Re-temporalising the Cultural in India

Ritwick Bhattacharjee, Srinjoyee Dutta

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9789356404038
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The book looks at the different ways the temporal features in the existential exigencies of the human located within the definitive boundaries of Indianness. This has been done through an interrogation of different cultural artefacts that have been produced, across the space and time of the Indian nation, to look not only at representations of Time but how time (as the temporal) actually finds a play in them. Each act of the cultural becomes, in a sense, a relation of the very action of time. This way, the volume wishes to think, in a very pointed manner, how this play of the temporal defines the Indian Being and allow narratives, of different kinds and forms, to become. Each chapter in the volume seek to read the temporal action inside the contemporaneity of India's existence since, for better or for worse, the west has taken a hold in. The global interaction that India has had to go through, either as a British colony or a world post-colony, has allowed a meshing in of the western philosophical conceptualisations of time with (and within) the Indian ones. The changes that it has wrought, then, become as important as those that have been rooted in a historical functioning of the nation.