Contact Information
Rabb 239
office hours: sabbatical 2011-12
uanjaria @ brandeis.edu
781-736-2162
See Professor Anjaria's Faculty Guide page for more information.
Ulka Anjaria
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Stanford University
Professor Anjaria is on sabbatical for the 2011-2012 school year.
Select link for information about the Soli Sorabjee Lecture Series
Research Interests
South Asian literatures and film; postcolonial literature and theory; narrative theory; the global novel; interdisciplinary approaches; literary theory
Selected Publications
“‘Relationships Which Have No Name:’ Family and Sexuality in 1970s Popular Film.” Journal of South Asian Popular Culture 12.1(2012): 1-13.
“‘Why Don’t You Speak?’: The narrative politics of silence in three South Asian novels.” Colonialism, Modernity and Literature: A view from India. Ed. Satya P. Mohanty. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011. 153-170.
"Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial Novel." NOVEL: A Forum for Fiction. 44.2(2011): 186-207.
“Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies of the City.” (co-authored with Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria) Economic and Political Weekly. 45.24(2010): 41-46.
“A Literary Kartography: Urban space and the postcolonial novel.” South Asian Review 29.1(2008): 216-233.
“Text, Genre, Society: Hindi youth films and postcolonial desire” (co-authored with Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria), in Journal of South Asian Popular Culture 6.2 (2008): 125-140.
"On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and form in Zadie Smith." Zadie Smith: Critical essays. Ed., Tracey Lorraine Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
"Satire, Literary Realism, and the Indian State: Six Acres and a Third and Raag Darbari." Economic and Political Weekly 41.46(2006): 4795-4800.
"Literature and the Limits of Law: Crime, guilt and agency in Premchand's Ghaban." Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts. New Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2005. 437-43.
Current Projects
Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (under contract)
Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel argues that unlike what we might glean from the revisionist "post-realism' of Salman Rushdie and others, realism in the early Indian novel was never a naïve belief in the knowability of the material world but a powerful mode of political self-fashioning under colonialism. Writers demonstrated the radical plasticity of the realist mode as they allowed their works to break apart at crucial moments, representing—in the form of aesthetic disruption—the disorienting experience of historical change. Far from a seamless aesthetic, realist novels written under colonialism are rife with contradictions, formal and thematic discontinuities, and uneven bouts of self-consciousness and metafictionality. Yet they remained committed to realist ideals—especially those of humanist characterization and linear temporality—as a means to rethink the meaning of national modernity in India. In their works, they play with characterization and time precisely in order to demonstrate the incompleteness of modernity under colonialism. Looking at works by Premchand, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, I argue that realism in the colony is a contradictory formal mode that allowed Indian writers to rethink who they were and to reimagine what they wanted their country to be.
“Whither Progressive Writing?: The new social in Indian literature”This project traces the legacy of Progressive Writing in contemporary Indian fiction and film. Although today the kind of social realism espoused by Premchand or Mulk Raj Anand is seen by most readers as hopelessly outdated and naïve, I argue that new modes of social protest have emerged in recent literature in surprising and unexpected ways. These include, for instance, a return to a gritty, documentary-style realism after the decades-long dominance of magical realism. Another trend is the gradual usurpation of the cause of the ‘social’ by a universalized middle-class subject. Works studied include The White Tiger, Last Man in Tower, Six Suspects, Rang De Basanti, No One Killed Jessica, A Wednesday, Serious Men, One Night @ the Call Center and others.
Selected Courses Taught
Bollywood (ENG 20a)
Filmi Fictions: From Page to Screen in India (ENG 22a)
Totalitarian Fictions (ENG 162a)
Decolonizing Fictions (ENG 167a)