KIIT Professor’s Article Features as Book Chapter in Beastly Modernisms (Edinburgh University Press)
“The Barking Dog and Crying Bird in Partition Stories: Beastly Modernism and Subalternist Humanism of Manto, Rakesh and Anand” (pp. 143-158) by Beerendra Pandey, Professor & Dean at KIIT School of Language & Literature has been published as Book Chapter number eight, under Part III titled “Animal, Nation, Empire” in Beastly Modernisms: Animal Figurations in Modernist Literature and Culture (edited by Alex Goody and Saskia McCracken& published by Edinburgh University Press in March 2023).
This book brings together scholarship from across literature and culture to engage with the animal turn in modernist studies. The figure of the anti-colonial / postcolonial animal is under-discussed in modernist studies, and is the focus of Beerendra Pandey’s work on dogs and birds in Saadat Hasan Manto (“The Dog of Tetwal”), Mohan Rakesh’s (“The Owner of the Rubble” & “God’s Dog”) and Mulk Raj Anand’s (“The Parrot in the Cage”). These animal figures—the dog and the parrot—trouble binaries such as citizen-refugee, animal-human and elite-subaltern, pushing back against the imperial /post-colonial understanding of the animal. The subversion, according to Professor Pandey, is encapsulated in these writers’ foregrounding of subaltern animism which is projected as an alternative to the politics of humanism at the heart of the historiography of Partition. The book chapter is also indexed in JSTOR