Lisa Lau

Meeting grounds: perceiving and defining interdisciplinarity across the arts, social sciences and sciences

Abstract Interdisciplinary work encourages porosity in disciplinary boundaries and the osmosis of knowledge. However, it depends on a willingness of those working within and across disciplines to build bridges instead of erecting walls. One threat to its growth is that academics often refuse to acknowledge the problems of interdisciplinary scholarship. A series of interviews with lecturers and students (mostly from the Department of Geography at Durham) provide some of the data for this article, which discusses attempts to bridge gaps between the sciences and the social sciences, and between the social sciences and the arts. Key points of debate include the ideological split between human and physical geographers, polarisation of research groups, the generational shift in the conceptualisation of geography, and logistical and institutional obstructions to interdisciplinary scholarship. Furthermore, some benefits and disadvantages of conducting interdisciplinary research at doctoral level are explored. We conclude by scanning the proverbial crystal ball in an attempt to foresee what the fate of interdisciplinary studies may be.

Literary Representations of the ‘New Indian Woman’ The Single, Working, Urban, Middle Class Indian Woman Seeking Personal Autonomy

This article discusses the levels of autonomy and self-definition of the ‘new Indian woman’ in the contemporary literature written in English by Indian women writers. The article will analyse the role, position and influence of the natal family in this delicate and highly experimental identity negotiation by contemporary middle class, single, urban Indian women. The focus of this article is on young, single women who have careers or waged employment, and who thus function in both private and public spheres. Caplan (1985) contended that for Indian women, the family alone represented their economic and psychological source of security. The article explores how the contemporary literature portrays changes in this setup and how aspiring new Indian women at the turn of the century perform cultural balancing acts to defend ever greater levels of personal autonomy, while maintaining (even, in some instances, consolidating) their place within their families. The article finds that despite the burgeoning of the middle class in urban India, which sees a radical economic shift towards increasing numbers of single women working outside their homes, as yet there has not been any equally radical shift in the social, cultural or familial situation subsequently; neither has there been a radical change in women’s roles nor societal expectations of them. However, emerging narratives of the last decade show that some small but significant shifts are occurring at this most fundamental level of identity negotiation, and that the identities of women may be more fluid than they had previously been permitted to be.

Making the Difference: The Differing Presentations and Representations of South Asia in the Contemporary Fiction of Home and Diasporic South Asian Women Writers

Contemporary South Asian women writers write from almost anywhere in the world; from all parts of Asia, from Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, and USA. Many of these women writers choose to focus their writings on their experiences of life as South Asian women. In this article, the diasporic literature I will be working with is by South Asian women writers from Canada, UK, and USA, and I therefore may occasionally group these countries under the term, ‘the West’, for ease of reference. For the same purpose, writers writing from within South Asia have been designated the term ‘home writers’. (It must be noted that home and diasporic South Asian women writers are inclined to define themselves as such, based on race, culture, and family background, rather than on nationality and political status.)

India through re-Orientalist Lenses

Re-Orientalism, initially defined as the perpetration of Orientalism by ‘Orientals’ (Lau 2009), is a discourse which comes out of and is inescapably informed by postcolonial and diasporic legacies. The investigation of re-Orientalism has revealed new, even radical strategies of eastern identity construction which, while not escaping Orientalism, manage to Orientalize subversively and with considerable self-awareness. This essay highlights two strategies currently being utilized in the negotiation of contemporary Indian self-identity: vicarious indulgence in poverty literature and vicarious redemption in Bollywood heritage films. The first part of the essay notes how the discourse of ‘Dark India’ via Indian writing in English (IWE) has become not only a re-Orientalist practice, but also most relevantly a re-Orientalist strategy, designed to challenge and deconstruct the rhetoric of ‘India Shining’ and to consciously pander to a western appetite for voyeuristic viewings of India as backward, poverty stricken and crime ridden. The second part of the essay argues that the reweaving of the independence struggle within post-2000 Bollywood heritage films (BHF) vicariously redeems British colonialists by representing white British characters facilitating Indian gallantry and heroism, thus constructing hybrid and more palatable depictions of Indian identities. In sum, the essay finds re-Orientalist discourse today increasingly and strategically utilizing elements of self-reflexivity and demonstrating new tones and themes of satire, subversion, self-mockery, reconciliation and artistic indulgence.

Indian writing in English and the global literary market

Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Foreword Tabish Khair 1. Introduction: The Reception of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the Global Literary Market Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau PART I: MARKETING THEORY OF IWE 2. Writing India Right: Indian Writing and the Global Market Vrinda Nabar 3. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity Pramod K. Nayar 4. How Does it feel to be the Solution? Indians and Indian Diasporic Fiction: Their Role in the Market Place and the University Dorothy M. Figueira 5. Commodifying Culture: Language and Exoticism in Indian English Literature Nivedita Majumdar 6. Recreating the Native Female: Diasporic Appropriations of Female South Asian Writers and their Texts V.G. Julie Rajan PART II: INDIAN WOMEN WRITERS 7. Indian Womens Fiction in the European Market Belen Martin Lucas 8. The troubled politics and reception of The Inheritance of Loss Daniel Allington PART III: INDIAN MEN WRITERS 9. Global Goondas? Money, Crime and Social Anxieties in Aravind Adiga Robbie B. H. Goh 10. In the Right Place at The Right Time: A Tale of Two Brothers Rochelle Almeida 11. Discrepant zones of reception: The presence and absence of Kiran Nagarkar in the West Dirk Wiemann Bibliography Index

India's women and the writing process: Interview with Manju Kapur

Lisa Lau interviews Manju Kapur, author of five novels (Difficult Daughters, 1998; A Married Woman, 2003; Home, 2006; The Immigrant, 2008; Custody, 2011) and editor of Shaping the World (2014).

No longer good girls: sexual transgressions in Indian women's writings

Indian womens writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose rights are routinely exploited and whose welfare and happiness are commonly sacrificed for the good of their families and communities. The literature has often depicted the women as complicit, accepting and upholding the definition of a good woman as one who is faithful, virtuous, self-effacing and obedient. This definition is also one the women instil in their daughters, thus reinforcing this code of ethics. This article observes that there is a tide running contrary to this and that there is a new breed of women in twenty-first century Indian literary fiction in English: women who are single and married, working and non-working, middle and upper-middle class and wives and mothers, who are no longer prepared to be ‘good girls’. These women knowingly, thoughtfully and successfully defy societal conventions to have pre and extramarital affairs, divorces and even custody battles for children, without shame, guilt, dire consequences or even societal condemnation. This article argues that these writings represent a quietly radical departure from the conventional depictions of the roles, expectations and morals of middle-class urban twenty-first century Indian women.

Emotional and Domestic Territories: The Positionality of Women as Reflected in the Landscape of the Home in Contemporary South Asian Women's Writings

The division of domestic space within South Asian households is indicative, and even reflective, of the social status of South Asian women. This article argues the dependence of South Asian womens positionality upon their position within the confines of the home, making a case for the correlation between womens domestic roles and their (self and social) identities. Through an analysis of the contemporary literature written by South Asian women, this article will analyse the joint family system, with its particular gendered spaces and hierarchies of power, exploring how these dictate and limit the interaction of its members, and pattern the relationships formed within them. The positionality of second wives will also be investigated, to trace exactly how the newcomers establish themselves in relatively hostile environments. The body language of the women will be paid particularly close attention, as much of what is being investigated is often not directly verbalised. This article also examines how the private spaces of home can be both sanctuary and prison for South Asian women. It will be seen that for South Asian women, not only their identities, but their survival, may be dependent on their successful staking out of positions within their domestic territories.

The conjunctural spaces of ‘new India’: imagined geographies of 2010s India in representations by returnee migrants

Focusing on returnee Indian authors, this article contributes to analytical perspectives on imagined geographies. We map the imagined geographies of 2010s Delhi and India as experienced and created by Indian returnee migrant authors, drawing on the hybrid nonfiction works India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India by Akash Kapur and Capital: The Eruption of Delhi by Rana Dasgupta. Juxtaposed, these texts sited on the borderline between fiction and nonfiction construct and produce knowledge on an imagined ‘new India’, textualised in literary form. Kapur and Dasgupta, having returned from long sojourns in the West are now India-based, privileged observers of and participants in the very subject of their study – the ground realities of contemporary, 21st century India – both temporally and geographically. As diasporic narrators of a ‘new India’, they stand within their physical landscapes as well as the created landscapes of their narrations. This article draws on the construction of imagined geographies, with a focus on the issue of affect and, relatedly, identification, desire, and transgression, and their impact on the representation of an imaginary homeland, to unpack the tension and dissonance between their imagined geographies of India – as residents and as members of the diaspora – and their lived geographies. We conclude that Kapur and Dasgupta’s imagined geographies offer an alternative account of the contemporary processes that geographers are seeking to describe and explain. Not only do their imagined geographies impact reality but also construct new worlds and realities of ‘new India’ in literary representation. Their hybrid nonfiction texts position India globally, carefully un-glamorising the binary representations of ‘India Shining’ and ‘Dark India’, and recovering the multiplicity of presences in the conjunctural spaces of ‘new India’.

Post-9/11 re-orientalism: Confrontation and conciliation in Mohsin Hamid’s and Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This article offers a comparative reading of the novel and film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, looking at the ways these texts represent changing Western public perceptions towards Pakistan and vice-versa along the temporal axis 2001–2007–2012. Both novel and film are informed by the post-9/11 distrust of the Muslim other. Mohsin Hamid’s novel was begun before 9/11 and published seven years later, in 2007; Mira Nair’s film adaptation followed in 2012, with a premiere at the Venice Film Festival (as the opening film) and the Toronto Film Festival. Ostensibly more conciliatory than Hamid’s novel, Nair’s film adaptation attempts to build bridges, stressing the tragedy of cultural suspicion and mistrust that besets the relationships between Pakistan and the US, endeavouring to open and facilitate dialogue. Despite utilizing spaces of ambiguity to expose the dangers of binary thinking, both novel and film ultimately demonstrate that representations are still unable to escape the loop of orientalism and re-orientalism, highlighting the tension of how East and West continue as locked into this circular mode of relational identity.