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Title Investigating the Differend: A Study of Heterogeneous Voices in Anglophone South Asian Fiction

Author(s) Rashid Masood Sadiq

Abstract Thesis Title: Investigating the Differend: A Study of Anglophone South Asian Fiction This dissertation is a study of heterogeneity of conflicting religious, cultural, political, and social voices in Anglophone South Asian fiction. It is delimited to Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim (2011), Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), and Shashi Tharoor’s Riot: A Novel (2001). This research project investigates how the Muslim difference is inscribed in fictional writings of local/home and diasporic Anglophone South Asian writers. This study claims that these writers employ the value system of secular rationalism and liberal humanism to analyze the largely faithbased ontology of the Muslims in South Asian and diasporic spaces. It also argues that these writings self-consciously undertake to explicate the nature of differences among incongruent religious and ideological groups with a view to effect their imaginative resolution. But these irreducible differences, termed as differends by French Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, may not be settled to the satisfaction of all sides of the divide. This genre of fiction, then, in order to offer the possibility of an imaginary resolution of the disputes among ideological adversaries, inflicts wrongs on one of the parties to the conflict. This dissertation argues that when the fictional or fictionalized conflict is articulated by Anglophone South Asian writers, in which the Muslims constitute one of the parties to the conflict, the resolution turns them into ‘victims’ because of the rational secular and liberal humanist value judgment system brought to bear on the conflict. I intervene in the critical scholarship about this genre by exploring the dynamics and assumptions that contribute towards the perpetuation of the sense of injustice felt by the believing and practicing Muslims because of their representation in these writings. It is through both disrupting and confirming the Western and non-Muslim world’s perception of the figure of the Muslim, raising Muslims’ voice yet participating in the mechanisms that suppress it, overturning erstwhile stereotypes but proliferating new negative images about them, this genre of fiction problematizes and complicates contemporary production of knowledge about the Muslim difference.

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2023-11-22

Subject PhD English Literature

Publisher Department of English (GS)

Contributor(s) Dr. Sibghatullah Khan

Format As per departmental guidelines

Identifier Dr. Muhammad Haseeb Nasir (PhD English Program Coordinator)

Source PhD

Relation PhD

Coverage PhD

Rights PhD

Category PhD English Literature Thesis

Description PhD English Literature Thesis