WOMAN AND INDIAN MODERNITY

Readings of Colonial and Postcolonial Novels.

by Nalini Natarajan

(University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras)

            Drawing from the large body of criticism on non-European modernities in recent years, this study targets what seems to be a discernible ambivalence in these studies.  The author seeks to investigate twentieth-century India’s complex negotiations with modernity, with its usefulness as well as its threat, at one of the most vulnerable points of definition, the position of women. Focusing on the disciplines or genres within which modernity is introduced, the study uses the modern literary genre, as well as intellectual disciplines.  Using these two domains of study, an interdisciplinary framework is developed by looking at how narratives may be read in the light of other disciplines constructing the modern subject-ideologies of manners and ‘refinement’, prohibition, ethnography, ethnospsychology, film, property law and urban history.