SOCIOLITERARY CULTURES IN SOUTH ASIA

Socioliterary Cultures in South Asia presents seventeen studies on authors, texts, and issues under three sections that represent different secular traditions, imaginative landscapes and realistic configurations. It examines social, political, secular and cultural texts from five South Asian sites—India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—to represent a larger kaleidoscope of ancient and modern heritages. It appraises personal and collective histories in terms of time, memory, and myth, spells out stages in the formation of canons and identities, and considers the problematic of survival in the maze of ideological formulations in different South Asian locations. Drawing upon a rich variety of verbal and performance texts, the book examines the vitality of authorial imagination, hybrid thought patterns, and indigenous expression. The merit of the book lies in how it develops a larger view of South Asia as a veritable cultural space marked for the richness of its diversity rather than the illusion of its unity.