India's Forests, Real and Imagined

Writing the Modern Nation

Alan Johnson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350353923
• eBook ISBN: 9780755634118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As they seek to explore evolving and conflicting ideas of nationhood and modernity, India's writers have often chosen forests as the dramatic setting for stories of national identity. India's Forests, Real and Imagined explores how these settings have been integral to India's sense of national consciousness. Alan Johnson demonstrates that modern writers have drawn on older Indian literary traditions of the forest as a place of exile, trial and danger to shape new ideas of India as a modern nation. The book casts new light on a wide range of modern writers, from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay – widely regarded as the first Indian novelist – to contemporary authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie as well as local attitudes to nationhood and the environment across the country.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Imagining India’s Forests
• 1 Moral Kingship, Forest Dwellers, and Epic and Vernacular Forests
• 2 Colonial History, Home Forests, and Mother India in Bankim’s Anandamath
• 3 Premchand’s Forest, Bibhutibhushan’s Aranyak, and the Progressive Era
• 4 History, Nation, and Forest in Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh
• 5 Indigeneity, Forestry, and the State in C. K. Janu, Mahasweta Devi, and Easterine Kire
• Conclusion: The City in the Forest
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page