Rewriting the Past and Tracing the Limits of Community in Contemporary Indian Ocean Fiction

FAIN: FT-278766-21

Kritish Rajbhandari
Reed College (Portland, OR 97202-8138)

Writing of a book on the relationship between fiction and history in a selection of contemporary South Asian and Eastern African novels written in French and English.

This book project confronts the importance of lateral exchanges in the Indian Ocean in shaping the cultures and communities of the region. It takes the Indian Ocean as a transnational framework to explore the relationship between fiction and history in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone novels from South Asia and Eastern Africa. Examining the novels alongside multi-lingual, trans-historical archives, ranging from legal and administrative documents to travel narratives, photographs, and film, I contend that the novels employ a self-conscious mode of rewriting history, which exposes the limits of the various forms of community imagined in the region. This interdisciplinary project formulates a historically and culturally informed reading of the Indian Ocean that is sensitive to the region’s complex history of colonization and decolonization and at the same time responsive to its racial, linguistic, and cultural heterogeneity.