Desirable or Dysfunctional? Family in Recent Indian English-Language Fiction

Abstract

Meenakshi Mukherjee, in the period when Commonwealth Literature was attempting to establish the difference of national cultures from a British canon, pointed to the perception of early Indian novelists that South Asian family structures mitigated against working in a form based around individual characters (7-9). Where arranged marriage, the greater importance of the extended family unit, and caste affiliations had more social force, stories and their resolutions would have to look different from those of Hardy, Eliot or Henry James. If we think of the world of Austen, this is evidently a difference of degree rather than an absolute distinction, but Sudhir Kakar has also elaborated on the strength of ties in India between child and parent that moderate teenage rebellion and the radical break of adult individuation that the West has come to see as normal. The stress of Commonwealth Literature and its variants, on cultural specificity and local aesthetics, matched at the local end of the critical scale by nationalistic insistence on authenticity and tradition, kept literary treatments of the Indian family more or less centre stage but also perhaps under-examined in that they took for granted the general social grounding of particular fictions. Keywords era2015 Disciplines Arts and Humanities | LawPublication Details Sharrad, P. (2013). Desirable or dysfunctional? Family in recent Indian english-language fiction. South Asia, 36 (1), 123-133.

Commonwealth, empire, and critique in South Asia

“…Family in Recent Indian English-language Fiction”. Sharrad (2013: 123) cites the literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee on Commonwealth literature as a framework meant to specify points of national difference from Britain. The article refers to “cultural specificity and local aesthetics of Commonwealth literature and its variants”, which accords with “the local end of the critical scale” characterized by “nationalistic insistence on authenticity and tradition” (2013: 123).…”

“…Sharrad (2013: 123) cites the literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee on Commonwealth literature as a framework meant to specify points of national difference from Britain. The article refers to “cultural specificity and local aesthetics of Commonwealth literature and its variants”, which accords with “the local end of the critical scale” characterized by “nationalistic insistence on authenticity and tradition” (2013: 123). In this sense, Commonwealth literature, as perhaps intended by the founders of JCL , is anything but a homogeneous set of literary practices; it is instead meant to imply cultural specificity.…”

“…Ideas of cultural specificity “kept literary treatments of the Indian family more or less centre stage”. At the same time, literary representations of the Indian family could remain “under-examined”, because such models of cultural specificity “took for granted the general social grounding of particular fictions” (2013: 123). As Sharrad implies, the category of Commonwealth privileged the nation as the adjective of proper size to describe such concepts as “family”.…”

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Fault Lines in Ecofeminism

“…Nanda does what a conventional Indian woman is never expected to do-live a solitary life, away from responsibilities. Sharrad (2013) in his "Desirable or Dysfunctional? Family in Recent Indian English-Language Fiction" discusses the "major shift in outlook" in the Indian fiction where certain norms regarding a family and family life are dismantled (p. 123).…”