1Postcolonial texts from India provoke such immediate and plethoric critical response both in India and abroad that when an engaging, well-structured and thought-provoking anthology of critical writing such as Alternative Indias falls into the hands of academics, they feel grateful for the intellectual enlightenment that it brings. Its eminently readable style, which nevertheless incorporates up-to-date critical theories, is indeed a plus. Harnessing the multifarious and monstrous cultural energy of an ancient civilization within the framework of a modern nation-state has taxed the imagination of not only the former colonizers and leaders of the nationalist struggle but also successive generations of Indian politicians, thinkers, writers, citizens and movie-makers alike. Alternative Indias is a multidisciplinary and comprehensive attempt by established scholars to revisit some seminal Indian cultural and literary texts and capture those Indias of the mind.

2The introduction by Peter Morey and Alex Tickell evokes the violent political context of the debate on India’s identity and points out how the understanding of the secular state “as one that is based on respect for all religions… rather than as entailing a strict separation of state and religion” has unwittingly led to communalism in India. India’s plural identity got contracted into the Hindutva (a meshed territorial and religious bond) under the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the late 1990s, while Oxford Scholar Sunil Kilnani argues that ‘the presumption that a single shared sense of India – a unifying idea and concept can at once define the facts that need recounting and provide the collective subject for the Indian story has lost all credibility’(x).

3Anshuman A. Mondal’s essay focuses on the concepts of nationalism perceived as secular and good and communalism denounced as primordial, atavistic, and bad. It explains the limits of Indian secularism as arising out of the ambivalent relationship, which Indian nationalist discourse maintained with the Hindu majoritarian point of view, and which has largely undermined the ethnic syncretism put forward by Nehru to thwart the dangers of communalism. Alex Tickell’s essay looks beyond Nehru’s secularist vision that influences the cosmopolitan Indian English novel with a view to tracing its embarrassing Hindu nationalist, indeed even racist past in Sarath Kumar Ghosh’s The Prince of Destiny and S.M. Mitra’s Hindupore, two novels published in London in 1909. The scrutiny of these literary archives helps Tickell uncover the imperialist dimension of Hindu nationalism which dreams of a great Asiatic empire encompassing India, China, and Japan. Ralph Crane offers an original and alternative reading of Kushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan through careful textual deconstruction. According to him, Kushwant Singh ‘shifts the Sikhs into the position of power vacated by the colonizers, a position which he clearly presents as bound up with virility’ (184). Singh is able to implement his communitarian agenda by locating the Hindus in the female or subaltern position and portraying the Muslims as worthy rivals to Sikhs. The essay’s conclusion lays stress on the female body as a site of communal violence in Kushwant Singh, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s partition novels. Crane’s reading is not a critical sleight of hand but an eye-opener in understanding the power politics that governs the ties between India’s different religious communities. In the ongoing discussion on who is entitled to speak for India, the binary opposition between English-speaking Indians and other regional language speakers had been highlighted in the heated debate between Salman Rushdie’s Vintage and Amit Chadhuri’s Picador anthologies of Indian writing. Amina Yaquin looks at the communally charged Hindu-Urdu struggle for cultural hegemony through Anita Desai’s In Custody. According to her, India’s entry into modernity comes at the price of embracing Hindi and bidding farewell to Urdu.

4Perhaps the one language that is commonly understood by the people of India is the language of Indian cinema. Sharmila Sen’s interesting analysis of some recent Hindi films that belong either to the historical drama (Border, Refugee, LOC, Gadar, Pinjar) or the contemporary terrorist film genres (Dil Se, Fiza, Mission Kashmir) in contrast to the earlier genre of romantic films shot in Kashmir shows how the line of control between “Great India” and “Eternal Pakistan” is culturally constructed in order to stage border patrols and crossings as nationalist rites of passage. Sen argues that such proximity at the border only serves to maintain and reinforce the difference between the two countries. However, the success of cross border love stories such as Veer Zara (2004), which her essay does not mention, raises hopes as to the impact of celluloid diplomacy.

5Elleke Boehmer’s reading of Manju Kapur’s two novels, Difficult Daughters and A Married Woman as novels of erotic self-fulfilment is built on the assumption that nationalism invokes ‘the male citizen as normative and the mother symbol as its reified, governing ideal’ (Boehmer quoting Sangeeta Ray on 53). Even Nehruvian secular state nationalism shows a ‘lack’ that Hindu fundamentalism has exposed. Kapur’s heroines Virmati and Astha use the nation as a base to recuperate important libidinal solidarities. By not disassociating sexual needs from political activity, says Boemer, Kapur’s narratives defend the values of the secular nation. Some readers might find the contradiction in Boehmer’s stand, which identifies self-pleasuring as a Western value (61) and cites the Kamasutra to assert the homoerotic as central to the nation’s cultural make up (67), slightly irritating. Shirley Chew chooses Sashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies to fathom the effect of communal violence on a personal and familial level. Madhu, the protagonist of Deshpande’s novel, has lost her only son in the communal bombings that shook Bombay in 1993 in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Madhu leaves Bombay and her husband to relocate to Bhavanipur and gets involved in writing the biography of Savitribai Indorekar, a classical singer, as an exercise in self-healing. The juxtaposition of Bhavanipur and Bombay in the novel, Chew argues, helps Madhu detach herself from the Bombay of ‘middle class dreams and hard work’ and connect to its transformed identity.

6Among the diasporic Indians, A.K. Ramanujan is perhaps one author who had not overtly dealt with the politics of Indian identity. However, Ashok Bery’s essay sustains that an almost Bakhtinian conception of Indian identity as ‘a spectrum of forms, where one complements, contradicts, reflects and refracts another’ (Ramanujan quoted by Bery in 122) underlies both Ramanujan’s theoretical questioning of the great and little traditions of the Indian cannon and his practice of poetry, cross-cultural anthropology, and translation. Sujala Singh’s essay draws a parallel between the unsymbolizable silences that form the kernel of a conception of nation and the production and circulation of silence in Amitav Ghosh’s novel Shadow Lines, which looks at the violence of partition from the Bengal/East Pakistan border perspective. Peter Morey’s study of Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters explores the way the Parsi community learns to survive the waves of communal violence and corruption that had forever ruptured the interwoven social fabric of Bombay. A disquieting Zoroastrian fundamentalism emerges from the novel, points out Morey, when one of its protagonists Yezad delves into a nostalgic desire for order.

7The Bharatiya Janata Party government was voted out of power in 2004 in spite of its ‘Shining India’ campaign. This does not mean that the identity pendulum has swung in favour of the secular model in India. The hue and cry raised on the prospect of Sonia Gandhi becoming Prime Minister and the compromise solution of a Sikh Prime Minister adopted only prove that the idea of the nation is still understood in its primary sense of ethno-religious-linguistic community in India rather than in its modern acceptation as a legal-territorial-political entity. The essays in Alternative Indias throw light on the different facets of India’s encounter, indeed even clash, with modernity and, as such, will, like Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West, How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006), remain relevant for years to come.