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'A good bombing begins everywhere at once':
Reading Infrastructure and Form in the Contemporary Indian Novel in English'
My paper addresses the apparent challenge to the form of the anglophone novel posed by accelerated political and infrastructural change in contemporary (post-liberalisation) India. Taking the scene of the bomb-blast and the fragment in Karan Mahajan’sThe Association of Small Bombs (2016) as a starting point, but also covering novels such Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), I will ask how Indian-English authors meet the representational and aesthetic ‘problem’ of civic cataclysm in the form of terror, environmental disaster, and military conflict. My reading will be informed by, or angled through, urbanist approaches to disrupted or failed infrastructure by commentators like Steven Graham, Colin McFarlane, Brian Larkin and Eyal Weizman and a renewed critical focus on literary form in the work of Caroline Levine.
ALEX TICKELL
Alex Tickell is Senior Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK, and Director of the OU's Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group. Tickell taught previously at the University of Leeds and the University of York. He specialises in the anglophone literary histories of South Asia and South East Asia and conjunctions of literature and politics, and is the author of Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature: 1830 -1947 (Routledge: 2013).
Alex Tickell also researches contemporary Indian fiction and has published a guide to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (Routledge: 2007) and recently edited an essay collection, South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations (Palgrave 2016). He is currently working on a monograph on fictions of the 'New India'. He is the editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English (Vol 10): The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945.