Representing India
Speaking of Kavita Daiya, current undergraduates rejoice! After a long leave to research a book in India, Professor Daiya returns to teach this fall. Don’t miss this course:
English 173
Representing History: Nation and Romance in Contemporary Indian Literature and Cinema
Representing History: Nation and Romance in Contemporary Indian Literature and Cinema
11:10 am – 12:25 pm TR; Phillips Hall 510
This course explores the 20th and 21st century representation of nation and nationalism, and its relation to love and family in Indian literature and film. Our texts span South Asia and the diaspora in the UK and North America, and put Indian writing in conversation with writings from Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Questions we will explore: How do writers and filmmakers imagine the idea of India? How do they tell the story about a nation’s history? How are “Indian” identity and family represented, and what does this tell us about gender, sexuality and power in some South Asian contexts? Topics we will explore include gender, feminism and nationalism; patriotism and cosmopolitanism; ethnic identity and inter-ethnic romance; family, citizenship and belonging; minority, multiculturalism and migration. Writers we will read include Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Deshpande, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bapsi Sidhwa, Shyam Selvadurai and Amitav Ghosh. Films we will view include mainstream Bollywood blockbusters like Yash Chopra’s “Veer Zaara” and Farah Khan’s “Main Hoon Na” as well as South Asian parallel cinema, like Shyam Benegal’s “Mammo” and Deepa Mehta’s “Earth.”
