Memoir, Autofiction, and the New Indian Humanities

Abstract This chapter pursues two developments in modern Indian Anglophone literature: the institutionalization of creative writing in Indian institutions of higher education and a metacritical turn in literary memoir and autofiction. In the first two decades of the 21st century, Indian universities such as Ashoka and the Manipal Centre for Humanities advanced a formerly “Western” liberal arts tradition by creating new institutional structures for creative writing pedagogy and credentialization. The chapter reads Gayathri Prabhu’s experimental memoir, if I had to tell it again (2017), and Amit Chaudhuri’s autofictional novella, Friend of My Youth (2017), as evidence of a new trend in Indian literary nonfiction writing in English inflected by these institutional changes. It proposes that modern Indian Anglophone memoir and autofiction be read as a future-oriented process of living, as opposed to a means of memorializing the past. The chapter offers a critical complement to sociological scholarship on the itineraries of global-South writers in US creative writing programs by locating in India and Indian institutions a future for the New Indian Humanities.