Kritish Rajbhandari: India from the Indian Ocean: Ananda Devi’s Queer Archive of Indenture (Forum) | 30 Apr 2026

This talk will examine the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourse through an intertextual reading of Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2005), as a transnational queer rewriting of Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) (1916).

Much contemporary fiction from Indian Ocean Africa and South Asia turns simultaneously to the past and across the ocean generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined.

Kritish Rajbhandari is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, USA, where he teaches courses in postcolonial, South Asian, and African literatures. He is the author of The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction published by Cambridge University Press. His articles have been published in journals including Comparative Literature, South Asia, and Research in African Literatures. He is also a translator and has translated poetry from his native language Nepalbhasa to English.