Modernism, Existentialism, and the Aesthetics of the Postcolony

How did writers reimagine self and nation in the postcolonial moment? After the brutalities of partition and the triumph of Independence, decolonization in South Asia unfolded in a dramatic sense of disillusion and alienation. In this transnational study, Toral Gajarawala explores the cultural afterlife of decolonization in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and its profound moment of existential reckoning. In new genres and forms, artists registered a growing sense of estrangement from nation and nationalism, and crafted a new aesthetic landscape. This book reconsiders modernism in the subcontinent, charting the unlikely affiliations and aesthetic experiments it generated. Each chapter discusses a distinct artistic experiment- Hindi novels set in snow and ice, and a Pakistani painter's Paris moment; the existential novel of Bengal, and absurdist plays on famine and extinction- in light of key philosophical concepts of the moment: askesis, responsibility, commitment. The result is an illuminating microanalysis of the 1960s that reshapes our understanding of postcolonial aesthetics.

Toral Jatin Gajarawala is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at NYU and the author of Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (2012). She is also the winner of the William Riley Parker Prize, Modern Language Association; awarded grants by the Camargo Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; forthcoming publications in Modernism/Modernity and Philological Encounters.