This thesis is a comparative study of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993). It compares the novels' representations of the postcolonial Indian nation-state and of the conflict between secular and religious perspectives in the Indian public sphere. The novels are interpreted as responses to specific moments of crisis in the so-called "secular consensus" of the Indian state: Midnight's Children to the Emergency of 1975, A Suitable Boy to the rise of the Hindu right in the early 1990s. The aim of this study is to establish secularism as an interpretative concept in South Asian literature in English. Each chapter examines different aspects of the texts in relation to secularism. The first chapter outlines two different theoretical positions, Seth's "rationalist" and Rushdie's "radical" secularism. The second examines the question of minority identity in the two novels. The third explores the different narrative structures that shape their ideas of Indian citizenship. The fourth compares their differing versions of India's national past. The fifth interrogates the status of English as a secular language in the Indian context by examining the interaction between English and Indian vernaculars in the two texts. The dialogic form of the novel has been appropriated by postcolonial Indian writers in English in order to stage contrasting religious and secular worldviews. This dialogism, it is suggested, may offer the possibility of opening up the public sphere to different modes of communication not exclusively defined by rationalism.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-294).

This dissertation considers how twentieth century British lyric poets, in continuing the traditional relationship between religion and poetry, respond to changing expectations and assumptions about poetry’s role and power—changes directly related to ongoing social processes of secularization. By combining recent critical insights from secularization theory and lyric theory with close readings of poems, essays, and letters from British poets, this dissertation shows that due to social changes that cohere around World War I, poets like Wilfred Owen, Mary Borden, and David Jones confront an unsettling of traditional strategies of lyric enchantment. This unsettling both imperils the legitimacy of lyric poetics and opens new opportunities. Poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and H.D. subsequently engage in strategies of deliberate re-enchantment to justify wide-ranging vocations, while the later Eliot, David Jones, and Elizabeth Jennings confront the limits of re-enchantment but still imagine the poetic vocation as connected to religion. In every case, this dissertation shows that lyric re-enchantment (as a distillation of the aesthetic itself) is fundamentally ambiguous; it is necessarily secular and immanent, yet it continues to imply a transcendence that can easily be put to religious or even supernatural ends. The lyric is thus a genre that uniquely registers the opportunities and challenges for the aesthetic in a secular age.

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This dissertation maps the emergence of a 'secularist ethics' in post-independence South Asian literature and film, an ethics which is a deeply felt poetic response to particular historical conjunctures marked by religio-nationalist conflict in the Indian subcontinent. It is my argument that literary and cultural productions, in striving to dream and envision a world free of violence, terror and religious intolerance, have some central contributions to make to contemporary intellectual and political debates on secularism. Through close readings of fictions by Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Bapsi Sidhwa, Saadat Hasan Manto, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Jamila Hashmi, Jyotirmoyee Devi, and Lalithambika Antherjanam, as well as films by M. S. Sathyu, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Khalid Mohamed and Shyam Benegal, which are concerned to address the issue of peaceful co-existence between different religious communities and nations in the Indian subcontinent, I argue that literary and imaginative endeavors by way of their alternative secularist imaginaries enable us to begin to imagine the possibilities of more habitable futures. Significantly, the 'secularist' fictions and films I invite attention to in my project enable a revisioning of the secular in terms quite different from normative understandings of liberal secularism. Such a renewed secularism seeks to make visible the normalization and neutralization of majoritarian religious beliefs and practices as constitutive of the representative secular-nationalist self in post-Partition India; it also emerges, significantly, from a gendered critique of the deep-seated patriarchal norms underlying most religious communities. Responding to different moments of crisis, predominantly the Partition of India in 1947, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the radical secularist poetics of these works call attention to the fundamentalist agenda of Hindu nationalism, the limit

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Heidelberg, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 387-406) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Heidelberg, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 387-406) and index.