Prospective Essay Volume

Call for Book Chapters

Over 25 years into the 21st century, literature set in the Indian subcontinent, written both from within and from without South Asia, has flourished. Not since the Indian Literary Renaissance in the first half of the 20th century—which amalgamated writers from across pre-partition India, including (but by no means limited to) the Calcuttan Rabindranath Tagore, the Bombayite Rudyard Kipling, the Peshawari Mulk Raj Anand, the Mysorean Raja Rao, and the Madrassi RK Narayan—has literature from India and its subcontinental neighbours garnered so much interest. Certainly, in the wake of Rushdie’s international acclaim for his pan-Indian pyrotechnic carnival Midnight’s Children (1981)—an Indian subcontinent-set Booker preceded by only JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975), this since the inaugural Booker of 1969—South-Asian English fiction has been much on the mind (albeit in a critically limited sense) of the Booker Prize-set, which we might loosely equate to the anglophone academy of the Global North.

Following Midnight’s Children’s Booker, which later gained the Booker of Bookers in 1994, a handful of Indian novels garnered the award in quite short order: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997); Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006); and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), with Sri Lankan Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) winning the prize most recently. Waiting in the wings, over this same period, however, are a host of other Booker-shortlisted novels set in South Asia. Too many to fully detail here, they include titles (sometimes severally) by Rushdie, Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry, Romesh Gunesekera, Indra Sinha, Amitav Ghosh, Jeet Thayil, Jhumpa Lahiri, Neel Mukherjee, Avni Doshi, and Anuk Arudpragasam.       

This continued and growing recognition of literature from the subcontinent, or from what was, until 1947, India writ-large, of course emerges at least partly from the wealth of Anglophone literary texts stemming from the subcontinent, the most populous region of the globe. Yet international fascination with South-Asian literature (in lieu of the subcontinent as spiritual site for the orientalist enlightenment Gita Mehta so masterfully parodies in Karma Cola (1980)), remains understudied by the academy. Despite the increasing international preponderance of South-Asian literature, so the Booker Prize’s celebration of the best sustained fiction written in English presupposes, this critical oversight is Global North orientated. Anglophone scholarship continues to overlook—to not write much about—literature from the subcontinent.

This essay volume endeavours to do international critical justice, in English, and in both conventional and alternative ways, to a host of literary texts from and set in the subcontinent by way of (i) standard critical essays, (ii) experimental creatical writings, and (iii) autoethnographic textual encounters.

Though I begin this solicitation with a focus on the subcontinent in the 21st century, or what we might call the post-Rushdie generation—as Pranav Jani intimates in 2010’s Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English (a rather short volume comprised of but five body chapters)—I welcome text-centred critical essays, creatical work, and ethnographic immersions dating from the post-Indian Renaissance period to today, meaning from the 1960s to the present. Though I’m particularly interested in academic treatments of more contemporary regional novels and memoires from around the subcontinent, ranging from the recent work of the likes of (in no particular order) Charmaine Craig, Said Z Hossain, Rita Chowdhuri, Numair Atif Choudhury, Shubhangi Swarup, Seketu Mehta, Manjushree Thapa, Megha Majumdar, Taha Kehar, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Nida Jay, Kushanava Choudhury, and Perumal Murugan, I will also consider contributions on more immediately recognizable and established names, including, but not limited to: UR Ananthamurthy, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Shyam Selvadurai, Upamanyu Chatterji, Manju Kapur, Akhil Sharma, Vikram Chandra, Vikram Seth, Tarun J Tejpal, and GV Desani. Most especially in terms of the more established (and older) names, however, I would like to emphasize the legacies of the present, that is, the inheritances of South-Asian regional literature across the 21st century.

All contributions should measure somewhere near 10,000 words and follow the most recent APA citation guidelines. I welcome submissions on most any Indian subcontinent-set novel or set of novels by scholars from all levels, meaning from students to independent researchers to chair professors. Do note that contributors considering more creative submissions, such as creatical (creative + critical) interventions as well as (auto)ethnographic engagements with South-Asian literature, likewise should conform to APA guidelines in addition to the fundaments of the critical essay, ie., a thesis, convincing argumentation, cogent analyses, secondary sources, theoretical interventions, clear explications, and a sound conclusion.   

Please send 200-word abstracts, including a prospective title and five keywords, along with a 75-word contributor biography, to Prof Jason S Polley (jspolley@hkbu.edu.hk), under the subject heading “Reading South Asian Fiction,” by 1 September 2025.