Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature

ANNA GUTTMAN is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University, USA.

• Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru's Multicultural Indian Nation Vikram Seth's Real(ist) India Parodying Nehru in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh All in the Family: Nayantara Sahgal's Indian Home Re-Examining Indian Non-Alignment: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things States of Dystopia: Imagining Future Indias in Ruchir Joshi's The Last Jet-Engine Laugh Unity in Diversity Beyond the Nation-State in Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop

"Sophisticated . . ..convincing, sometimes surprising, and forward-thinking." - The Year s Work in English Studies "This is a solid and intriguing book that will appeal to scholars and students in South Asian literature, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literature in general. It is an innovative and interesting notion to approach South Asian novels through the lens of a Nehruvian-inspired notion of what India should be. As Guttman argues, the questions this raises are quite lively ones in India and Pakistan today, and by analogy are significant throughout the postcolonial world. Guttman draws on important sources and offers a new ways to read individual texts by such authors as Seth, Rushdie, Sahgal, Roy, Joshi, and Bajwa." - John Hawley, University of Santa Clara