Category: South Asia

Out of Bounds: Anglo-Indian Literature and the Geography of Displacement, by Alan Johnson, focuses on the crucial role that conceptions of iconic colonial Indian spaces—jungles, cantonments, cities, hill stations, bazaars, clubs—played in the literary and social production of British India. Johnson illuminates the geographical, rhetorical, and ideological underpinnings of such depictions and, from this, argues that these spaces operated as powerful motifs in the acculturation of Anglo-India. He shows that the bicultural, intrinsically ambivalent outlook of Anglo-Indian writers is acutely sensitive to spatial motifs that, insofar as these condition the idea of home and homelessness, alternately support and subvert conventional colonial perspectives.

Writing Past Colonialism
March 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3521-7 / $28.00 (PAPER)

One of the most significant plays of post-Independence India, Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug takes place on the last day of the Great Mahabharata War. The once-beautiful city of Hastinapur is burning, the battlefield beyond the walls is piled with corpses, and the few survivors huddle together in grief and rage, blaming the destruction on their adversaries, divine capriciousness—anyone or anything except their own moral choices. Andha Yug explores our capacity for moral action, reconciliation, and goodness in times of atrocity and reveals what happens when individuals succumb to the cruelty and cynicism of a blind, dispirited age.

“Andha Yug is one of the great Indian plays of the millennium, and in Alok Bhalla it has found an ideal translator. . . . A model in the fraught field of translation.” —Girish Karnad, playwright, Padma Bhushan and Jnanpith Laureate

“Bhalla’s fine translation is austere and rigorous, negotiating both the epic scale of the play and the Spartan simplicity of its poetry.” —Keki N. Daruwalla, poet, Sahitya Akademi Laureate

May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3517-0 / $20.00 (PAPER)
Manoa 22:1