Weaving the Indian Ethos: Fantasy, Irony, and Nostalgia as Markers of Indianness in the Selective Short Stories of Manoj Das

Abstract
Manoj Das is a ong of the finest bilingual short story writers of the Indian subcontinent, who has been awarded with the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the top honor at Sahitya Akademi for “Immortals of Literature”.
This paper explores the postcolonial concept of Indianness in the selected short stories of Manoj Das- fantasy, irony, satire and nostalgia as narrative elements in which Das brings an Indian sensibility; storytelling technique that puts this Indian sensibility into the ostentatious version of basic elements; and how these elements convey the sublimity of the short story form in Indian context? Taking a post-colonial perspective based on Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridity (1994), Said's theory of representation (1978), and Ashcroft et al.'s theory of post-colonial reclamation (2002), the study discusses in detail six poems by the two authors, namely: “The Submerged Valley,” “The Crocodile's Lady,” “Farewell to a Ghost,” “The Bridge in the Moonlit Night,” “The Crocodile's Lady,” and “A Tiger at Twilight.”
Das can be seen as a guardian of Indian narrative art as the analysis reveals his exploration of the Indian psyche in Das's fantasy, his un-cynical social examination in his irony, and the modernity's pressure with respect to his nostalgia to the past.