Postcolonial Fiction and the Question of Influence: Arundhati Roy, <i>The God of Small Things</i> and Rumer Godden

This article reflects on formal and technical similarities in the writing of Arundhati Roy and Rumer Godden through a close parallel examination of three works by Godden: Black Narcissus (1939), The River (1946), and The Peacock Spring (1975) and Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). I use the possibility of an unrecognized dialogue between Godden’s and Roy’s fictions to tackle the broader issue of “influence” as a critical-conceptual elephant in the room of postcolonial literary studies: something that can only be spoken of in certain ways, using a certain vocabulary. I ask why certain critical assumptions—amongst them the politics of “writing back,” a kind of ironic formal auto-critique and a tendency to avoid “vertical” comparison between earlier and later texts in the post/colony except as a resistant form of reiterative citation—have made the question of “influence” a peculiarly difficult one to pose (and to answer) in postcolonial literary contexts

The 1990s: An increasingly postcolonial decade

The article offers a critical contextualized overview of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the decade of the 1990s, at a time when it was edited at the Universities of Leeds and Hull. It looks at the journal’s relations to the emerging and rapidly changing field of postcolonial literary studies, when JCL shifted from offering fairly predictable close readings of writers still predominantly described as “Commonwealth”, to more prominently theorized accounts of migrant and national narratives

Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This article uses the term “anticipatory anti-colonial writing” to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayan’s local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anand’s awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latter’s anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a “bridge between the Ganges and the Thames” and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism

Data Management in Multicountry Consortium Studies: The Enterics For Global Health (EFGH) Shigella Surveillance Study Example

Background: Rigorous data management systems and planning are essential to successful research projects, especially for large, multicountry consortium studies involving partnerships across multiple institutions. Here we describe the development and implementation of data management systems and procedures for the Enterics For Global Health (EFGH) Shigella surveillance study—a 7-country diarrhea surveillance study that will conduct facility-based surveillance concurrent with population-based enumeration and a health care utilization survey to estimate the incidence of Shigella­-associated diarrhea in children 6 to 35 months old. Methods: The goals of EFGH data management are to utilize the knowledge and experience of consortium members to collect high-quality data and ensure equity in access and decision-making. During the planning phase before study initiation, a working group of representatives from each EFGH country site, the coordination team, and other partners met regularly to develop the data management systems for the study. Results: This resulted in the Data Management Plan, which included selecting REDCap and SurveyCTO as the primary database systems. Consequently, we laid out procedures for data processing and storage, study monitoring and reporting, data quality control and assurance activities, and data access. The data management system and associated real-time visualizations allow for rapid data cleaning activities and progress monitoring and will enable quicker time to analysis. Conclusions: Experiences from this study will contribute toward enriching the sparse landscape of data management methods publications and serve as a case study for future studies seeking to collect and manage data consistently and rigorously while maintaining equitable access to and control of data

Miraculous Realities: Postcolonial Identity and the Limits of Form in the Work of Salman Rushdie and Intizar Husain

We return to the theme of migration and dislocation with an essay by Tickell on postcolonial identities in the literature of Salman Rushdie and Intizar Hussain. ... (Introduction

'An Idea Whose Time Has Come': Indian Fiction in English After 1991

This chapter surveys recent Indian English fiction published after India's economic liberalization in 1991. It looks at changing social and publishing contexts of the contemporary novel and discusses works by Manju Kapur, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga and Chetan Bhagat

Scholarship-terrorists: the India House Hostel and the 'student problem' in Edwardian London

This book-chapter examines the nationalist politics of and British counter-terrorist measures taken against India House - a notorious Indian student hostel managed by Shyamji Krishnavarma and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in the London suburb of Highate between 1905 and 1910. My analysis reviews the politics of the Indian House group and explores the policy-recommendations of the Lee Warner committee, founded to counteract the increasing political radicalism of Indian students in Britain. The chapter concludes with a short analysis of Sarath Kumar Ghosh's contemporary novel 'The Prince of Destiny'