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This book is a study of representations of unproductive leisure in contemporary Indian novels in English. It focuses both on the relevance of experiences of purposelessness to the Indian cultural context and on their potential to subversively comment on the history of colonialism and on global, productivity-oriented mechanisms of acceleration. In this way, the monograph analyses the importance of leisure and purposelessness to a postcolonial perspective. Moreover, this perspective engages in current global debates about acceleration and time perception in modernity. The way in which time is perceived is central to representations of such experiences of unproductive leisure. Not only are they free from a specific purpose, but during the experience, time takes on a different quality, being characterised as duration rather than as a linear development. From a postcolonial perspective, the temporal experience of lingering in the present moment is understood as a subversive critique of the modern concept of an abstract, linear time which has spread historically and has become naturalised through colonial expansion and global capitalism. Thus, the novels’ representations of purposeless leisure are understood to express a utopian potential via the critique of dominant experiences of temporality, since these are affected by India’s colonial past and reinforced by a capitalist belief in progress and productivity. The readings in this study are linked to a South Asian discourse of rediscovering Indian cultural modernity for the late modern moment in which the novels are set. Both the novels' nostalgic longing for instances of alternative temporality and for certain cultural practices are rooted in an older cultural modernity. From a present sense of alienation and loss, the texts harken back to older modes of social togetherness, they characterise a playful openness of perceiving the urban space or they depict cultural phenomena such as Hindustani music or the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The entangled discourses of ...
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