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Ulka Anjaria

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Stanford University

Research Interests

South Asian literatures and film; postcolonial literature and theory; narrative theory; the global novel; interdisciplinary approaches; literary theory

Selected Publications

“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

Novel Forms: Conjuring the modern in late colonial India
In this book, I argue that experimental forms of the novel were central to imaginations of modernity in the 1930s. In postcolonial criticism, the novel is seen as a crucial tool in the formation of a national consciousness due to its progressive historicism and its commitment to secular, humanist ideals.  Nuancing this configuration, I argue that many works from this period in fact stage and contest elements of dominant nationalist discourse as a necessary feature of their realist representation.  In foregrounding moments of heteroglossia, irony, and genre mixing as fundamental to these works’ literary realism, I argue that the novel offers a crucial site from which to rethink the content of modernity in the late colonial period.  Likewise, I suggest that attention to the rich, if not always aesthetically coherent, visions of India’s future offered by these texts sheds new insight not only on the particular history of the Indian novel, but on the problem of delineating the literary aesthetics of modernity (typically grouped as ‘modernism’) across the colonized world.  Authors discussed include Premchand, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Mulk Raj Anand.

The Poetics of Disillusion: India’s postcolonial novel
This project focuses on aesthetic and formal disillusion as the constitutive features—the antidote to generic dissolution—of the postcolonial novel in India from the 1950s through the 2000s.  I attribute the success of the postcolonial Indian novel to the particular aesthetic of disillusion that is so variously elaborated by Srilal Shukla as early as the 1960s, by Rushdie and Mistry in the 1980s and 90s, and by the group of novels I characterize as the ‘angry young man’ globalization texts of the 2000s (The White Tiger, Animal’s People, Q&A, among others).  In this way, I argue against dominant critical celebrations of hybrid aesthetics and linguistic ‘chutnification’ to underline a more despondent mode of postcolonial self-fashioning, where literary texts are founded upon their disillusion not only with the failures of Indian nationalism, but with literary form itself.

Selected Courses Taught

Bollywood (ENG 20a)
Filmi Fictions: From Page to Screen in India (ENG 22a)
Totalitarian Fictions (ENG 162a)  
Decolonizing Fictions (ENG 167a)