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Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction
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Order online and receive a 25% discount $85.00 Hardcover, 247 pp. ISBN13: 978-1-55458-043-9 Release Date: |
Book Description
The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction is a comprehensive study of the literary works of Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit—the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly—and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Clara A.B. Joseph introduces Mahatma Gandhi’s political and philosophical to literary analysis and utilizes non-structuralist aspects of Louis Althusser’s theories of ideology to trace how characters marginalized by gender, class, race, and language in Sahgal’s work assume agency, challenging poststructuralist theories of cultural and ideological determinism. She considers how gender complicates autobiography and how the roles of daughter, virgin, wife, widow, and alien serve (often ironically) to highlight human dignity.
About Clara A.B. Joseph
Clara A.B. Joseph is an associate professor of English at the University of Calgary with a research specialization in postcolonial studies. She is a co-editor of Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions (2006) and Theology and Literature: Rethinking Reader Responsibility (2006) and is on the editorial boards of ARIEL and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Reviews
“How lucky we are to have this book, which captures the unusual place of Nayantara Sahgal’s committed writing in contemporary Indian literature. Best known as Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece and a severe critic of her cousin Indira Gandhi, Sahgal appears in Joseph’s vividly concise analysis as a strong writer mapping agency for Indian collective identity. Grounding her approach in an acute summation of the entire arc of her subjects life-thought, Clara Joseph balances brilliantly her literary criticism of Sahgal’s work with philosophical elements that make her book an interesting theoretical piece thoroughly woven with rigor and deep sensitivity. As such, postcolonial and Gandhian scholars are offered here the opportunity to consider the interaction between Gandhian ideology and Sahgal’s fiction in the context of the making of post-independence India.”
— Ramin Jahanbegloo, University of Toronto, author of India Revisited (2007) and The Spirit of India (2008)
