Memory Studies in India

Texts and Contexts
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-72248-4
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 5, 381 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: Mobilizing Memories

This pioneering volume marks a significant contribution to memory studies in India, offering an in-depth exploration of how collective and individual memories shape and reshape identities, narratives, and historical knowledge. By addressing a diverse array of topics—from forgotten events, massacres, and monuments to public spaces and food rituals—across various epochs, the essays in this collection bring new insights into India’s complex cultural history. With contributions from scholars across different stages of their academic careers, this volume not only enriches the field of memory studies but also paves the way for future research in India and beyond.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Parui, Avishek

Raj, Merin Simi

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Avishek Parui and Merin Simi Raj

PART 1: Memory-Sites, Materiality, and Identities

1 Remembering Bhima Koregaon: Contesting Historical Memories around Memorial Buildings

Aswathy Krishnan

2 Memorials and Memory: A Material Turn

Neha Khetrapal

3 Mapping Old Tales and New Trails: A Peripatetic Account of Chandni Chowk

Mohit Abrol

4 Food, Identity and Purity in the Indian Jewish Community before and after Migration: An Analysis based on Jewish Life Narratives

Shiji Mariam Varghese

5 The Eating of the Lotos: Food and Forgetting in the Dangs

Susan Vivien George

6 Revisiting Partition Memories of the Bannu Community: Remembrance Through the Gurudwara Shahidane Gujarat Train

Prachi Ratra, Anjali Gera Roy, and Seema Singh

7 Britain’s Anglo-Indian Associations—Help or Hindrance?

Rochelle Almeida

8 Enabling Memory and Renegotiating Identity: a Study of the Goan poskim

Rochelle Ann Fernandes

PART 2: Memories, Histories, and Events

9 Framing Memories of Colonial Violence: Tracing Shifts in Narratives of the Bengal Famine

Bhagyashri V.

10 Constructing the Ontology of Food Narratives during the Bengal Famine 1943 through Post-Memory Practices

Rituparna Mukherjee and Juthika Biswakarma

11 Peace, Paradise, and Paradox: Analysing the Politics of History and Memory in Kashmir

Sana Shah

12 Memory of a Massacre: Ecological Preservation and the Marichjhapi Debacle

Pratiti Roy

13 Mnemohistorical Reading of the Past: Conceptualizing Memory-Scape and Historical Time

Sumallya Mukhopadhyay

PART 3: Narratives, Reconstructions, and Representations

14 Stories at a Site of Fratricidal Violence: Cultural Memory and Trauma in Arupa Patangia Kalita’s “Bir Daimalur Sadhu”

Jayashree Borah

15 Remembering Partition: Postmemory and Gendered Representation of Bodily Entities in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers

Samyukthah A

16 Representation of Memory and Trauma in Manto

Nishat Haider

17 Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan: Tamil Modernity, Revivalism and the Popular Historical Novel

Catherine Shilpa X.

18 Marginalized Memories in Hagiographies of Martyrs: Historical Sensibilities in the Vernacular Literatures of the Malabar Muslims

Muhammad Niyas

19 “Displacement as an Escape Mechanism”: Traumatic Memory and Identity Formation in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

Shrimoyee Chattopadhyay

20 Remembering the Tebhaga Movement in Mahasweta Devi’s Quest Novels Swechasainik and Bandobasti

Somrwita Ghosh

21 Detecting Memory, Creating Pasts: Historical Memory in Crime Fiction

Vaibhav Iype Parel

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Avishek Parui is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Studies, IIT Madras and Associate Fellow of
the UK Higher Education Academy. He researches in memory studies, masculinity studies, and medical humanities. He is the
author of Postmodern Literatures (Orient Blackswan 2018) and Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory (Rowman
& Littlefield 2022).

Merin Simi Raj is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Studies, IIT Madras. Her research areas are
memory studies, digital humanities, and Anglo-Indian studies. She is the co-editor of Anglo-Indian Identity: Past and Present,
in India and the Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).



The editors are faculty coordinators of the Centre for Memory Studies, IIT Madras and founding chairpersons of the Indian
Network for Memory Studies (INMS). They developed MemoryBytes, the first Augmented Reality (AR)-based mobile application
using the intersection of memory studies and digital humanities.