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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5382-9304
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
English
Year Degree Awarded
2023
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Asha Nadkarni
Second Advisor
Charles Hallisey
Third Advisor
Malcolm Sen
Fourth Advisor
Banu Subramaniam
Subject Categories
Buddhist Studies | Comparative Literature | Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America | South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
Abstract
This study analyzes the centrality of South Asian Buddhist heritages in the articulation of multiple iterations of “the secular” in post-independent Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. As contradictory as such a proposition might seem, this project demonstrates that literature was a forum where the category and language of Buddhism were reoriented to fashion new ideas of “the secular” for modern South Asian polities. With this in mind, I turn to the quintessential genres of secularity in South Asia: the twentieth-century novel and short story. These genres reveal how the category of Buddhism, Buddhist ethics and literature were received and used by both Buddhist and non-Buddhist communities to explore possibilities of the secular that converged with the religious. I specifically read the works of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike (1899-1959), Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), Intizar Husain (1923-2016), Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007), and Punyakante Wijenaike (1933-2023) to illustrate that correlations between the category of Buddhism and notions of “the secular” shaped the grammar of secularism as political policy and cultural concept in South Asia. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, this study not only reveals why existing criticism has thus far overlooked this important correlation, but it also demonstrates that these connections are crucial to understanding contemporary attitudes to both Buddhisms and ideas of the “secular” in South Asia.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/35979565
Recommended Citation
Baines, Crystal, "In Search of Middle Paths: Buddhism, Fiction, and the Secular in Twentieth-Century South Asia" (2023). Doctoral Dissertations. 2950.
https://doi.org/10.7275/35979565
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2950
Included in
Buddhist Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons