Nation and Nationalism in South Asian Literature

This volume explores the ways in which religion in the South Asian literary landscape play a significant role in the creation of political structures and secular democracies in South Asia. It highlights how the concepts of nation, nationalism, and secularism in South Asia is frequently determined by the rhetoric of racism, fundamentalism and religious fanaticism, minority politics, issues of caste, class, and ethnic identity, border politics, diaspora, among other factors.
This edited volume investigates the extent to which national identities are regarded as potent dimensions of social participation in South Asian literature. It studies key works of many South Asian writers to explicate how the rich national and secular dynamics of the South Asian context remain entwined with questions such as:
- How could democratic processes be implemented in independent states by separating politics from religion?
- How do certain literary texts depict the notion of nationalism expanding beyond the concept of a single nation due to its intricate ethnic, regional, and cultural offshoots?
- How does religious mobilisation in South Asian literary narratives become a carrier of secularism within and beyond South Asian countries?
- How can (mis)conceptions regarding religious fundamentalism be understood through the policies and politics of secularism and postcolonial nationalism?

Taking readers through literary and cultural analysis of diverse literary productions, this volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of literature, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, identity politics and political philosophy, modern history, and South Asia studies.

Goutam Karmakar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad in India, with affiliations at MESH and GSSC, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He has received prestigious fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt and National Research Foundation awards. His research spans Global South literature, postcolonial and decolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities. Karmakar edits the journal Global South Literary Studies and the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.

Nukhbah Taj Langah joined Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan, after completing her doctorate from the University of Leeds in 2009. She is currently affiliated with the Department of English, University of Malaya, Malaysia. Her research interests include resistance literature from South Asia, translation theory and practice, and South Asian diasporic literature. Her publications include Poetry as Resistance: Islam and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Pakistan (2011). A recent edited volume includes N. Langah & R. Sengupta (eds.) Volume I - Film, Media, and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia (Delhi: London: New York, Routledge 2021), and Literary & non-Literary Responses towards 9/11 (Delhi, London, New York: Routledge, 2019). She associated with CEIAS Paris (2016-2017) as a research fellow from 2016-2017 and was selected as Charles Wallace Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2018. She is a freelance translator and a political activist voicing the Siraiki community in Pakistan. In 2008, she collaborated with the Poetry Translation Center (London) and co-translated Pakistani Urdu poet Noshi Gillani with the British poet Lavinia Greenlaw (Poems: Noshi Gillani (Enitharmon, 2008). She has recently completed “Archives of Siraiki Cultural and Political History” funded by the Modern Endangered Archives Program (UCLA, USA). Her forthcoming publications include several papers and edited anthologies.