Cambridge Scholars Publishing Affect and the Performative Dimension of Fear in the Indian English Novel: Tumults of the Imagination

This volume provides a critical reading of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) to provide a literary account of three fundamental moments in India’s history: the Partition of 1947, the Naxalbari movement, and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. These novels provide literary interpretations of the ways in which feelings of fear and insecurity connected with ethno-religious rivalries, as well as with new power shifts in Indian socio-economic structure, gave a significant contribution to the formation of the political landscape in post-colonial India. More specifically, defying any kind of identitarian juxtaposition (be it related to ethnic belonging, religion, sexuality, or social class), the present work reads those three major novels in Indian English fiction to investigate how episodes of violence, in the first three decades after India’s independence from the British Empire, were enacted under the influence of cultural images and “affects” which legitimised different social groups to claim for themselves the right to prevail over others, or even take their lives. The volume starts with a reflection on the spreading of rumours during Partition in Train to Pakistan (1956) and their power to turn friendly communities into sworn enemies. The analysis proceeds then to discuss how the newborn government’s struggle to stifle the Naxalbari movement, as it described in The Lives of Others, was partly sustained by paranoiac feelings projected by the new metropolitan bourgeoisie on the people living in the rural parts of the country. The historical itinerary concludes with an analysis of A Fine Balance’s description of the two main political objectives of the Emergency: the “beautification” of India and the reduction of the country’s population. Both appear to be revealing moments of a predatory character present in the new Indian democratic institutions, transmitted as a kind of bodily contagion. About the Author Giuseppe De Riso is an adjunct professor in English Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, where he also completed his Ph.D. in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World with a dissertation entitled “The Body Expanded: Agency, Representation and Affect in Tridimensional Videogames”. He is also editorial assistant and webmaster for Anglistica AION, an interdisciplinary journal of the Department of Literary, Linguistic, and Comparative Studies of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (https://www.anglistica-aion-unior.org/). In 2013 he published a book entitled Affective Maps and Bio-mediated Bodies in Tridimensional Videogames of the Anglophone World, as well as different treatises on post-colonial literature and digital media, such as “Bodily Remediations in Geetanjali Shree’s The Empty Space”, “Of Smoke and Mirrors: Tribal Women in Postcolonial India” and “Gaming Gender: Virtual Embodiment as a Synaesthetic Experience”. He is currently researching on the political role of literature and new media in the emergence of the public sphere in South Asian countries.