Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
-
Neele Meyer
Abstract
This paper looks at three Indian crime fiction series by women writers who employ different types of female detectives in contemporary India. The series will be discussed in the context of India’s economic growth and the emergence of a new middle class, which has an impact on India’s complex publishing market. I argue that the authors offer new identification figures while depicting a wide spectrum of female experiences within India’s contemporary urban middle class. In accordance with the characteristics of popular fiction, crime fiction offers the possibility to assume new roles within the familiar framework of a specific genre. Writers also partly modify the genre as a form of social criticism and use strategies such as the avoidance of closure. I conclude that the genre is of particular suitability for women in modern India as a testing-ground for new roles and a space that helps to depict and accommodate recent transformations that connect to processes of globalization.
Works Cited
Berman, Jessica (2012). Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.10.7312/berm14950Suche in Google Scholar
Bhattacharyya, Madhumita (2012). The Masala Murder. New Delhi: Pan MacMillan.Suche in Google Scholar
Brownson, Charles (2014). The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Suche in Google Scholar
Certeau, Michel de (2011). The Practice of Everyday Life. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Chandra, Vikram (2007). Sacred Games. London: Faber.Suche in Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (2014). “Gender, Media and Popular Culture in a Global India.” Leela Fernandes, ed. Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia. London: Routledge, 145–159.Suche in Google Scholar
Daechsel, Markus (2003). “Z̤ālim Ḍākū and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13.1, 21–43.10.1017/S1356186302002973Suche in Google Scholar
Dawson Varughese, Emma (2013). Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Suche in Google Scholar
Desai, Kishwar (2010). Witness the Night. Noida: Harper Collins.Suche in Google Scholar
Desai, Kishwar (2013). The Sea of Innocence. London: Simon & Schuster.Suche in Google Scholar
Donner, Henrike (2011). Being Middle Class in India: A Way of Life. New York, NY: Routledge.10.4324/9780203148532Suche in Google Scholar
Dwyer, Rachel (2000). All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India. London: Cassell.Suche in Google Scholar
Ghatak, Anchita (2015). “Detective Mitin Mashi, Not Middle-Class Tales, Might Be Suchitra Bhattacharya’s Lasting Legacy.” Scroll.in. <http://scroll.in/article/727730/detective-mitin-mashi-not-middle-class-tales-might-be-suchitra-bhattacharyas-lasting-legacy>; (March 25, 2017).Suche in Google Scholar
Gupta, Suman (2012). “Indian ‘Commercial’ Fiction in English, the Publishing Industry, and Youth Culture.” Economic and Political Weekly 46.5, 46–53.Suche in Google Scholar
Gupta, Suman (2015). Consumable Texts in Contemporary India: Uncultured Books and Bibliographical Sociology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9781137489296Suche in Google Scholar
Irons, Glenwood (1995). Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.10.3138/9781442623088Suche in Google Scholar
Keitel, Evelyne (1998). Kriminalromane von Frauen für Frauen: Unterhaltungsliteratur aus Amerika. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Suche in Google Scholar
Khair, Tabish (2008). “Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview From Dutt to Dé.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.3, 59–74.10.1177/0021989408095238Suche in Google Scholar
Kramatschek, Claudia (2007). “Farewell to Spice and Curry.” Hindu Literary Review. <http://www.signandsight.com/features/1117.html> (March 25, 2017).Suche in Google Scholar
Lakshmi, Rama (2007). “India’s Cheeky ‘Chick Lit’ Finds an Audience.” Washington Post. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201415.html> (March 25, 2017).Suche in Google Scholar
Lau, Lisa (2010). “Literary Representations of the ‘New Indian Woman’: The Single, Working, Urban, Middle Class Indian Woman Seeking Personal Autonomy.” Journal of South Asian Development 5.2, 271–292.10.1177/097317411000500204Suche in Google Scholar
Orsini, Francesca (2009). Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India. Bangalore: Permanent Black.Suche in Google Scholar
Phadke, Shilpa, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade (2011). Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. New Delhi: Penguin Books.Suche in Google Scholar
Poonam, Snigdha (2015). “Terms of Endearment: India’s Male and Female Romance Writers Follow Opposing Codes.” The Caravan Magazine. <http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/terms-endearment-indian-romance-writers> (March 25, 2017).Suche in Google Scholar
Priestman, Martin (1998). Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present. Plymouth: Northcote House.Suche in Google Scholar
Sen, Krishna and Rituparna Roy (2013). Writing India Anew: Indian-English Fiction 2000–2010. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.10.1017/9789048518852Suche in Google Scholar
Sinha, Pooja (2013). “Contemporary Indian English Genre Fiction: Conventions and Contexts in the Marketplace.” Unpublished Thesis, Open University.Suche in Google Scholar
Surve, Sangram (2014). “Litomania: Celebrating the Rise of Popular Indian literature.” DNA India. <http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-litomania-celebrating-the-rise-of-popular-indian-literature-2025152> (March 25, 2017).Suche in Google Scholar
Swaminathan, Kalpana (2012). I Never Knew It Was You. New Delhi: Penguin.Suche in Google Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan, ed. (1966). “Typology of Detective Fiction.” The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 42–53.Suche in Google Scholar
Walton, Priscilla and Manina Jones (1999). Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520921467Suche in Google Scholar
Weber, Ute (2003). Von Sita zur neuen Frau: Die Darstellung der Frau im postkolonialen indo-englischen Roman. Marburg: Tectum.Suche in Google Scholar
©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
