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Accepted Paper:

The ambivalent return to the village in the post-liberalization period: Maitreyi Pushpa's novel "Chak" [the potter's wheel]  
Richard Delacy (Harvard University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper examinesa recent critically acclaimed Hindi pastoral novel Chak, by the celebrated feminist writer Maitreyi Pushpa, to think through literary responses to liberalization in South Asia and anxieties over Hindi as a literary register in the new millennium.

Paper long abstract:

With South Asia's rapid economic and social transformation in the post-liberalization period, the Hindi novel has returned to the village in search of an authentic South Asian identity. The novels of the celebrated and prolific writer Maitreyi Pushpa embody this recent shift to non-metropolitan Hindi writers. Having migrated to the metropolis in search of literary opportunities such writers represent the abandoned hinterland in a nostalgic, yet ambivalent mode as the authentic site of South Asian identity. Pupsha's work turns a highly critical, gendered lens onto problems of contemporary everyday life in rural India. However, in Pushpa's fiction the village should not be abandoned despite the moral degeneration of its inhabitants from the corrupting, exploitative forces of global capital. Pushpa's fallen village - and her authentic South Asian identity - finds its savior in the strong, independent female rural subaltern, who accomplishes a successful journey from the domestic sphere to the public/political sphere, redeeming a specifically South Asian rural landscape. Examining Pushpa's third novel Chak (1997, 2004), I interrogate how anxieties over the recent economic transformations emerge in Pupsha's gendered portrayal, and the contradictions/complexities inherent in the invocation of an authentic South Asian village identity, at a time when increasingly villagers are forced to migrate to India's metropolitan cities. I examine how the novel struggles with its own status as a commodity as it critiques global capital and entreats the reader to reflect on a literary form of Hindi that now seems distant from the contemporary, global world of metropolitan South Asia.

Panel P37
Up to date? Hindi literature in the 21st century
  Session 1