Affect and the performative dimension of fear in the Indian English novel : tumults of the imagination

This volume provides a critical reading of Khushwant Singhs Train to Pakistan (1956), Neel Mukherjees The Lives of Others (2014) and Rohinton Mistrys A Fine Balance (1995) to provide a literary account of three fundamental moments in Indias history: the Partition of 1947, the Naxalbari movement, and Indira Gandhis Emergency.
These novels provide literary interpretations of the ways in which feelings of fear and insecurity connected with ethno-religious rivalries, as well as with new power shifts in Indian socio-economic structure, gave a significant contribution to the formation of the political landscape in post-colonial India. More specifically, defying any kind of identitarian juxtaposition (be it related to ethnic belonging, religion, sexuality, or social class), the present work reads those three major novels in Indian English fiction to investigate how episodes of violence, in the first three decades after Indias independence from the British Empire, were enacted under the influence of cultural images and affects which legitimised different social groups to claim for themselves the right to prevail over others, or even take their lives.