Contested terrains and multiple authorities literary criticism in India after 1990

Abstract

The purpose of the present thesis has not been to dismiss Western theories of criticism in terms of their meaningful application to Indian literature. After all, all these years we have derived a lot of critical impetus from these theories. Also there is no aim to romanticize the so-called indigenous as essentially more authentic. We have seen in our discussion in the preceding chapters that Indian critics have not only tried to indigenise the foreign, but have also struggled to update the indigenous to respond to modern literary works. The thesis charts out the spectrum of critical possibilities that Indian critics can explore and exploit to understand and appreciate the nuances of Indian literature. For one group of critics, Indian cultural diversity/ heterogeneity and social polycentric space are symptoms of absent authority.and#8223; but for some others, multiculturalism and multilingualism have been the strength of Indian society from the twelfth century. That multiplicity was seen as degradation in the past, and is seen as weakness today. We need to get over the sense of guilt through an open-eyed approach to history in order to build a modern Indian critical discourse (After Amnesia 129). Today almost every Indian language has its own critical tradition that includes theory and practice both. In addition to it we have criticism along regional, temporal and thematic/ epochal lines. In this way, under different rubrics, we have a huge corpus of books and articles in the fields of critical theory and literary criticism. newline