The Stranger: Existentialism and the Modernist Arts of South Asia

FAIN: FT-278983-21

Toral Gajarawala
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)

Research and writing of a book on the development of existentialist thought in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh during the 1960s and 1970s.

How did modernist poets, playwrights and artists imagine the idea of freedom in the early moments of a newly decolonized India, Pakistan and Bangladesh? The Stranger: Existentialism and the Modernist Arts of South Asia draws on the artistic trope of the “stranger” to consider the development of existentialist thought by writers, artists, and critics from South Asia in the 1960s and 70s. Arguing that existentialism offered a realm of freedom philosophically and aesthetically distinct from that augured by a new postcolonial citizenship, this project considers the range of texts that played with abstraction, metaphysics, and spirituality, insisting that the problem of the postcolonial self was still to be negotiated, even after Independence. I focus specifically on two artistic engagements with French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus to ask how South Asian intellectuals created a distinct sense of the modern arts while also contributing to a global existentialist language.