Rezensionen Ellen Dengel-Janic, ‘Home Fiction’. Narrating Gendered Space in Anita Desai’s and Shashi Deshpande’s Novels. (ZAA Monograph Series 13). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn Critical work on Indian women writing in English is not exactly a flourishing industry, even if it looks back to a rich tradition in Germany, where pioneers like Gerhard Stilz and Dieter Riemenschneider had some remarkably incisive things to say on the subject. It is therefore all the more to be welcomed that a recent dissertation takes the writing of two Indian novelists (and short story writers), Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande, as its point of departure. Desai, the better known and elder of the two, is unique among Indian women writers in being of Indo-German parentage. Moreover, as she grew up in Delhi, it is Hindi, rather than her father’s native Bengali or her mother’s German, that she regards as her mother tongue. Linguistically at least, Deshpande was not brought up either in one of her parent’s cultural environments but, by virtue of living in Dharwad, had mother tongue access to Kannada, which was quickly ousted, as with Desai, by the Anglicisation processes typical of English-based education in the former British colonies. These details are not merely incidental; they rather point to the parameters of Indian English writing, to the polylingual and polycultural aspects that make it the type of transcultural writing that it uniquely is. That these are not matters of much interest to Ellen Dengel-Janic is demonstrated by the fact that she mentions conceptually saturated terms like “transcultural” (13) or “transitional” (18) merely en passant. When one asks, as any reader of this book must, why these two writers have been selected, the only answer that is given is the fact that they are “two of the most prolific Indian women writers in English of their generation who have actively contributed to the genre of ‘home fiction’” (1). The first part of this statement points us to the kind of corpus Dengel-Janic has chosen for her thesis: three of Desai’s, and three of Deshpande’s novels - despite the AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 38 (2013) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen 236 fact that these writers are regarded as being “most prolific.” Of the six selected texts, the ones chosen in Desai’s case are her first three novels, all of which were published within a time span of five years; in Deshpande’s case, the choice again fell on a debut novel, alongside two further novels published after her attempts at crime fiction. The reader is left to her own conjectures as to the reasons for this choice, particularly in view of the fact that in both cases the works chosen form the first part of what must be seen as a full œuvre. This is especially true for Desai, who has moved away from the referentiality of middle-class Indian women’s experiences, whether within the home or outside, to that of non-Indian protagonists and non-Indian contexts. In Deshpande’s case, too, it is legitimate to ask why a masterpiece like Small Remedies has not been included in the case studies, as it is here that the tension between the ‘home’ and ‘outside’ is most fruitfully explored. But, it can be asked as a corollary, is this what “home fiction” is meant to represent? One looks in vain for a definition. On the opening page, we are told that “the aim of this book is to show that Desai and Deshpande are not merely telling private stories” (1, emphasis in the original) - a premise that is in itself perhaps questionable, especially with regard to what readers can expect of creative writing. We read on that: “by engaging with the concepts of ‘home,’ ‘family,’ and the ‘private,’ they simultaneously re-think the allegedly more significant topics of national history and the (re-)construction of cultural identity in a postcolonial context” (1). The binaries that are set up here are not necessarily fresh nor, in the final count, highly productive. Critics like Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee (despite their sex) have put the distinction between the ‘home’ and its ‘outside’ to brilliant use in their work and therewith paved the way for further implementation of these constructs. Dengel-Janic refers at least to Chatterjee’s ideas of the split between the “‘ghar’ and ‘bahir, the world and the home’” (27), in the chapter that prefaces her case studies, but Chakrabarty is given only a footnote about his reference to Subaltern Studies (4). Instead, Dengel-Janic quickly moves on to deal with the spatial aspects of the ‘home’, viz., “the discursive inscriptions of space from a gendered perspective” alongside the “literary strategies which problematise these discursive locations of women.” In terms of the case studies this means that she looks at length at her corpus in order to subsume the novels under two categories, the “disintegrated homes” and “haunted homes”, respectively. These two chapters follow in the wake of a more general one dealing with examples of what the author wishes to claim as a “genre”, namely the “home fictions” of early Indian English writers, both male and female, from Bankimchandra to R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao, again presented to readers without a rationale beyond that of chronology. Had these examples been used as a kind of benchmark for the subsequent case studies, this would have provided further legitimation for Dengel-Janic’s corpus. Not only would this have served to render her arguments more coherent, it would have had the added advantage of gesturing towards the larger picture of sketching in an Erwartungshorizont for an Indian English readership and thereby emplacing Desai’s and Deshpande’s (albeit early) works therein. This would have rendered research into Rezensionen 237 Indian English writing a great service, especially in view of the fact that this book deals with works that are no longer new and have passed through a great many critical hands. An analogous approach would have also allowed Dengel-Janic to extend the scope of her argumentation by discussion not only of the later works of these authors but also of novels by their female, as against male, peers. This strategy would also have done away with the impression we get of works being discussed in a critical vacuum, since she leaves the question unanswered of why exactly Desai’s three novels are examples of “disintegrated” homes, or what exactly is meant by “haunted homes” with reference to Deshpande’s early novels (but not exclusively to hers, as reference to Desai’s works on page 196 shows). The possibility offered by the concluding chapter to bring out a thesis in sharper profile is however deflected by discussion of “more contemporary works centred on the home” (193), that is, on two in particular, Manju Kapur’s Home (2006), and Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us (2006). When we consider the gap that lies between novels of the 1970s/ 80s/ 90s and those of 2006, also in view of the fact that an explanation for the latter choice, too, is pending, it becomes clear that the opportunity to make some profound statements about gendered fictive accounts of the domestic sphere will have to be taken in some future project. In that project, it is also to be expected that the secondary literature (listed in a book published in 2011) will extend beyond 2005 (two references), or 2007 (the most recent date, and that, too, for a single title) in Dengel-Janic's bibliography, while texts relevant to the topic of Indian women’s writing seem to have a cut-off date well before that. And Amrita Bhalla’s excellent monograph on Deshpande’s complete œuvre would have been consulted, since it came out only in 2006, as would Jasbir Jain’s on Desai (2003). What we do have in hand, though, is a detailed study of six novels that offers a convincing model of close reading presented in a reader-friendly style. This book deserves the attention of those interested in gaining a foothold on either Desai’s or Deshpande’s early work, or on both authors’ first steps in a journey that has led them to venture far beyond these cautious beginnings. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn Transkulturelle Anglophone Studien Universität des Saarlands, Deutschland