In “Realism and the South Asian Novel,” Pranav Jani examines three Anglophone South Asian novels from the turn of the twenty-first century to reveal the complicated relationship between realism and postcoloniality. Often, Anglophone novels after Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children are read as if their postcoloniality implies a postmodernist distancing from realism. But Jani finds that despite their metafictional playfulness and disruption of linear narration, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things offer realist practices that illuminate historical truths about postcolonial South Asia. Rather than being anti-realist, Jani contends, these novels expand the real to include epistemological and self-reflexive processes while they criticize social oppression, elite complicity, sectarian and ethnic violence, caste apartheid, and patriarchy. Like the classic social realist novels of the past, recent Anglophone novels are attentive to questions of power and inequality – even as they experiment with form.

In Chapter 8, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things dramatizes the tragedy of Ammu, Rahel, and Estha. The children experience profound guilt for their part in the deaths of their cousin Sophie Mol and of Velutha, the god of small things of the title. The deaths are focalized through their eyes and told across two time frames, which serves to give us progressive, if fragmentary, instalments of the collapse of the children’s own internal emotional landscapes. I argue that even though the distribution of the story across two time frames suggests the shape of a fractured bildungsroman, the traumatic events of their childhood so firmly seal them into the discourse of tragedy, that theirs becomes not the story of growing up but rather the teleology of an arrested development. I trace the various ways in which the crises in the social world are metonymically displaced onto that of volatile nature.

Chapter 4 examines representations of tribal or adivasi movements by two of India’s best-known writers, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Roy’s creative non-fiction essay “Walking with the Comrades” ‘2011’ created a stir in India for its sympathetic portrayal of rebellious tribal activists. I maintain that Roy’s key inspiration is the earlier short story by Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi” ‘1978’. Describing a tribal woman leader Dopdi Mejhen, Devi’s story, translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is a widely anthologized text in postcolonial literature. However, the text’s global career fails to capture its complex history: this includes the Cold War and the contest between the Soviet and American-led blocs for regional hegemony in South Asia; the impact of antiwar peoples’ theater of the 1960s, including plays on Vietnam and the Black Panthers; and the tradition of progressive Bengali women’s fiction within which Devi is properly located. The chapter surveys the relationship between Devi’s Bengali-language story and Roy’s English-language essay through a host of little-known ‘to the Anglophone world’ intermediaries. In doing so, it demonstrates how various grassroots movements for the rights of adivasi and ethnic minorities continue to inflect creative non-fiction in the contemporary era.