In 2016, we celebrated 500 years of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. Lyman Tower Sargent and Jacqueline Dutton argued in their Introduction to a Utopian Studies special issue, devoted to “Utopias from Other Cultural Traditions”, that a reconsideration of the epistemological foundations of utopia is in order, that it is necessary to reframe western Judaeo-Christian definitions of utopia in order to take into account the parallel existence of utopianism in other cultural traditions, and that this allows us to recognize the wealth of texts and images from different parts of the world. This Special Collection concurs with this view and builds on existing work by scholars on utopia and India such as Gyan Prakash (conditions of historical possibility), Konrad Meisig (Buddhistic utopia), Barnita Bagchi (feminist utopia from South Asia), Anupama Mohan (utopia and the village in South Asia, including India), Supriya Chaudhuri (Indian Modernisms and utopia), and Mrinalini Chakravorty (contemporary dystopian texts from India), while also taking new directions. These include sustained attention to literature written in bhashas (vernacular languages), to contemporary Indian films, to poetry, and to the indispensable excavation of classic Modernist writers from twentieth-century India, such as Satinath Bhaduri, who can be usefully understood using a utopian studies framework. Polyvalent narratives imagining a utopian nation, in the period before the Partition and independence of India in 1947, form a major focus of analysis in this Collection. Contributions analyse literature, film, and art from different regions of India, notably Bengal and northern India. The genesis of this Special Collection lies in a seminar held at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in July 2017 at Utrecht University, on the theme of utopian imagination and South Asia.
This Special Collection is edited by Dr Barnita Bagchi, Senior Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, Utrecht University, Netherlands.
Featured image by unsplash-logoMitchell Ng Liang an on UnsplashUtopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Modern Indian Utopian Art and Literature: An Introduction
Barnita Bagchi and Sukla Chatterjee
2022-05-06 Volume 8 • Issue 1 • 2022
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Embodying Utopia in 1935: Poetry and the Feminized Nation
Anne Castaing
2019-01-30 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2019 • 8
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Nishchindipur: The Impossibility of a Village Utopia
Supriya Chaudhuri
2019-04-05 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2019 • 25
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay’s Caitālī ghūrṇi and The Dystopia of Hunger
Sukla Chatterjee
2019-04-17 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2019 • 29
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Special Collections
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Humour as a Human Right
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: Opening Museum Collections, Project Data and Digital Images for Research, Query and Discovery
Literature as Imaginary Archive: Ephemera and Modern Literary Production
Caliban's Mirror: Reflections of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde
Cultural Representations of Machine Vision
The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past
Medieval Minds and Matter
Representing the Medieval in Popular Culture: Remembering the Angevins
The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish Campaign to End Period Poverty
Production Archives 03: Archival Practices
Production Archives 02: Production Contexts
Production Archives 01: Puppets for Action
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine
Binary Modernisms: Re/Appropriations of Modernist Art in the Digital Age
Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture
Reading in Ruins: Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies
The Language of Perspective
Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain
The Working-Class Avant-Garde
Colonialities in Dispute: Discourses on Colonialism and Race in the Spanish State
Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918–2018
Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
Muslims in the Media
Encounters between Asian and Western Art in the 20th and 21st centuries: a liberating influence for Asia?
Waste: Disposability, Decay, and Depletion
Pride Revisited: Cinema, Activism and Re-Activation
New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records
Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives
Representing Climate: Local to Global
Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics
Freedom After Neoliberalism
The Medieval Brain
Remaking Collections
New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies
Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Imaginaries of the Future 02: Politics, Poetics, Place
Imaginaries of the Future 03: Utopia at the Border
Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing
#Agreement20
What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the 21st Century
New Voices in Jewish-American Literature
Authors, Narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives
From TV To Film
American Literature & the Transnational Marketplace
Mnemosyne
Healing Gods, Heroes and Rituals in the Graeco-Roman World
The Abolition of the University