The paper proposes a reading of Sorayya Khan’s novel Five Queen’s Road as a way of interrogating how Partition literature represents the territorialisation of Pakistan and India and the consequent manifold reshaping of conceived and perceived spaces that took place in public as well as private domains from August 1947. The discussion places the novel within the context of Pakistani Anglophone literature that has developed since the beginning of the new millennium and has emerged as a critical space where socio-political issues relevant to the Pakistani community are dealt with. It argues that the literature written in English by Pakistani authors provides a platform for the development of narratives that reveal the complex and multi-layered nature of the nation, thus opposing monolithic portrayals of Pakistani society. More specifically, the study considers the novel’s depiction of the redefinition of Muslim-Hindu relationships after Partition and the author’s representation of the characters’ role in re-configuring the places they inhabit, resisting imposed definitions of spaces in post-partition Pakistan. The analysis examines how the characters relate to the spaces of the home they inhabit, as well as of the city they live in, and focuses on the Hindu protagonist who decides to stay in Lahore, thus rejecting the new interpretation of spaces that appears to be imposed on him by others. The study maintains that by developing a story centred on the resistance opposed by a Hindu who refuses to leave Pakistan the author opposes a nationalist narrative that portrays Hindus as the sole perpetrators of violence during Partition and voices their right to live in the country as citizens enjoying equal rights.

My article analyses Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat (2013) as an exemplificative case study of the Bangladeshi postmillennial literary scene. I contend that, whereas Bangladeshi literature has seen the emergence of prominent diasporic voices by opening to the market of the English language, Imam can be said to draw on a traditional realistic style as his debut novel chronicles a tragic moment in Bangladeshi post-Independence history. In this regard, my essay takes it as a working hypothesis that Imam’s narrative conveys a critical revision of postcolonial Bangladesh and it does so by intertwining realism and dystopia. On the one hand, the novel privileges a dystopian aesthetic that engages with the catastrophes of the present, thus echoing the colonial past and foreshadowing an unpromising future. On the other hand, The Black Coat resists the hallucinatory effects of dystopia owing to the realist mode the narrative hinges around. My essay aims to show how nationalism still represents a trend in contemporary Anglophone literature and how, in certain respects, Imam’s novel denounces fundamental contradictions that are still current in Bangladesh in the age of globalisation.

This paper proposes an analysis of Anil’s Ghost (2000) by Michael Ondaatje in the attempt to overcome a marginalisation of Sri Lankan literary production, both in the canon of the contemporary South Asian novel, and postcolonial criticism. The novel is set in a Sri Lanka ravaged by the civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils that plagued the country for about a quarter of a century. The war represents a pivotal historical and political circumstance that has attracted the attention of many Sri Lankan literary authors for the last 30 years. Such scrutiny sometimes put in the foreground the active influence that past events still exert in the present, an influence that is often invisible, hidden or neglected. This is also true for Ondaatje. The author chooses to focus on the investigations of a forensic anthropologist who has returned from the United States to her native Sri Lanka in order to recover the identity of a skeleton abandoned in a zone protected by the government. In her surveys to solve the mystery behind the identity of the nameless victim, and uncover the truth about the mass killings plaguing the region, not only does Anil’s quest represent a new generation’s attempt to give voice to the voiceless victims of wars and national conflicts but also provides her author with a narrative space made of voids, gaps and blind spots. Attention to such narrative breaks provides space for truths that prove essential to making visible those unaccountable processes through which social authorities and symbolic formations interacted during those warring years. Following Jacques Derrida (2016) and Homi Bhabha (1990), the aim of my paper consists in showing that Ondaatje’s novel belongs to a wave of literary fiction concerned with (and even haunted by) the ‘ghosts’ produced by the violence of the recently ended war. In Ondaatje’s literary effort the Civil War works as a moment of temporal negotiation, whose dreadful events are used to highlight the need to recover history in the clash between historical happenings, subjective experience and the distortions of memory.

The present paper aims to shed light on the evolution of the concepts of ‘diaspora consciousness’ (Vertovec 1999) and identity development in the literary production concerning the genre of the Indian student diaspora. Specifically, it deals with the renegotiation of the ‘problem of ethnicity’ (Jayaram 2004) in Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad (2015) by investigating the relational affiliations occurring at the level of language authenticity and appropriation. In doing so, the paper addresses the different ways in which Ananda, the main character, portrays a delicate yet strong ‘Bengaliness’ in his recalling moods and past experiences while struggling with temporary rootlessness and nostalgia.

Rather than a work of speculative fiction, we contend that Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West is best located in the genre of migration literature. It well illustrates newer postmillennial efforts to update the migrant story for those who must navigate both real and virtual borders. Amid the chaos of a postcolonial world now thoroughly globalized and digitized, resistance to migrants seeking asylum or a better life elsewhere occurs within an international context of growing nationalist fervor and extreme racial/ethnic hatred and violence. The spread of mass and social media also requires migrants to navigate widespread stereotypes associated with the rapidly evolving role of the migrant. We argue that Hamid’s story of Muslim migrants is both universal and unique. The current discourse on important aspects of identity (e.g., gender), and conflicting expectations imposed by home cultures and those abroad, complicate both the migrant journey and their ultimate sense of self and place.

Diasporic literature posits itself as a space of vision in which to prompt ruptures, go beyond prescriptive and proscriptive limits, and imagine new ways to identify and belong (Parmar 2016). This is what makes the novels by Jael Silliman worth reading and apprehending in the contested and complex scenario of contemporary Indian literatures in English, further allowing an analysis of the role of English in constructing historically complex communities of readers in a transnational and transcultural perspective. At the crossroads of literature, anthropology and history, Silliman’s novel The Teak Almirah (2016) evokes times and places of colonial India, re-casting them in a new performance where both the characters and the readers are compelled to follow the shadows, the rumours, the hints and the traces that are defined an emotional geography and a “cartography of diasporaµ(Brah 1996).

Key-words: postcolonial literature, New India, social/literary engagement, Chetan Bhagat.

Chetan Bhagat’s fiction has often been misrepresented and branded as low literature because of the absence of complexity in its plots and the simple characterisation of the novels’ protagonists. The paper intends to focus on Bhagat’s choices both as a writer and as a public figure by examining his position between literature and politics. After a brief introduction to the current social climate in India, the paper will investigate how Chetan Bhagat’s straightforward style actually hides a literary engagement with a socio-political purpose, that is the genuine narration and denunciation of the socio-economic conditions (and plagues) of Indian society. Bhagat’s early novels highlight the inadequate interest the Indian government takes in young people and their future. In One Night at the Call Centre (2005) the author describes the growth of India as an emerging consumer society, but also a progressive criticism favouring a “New India” which should be created by students and young workers to contrast a globalised tendency to corruption. The attempt to realise that project is also narrated in his best-seller Revolution 2020 (2009), as well as in his essay What young India wants (2012). These works embody and anticipate both the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare (2011) and the lure of Narendra Modi’s New India project. The article seeks to explore the links between these various aspects of the Indian political scenario and Bhagat’s works; as a result, the last part of the paper will focus also on his readership and his evolution as a writer, from his initial social engagement to his more recent search for celebrity in the mediatic arena, in order to investigate how those two apparently contradictory goals can coexist in his literary production.

Key-words: adolescence, Indian novel, New India, Aravind Adiga, Neel Mukherjee, Anjali Joseph.

One new feature of Indian millennial fiction is the emergence of adolescent protagonists. This may be explained either as a realistic reflection of a new subculture that is rapidly developing in Millennial India or as a metaphor for a society that has moved beyond the legacy of colonialism but is uncertain as to what path it should take next. Adolescents have always been present in Indian fiction, but their predicament was mostly considered as a passing phase. It is only after the turn of the millennium that adolescents have started to constitute a class. None of the adolescents described in these novels is able to foresee their future and they appear unwilling to move on into adulthood. The economic competition of liberal India is represented through stern parents who compel their children to work excessively hard to achieve success. Such is the case with Neel Mukherjee’s and Aravind Adiga’s novels. Another characteristic of adolescents of New India is that they often resort to “timepass”, a kind of unproductive way to while away the time in apathy. These characteristics make the protagonists somewhat different from the teenagers described in earlier Indian novels; unlike their forefathers, their paths in life are not clearly defined, and yet they are heavily pressured to do better than the others. The characteristic open psyche of the adolescent suffers under these conditions of pressure and precarity. Furthermore, almost all the adolescents described in these three novels are gay, often in the process of coming to terms with their homosexuality, which enhances their instability in a homologating society. In the three novels here examined the adolescent subject is unable to grow into adulthood and perishes, either literally or metaphorically, as an over-demanding society annihilates his fragile Self.

Key-words: mothering, community, post-nation.

In continuity with the postcolonial socially concerned agenda and the modernist roots of the genre in the 1930s, a streak of the Indian postmillennial novel confirms its vocation as a concerned form of cultural activism. Within this trend, we find The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (2017). The novel weaves together the stories of a whole universe of people and follows their efforts in creating and defending their community against communalism in a country which is increasingly suffering from internal factionalism. In particular, the narration intersects the characters’ destinies with some of the gloomiest and murkiest episodes of contemporary Indian history. Continuing in fictional terms her life-long commitment against neo-liberal economic globalisation and the threats the rise of Hindu nationalism poses to democracy, Roy confirms a gift for storytelling which is genuinely, and almost daringly, literary. The aim of this paper is to assess not only the breadth of this novel’s capacity to tackle thorny political issues, but also to account for its quintessentially artistic devotion to stylistic expertise and original rhetorical proficiency, demonstrating once again the capacity of creative writing to develop social and moral worldviews through its formal experiments.