Anxieties, Influences and After

"""...a comprador intelligentsia: of a relatively small, Western style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery."" Neil Lazarus on postcoloniality However, any such essentialization of postcolonial studies is difficult as it itself by its own making resists essentialism. The book attempts to show how diverse are the possibilities of postcolonialism as an academic discipline and how manifold is its relevance in today's world. The book covers much discussed issues like postcolonial re-reading of Shakespeare or Indian Writing in English carving new interpretations out of the 'obvious'. Though the essays are various in subject matter and scope they clearly draw a trajectory of the irreducible colonial presence starting from texts like Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya's ""Swaraj in Ideas"" written in the heyday of colonialism till the more recent and upcoming issues like South Asian Gay Diaspora. The book moreover deals with issues as diverse as Partition of India, the appropriation of the genre of detective fiction as well as popular Hindi film. It touches upon several disciplines like history, anthropology, politics and literature and includes high-end archival research like Santanu Das's work on predicament of Indian soldiers under British Empire. Above all the book becomes a congregation of voices from a country like India in particular where colonialism has been such an overarching influence and therefore discusses texts and contexts which apparently are not discussed under Postcolonialism like novels of Premchand or Troilokyonath, but definitely contains anxieties of colonial impact. The book remaining within the discipline of postcolonial studies attempts to overturn some of its disciplinary and intellectual boundaries created largely by the western academia. The conversations with Bill Ashcroft and Mahesh Dattani would revitalize postcolonial scholarship and act as a valuable source material to look into for the recent developments in this field."