultural artifact and oversight of how religion comes to be lived, inhabited, and embodied within conditions of moder-nity. Reading the various registers of language animated by Anees Salim's novel Vanity Bagh (2013), the article explores how the Anglophone novel makes the inhabitation of religion thinkable, less as adherence to cosmopolitan virtues than as attunement to an embodied tradition, thereby suggesting the need to rethink the secular grammar undergirding much contemporary Anglophone scholarship.
This article reads Meena Kandasamy's The Gypsy Goddess (2014), an exploration of one of modern India's most horrific cases of anti-Dalit violence, to trace how Dalit literature uses imaginative and speculative modalities to disrupt dominant historical frameworks. Historical erasures and excisions have made Dalit life-worlds and experiences inaccessible to the methodologies of positivist history writing. In response, Dalit writers construct and assert their history through different means. Kandasamy's novel negotiates archival limits and braids together folk memory, oral narratives, and literary imagination to recover the history of the Kilvenmani massacre. Placing this event at the nexus of national and global chronologies, Kandasamy suggests that, despite its cultural specificity, Dalit experience resonates with other globally marginalised groups. This article reads The Gypsy Goddess through a transnational lens, including through Saidiya Hartman's practice of critical fabulation, and argues that the novel's alternate historical framework supports global networks of humanitarian solidarity.
Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons ofMaali Almeida (2022) unfolds during a civil war and focuses on Maali Almeida, a renegade war photographer who must solve a murder mystery after his death. It presents a Kafkaesque afterlife that blends magical realism with a whodunit thriller to examine politics, existence, war trauma, and memory. This interview explores how the novel addresses memory and collective historical experiences.
This article presents an interview with an emerging postcolonial author, Shona Patel, about her debut novel, Teatime for the Firefly, to understand her distinct perspective on the remote tea plantations of Assam. The interview addresses Patel's writing strategies for historical fiction, the imperial plantation history of India, and the sources of her novel. Through Patel's discourses on tea, this article demonstrates how the rhetoric of "tea time"-often linked with imperial aesthetics and leisure-has been challenged, redefined, or recontextualised in contemporary postcolonial narratives, highlighting ideological shifts in representing the plantation economy. This article enhances our understanding of how diasporic literature contributes to decolonising narratives of South Asian plantation history.
