Abstract

abstract:

Postcolonialism has been an all-encompassing discourse that has significantly transformed our ways of looking at the narration of coloniality in the writings of the erstwhile colonies. While it focuses primarily on the literatures in the Englishes (including our own English), the literatures in the bhashas (Indian language literatures) seem to have eluded the postcolonial scholarship. My paper interrogates basic questions involving the perceptions about and the reception of the bhashas. Does Indian English literature represent the Indian experience? Is it alone postcolonial, not the other literatures of India? My paper aims at addressing these anxieties of postcolonialism in theory and practice is in relation to the literatures of India, the bhasha literatures—some of which are more than a thousand years old. It will historicize the complicity between the colonial condition and narration, focusing on major Odia writers like Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843–1918) and Manoj Das (b. 1934).

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