This book studies postcolonial Indian novels in order to understand the nature and character of Indian postcolonial modernity. Modernity is understood here as the socio-historical condition that colonial modernisation programmes have given rise to. This condition is deeply catastrophic, marked by such events as the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977). This book contends that a careful study of form and mode in novels registering these events can show that they are all linked with the long-term agrarian crisis originating from the British modernisation programmes in India. It argues that while writers have used the realist form to represent the crisis, because of the specific nature and orientation of these events, they have also employed a wide set of literary modes which shape their realism into a deeply heterogeneous form. These modes of realisms, together read as ‘catastrophic realism’ in this book, insightfully point to the deeply vulnerable condition of life and living in postcolonial India.weiterlesen