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This entry should be read in conjunction with the article “Cities in the South Asia Subcontinent,” and with one on Premchand, the Indian novelist of the 1920s. It takes up the history of the subcontinent from 1500 onwards, so that it considers the experience of colonialism, and Empire, and the events after India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947. It considers, then, colonialism and some of its writers – Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, and George Orwell, and postcolonialism. Here it examines such writers as Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry and considers Bollywood, and Slumdog Millionaire. Postcolonialism must also involve the freeing up of women from forced marriages, from violence, from caste positions, and from compulsory heterosexuality: for some of the theoretical issues here, and suggestions, as centered on Kolkata, see Roy, Feminist Studies 40:628, 2014
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Tambling, J. (2021). Indian Subcontinent Cities in Colonialism and Postcolonialism. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_343-1
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