Minding Our Keys and Cues: On the Critical Governmentality of Literary Modernism in India

Abstract

This essay is about the often unremarked legislative control exercised by a certain set of modern(ist) assumptions in contemporary Anglophone Indian literary-critical discourse. Its chief aim is to call for and contribute toward rupturing this modernist hegemony. The essay identifies the major traits of the critical consensus and then discusses its harmful effects on Anglophone Indian literary studies, first, in the hope to persuade that such a consensus indeed exists, and second, to encourage a fresh re-examining of the terms of debate that currently monopolize Anglophone Indian literary studies. The latter task, it suggests, is not only desirable, but urgent.