This book establishes river fiction as an identifiable genre-fiction. It argues that rivers and riverbeds—through myths and legends, ecological and environmental concerns, geographical and historical realities, politics and economics around them—can provide an underlying framework to understand Indian prose fiction. With essays on river fiction across India, the volume presents a new way of understanding and reading South Asian literature. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism and South Asian studies.
Edited by:
Subhadeep Ray (Bidhan Chandra College India)
Imprint: Routledge India
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 730g
ISBN: 9781032662534
ISBN 10: 1032662530
Series: South Asian Literature in Focus
Pages: 284
Publication Date: 31 March 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: Reading Indian River Fiction – Intersectional approaches and generic classifications PART I: Narratives 1. Sentient River Narmada and the Politics of Identity 2. River as a Literary Trope: Complexity of Human Relationships in Select Bangla Short-stories 3. The Ambiguous Ganga: Representations of Women and the River in Manik Bandopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi and Samaresh Basu’s Ganga 4. “Those who live beside the river need to be alarmed around the year”: Women across Rivers from Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hasuli Turn to Anita Agnihotri’s Mahuldiha Days 5. The River Trails, the River Tells: A Topoanalytical Reading of The Man from Chinnamasta and Legends of Pensam 6. River, Cityscape and Crime: Navigating the Ganges in Satyajit Ray’s Joi Baba Felunath and Golapi Mukta Rahasya PART II: Geographies 7. The Devastating Case of ‘Holy’ Ganga: Reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and Select Fictional Works 8. The Golden River of India: Reflections on ‘Unsung’ Lives in Nalini Bera’s Subarnarenu Subarnarekha 9. “The anonymous history of her banks is the living truth”: A Comparative Study of Ecology, Community and Gender in Adwaita Mallabarman's Titas Ekti Nadir Naam and Harishankar Jaladas' Jalaputra 10. Ravaged Hinterlands of Central India: Capitalism and Ecological Appropriation in Anita Agnihotri’s Mahanadi: The Tale of a River 11. “What started as a trickle, has become a stream”: Violation of Socio-ecological Justice in Orijit Sen’s River of Stories and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri PART III: Histories: 12. Recalling the Past: River and River Narratives from the Sundarbans 13. Nilasamkriti: The Nila River Culture of Kerala 14. River-city as Affect, Agency and Environment in Contemporary German Writing: Ilija Trojanows along the Ganges 15. Tales of the Brahmaputra across Time: The River and its Ecosphere in Select Fiction from Assam 16. “Through the holes in her ears, you could see the hot river and the dark trees that bent to it”: En-visioning the River as a Text and Tracing the Poetics of Environmental Imagination in The God of Small Things 17. Forms and Imaginations of Labour in Debesh Ray’s Teesta Trilogy
Subhadeep Ray is an Associate Professor of English at Bidhan Chandra College, Asansol, West Bengal, India, and a Visiting Professor of English at Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal, India.
Reviews for River Fiction of India: Intersectional Flows of Narratives, Geographies, and Histories
""Rivers are the arteries of human existence; they nurture lives and civilisations. Although literature has dealt with rivers, river fiction as a genre is an emergent field. This is surprising especially in a country like India where one of the most ancient human civilisations flourished on the banks of the Indus, and rivers are deified and worshipped. This volume which brings together multiple perspectives on river fiction thus addresses a serious lack in literary scholarship and is sure to make a seminal contribution to the field. It puts the human in conversation with the non-human, by bringing together human narratives that are played out against the background of rivers and other natural forces. What makes it more valuable is this acknowledgement of the intersectional nature of riverine ecology, emphasising the inter-connectedness of our existence on this fragile planet."" Mini Chandran, Professor of English, & Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India ""Rivers have been running through the human landscape since time immemorial; they meander through spaces both mythical and actual, enlivening lives both quotidian and fantastic. In India, where rivers create labyrinths of communication and culture, it is no wonder that there must be an attempt to trace their literary and cultural cartography through rivers. This is what Subhadeep Ray has done in his edited book River Fiction of India: Intersectional Flows of Narratives, Geographies, and Histories (Routledge). The book offers an alternative approach to Indian literature and defies the long practice of literary historiography that follows the grand narratives of History. For this book, History becomes ‘Histories’, pluralistic and fragmented, which appears as the final section of the book; the previous two sections are ‘Narratives’ and ‘Geographies’. The structure of the book thus resembles the course of a river, where local and individual narratives commingle to form a mighty stream that flows through various cultural and cartographical geographies of India, finally submitting itself to the innumerable waves of temporality. The book provides a fresh and innovative way of looking at Indian literatures and cultures, including contemporary issues of environment and ecology. Researchers and scholars working on South Asia may find this book interesting."" Parthasarathi Bhaumik, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, & Associate Professor (Visiting), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan
