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The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction is a comprehensive study of the literary works of Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit—the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly—and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Clara A.B. Joseph introduces Mahatma Gandhi’s political and philosophical to literary analysis and utilizes non-structuralist aspects of Louis Althusser’s theories of ideology to trace how characters marginalized by gender, class, race, and language in Sahgal’s work assume agency, challenging poststructuralist theories of cultural and ideological determinism. She considers how gender complicates autobiography and how the roles of daughter, virgin, wife, widow, and alien serve (often ironically) to highlight human dignity.
Clara A.B. Joseph is an associate professor of English at the University of Calgary with a research specialization in postcolonial studies. She is a co-editor of Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions (2006) and Theology and Literature: Rethinking Reader Responsibility (2006) and is on the editorial boards of ARIEL and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Table of Contents for The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal's Gandhian Fiction by Clara A.B. Joseph
Preface
Introduction: Agency in the Margins: Althusser, Gandhi, Sahgal
Chapter One: The Interpellated “I”: Gandhian Ideology and the Autobiographical Genre
Chapter Two: The Thinking Subject: Virginity and Swaraj
Chapter Three: The Special Place of Literature: Mahasati, Satyagrahi
Chapter Four: Overdetermination and Truth
Chapter Five: The Resisting Subject: Dignity of Lesser Breeds
Conclusion: Representing the Human Person
Works Cited
Index