Professor of English Satya Mohanty has edited and contributed to a new collection of essays, "Colonialism, Modernity and Literature: A View From India," after a decade of collaboration with several international scholars. Recent reviews say it represents a turning point in Indian criticism, and Mohanty hopes the book will revitalize Indian literary studies and influence the way we think about world literature.

With contributors including professor of English Paul Sawyer and Claire Horan '07, the book offers cross-cultural analyses centered on Fakir Mohan Senapati's classic Indian novel "Six Acres and a Third," originally published in the Oriya language.

"Indian literature in the modern Indian languages goes back, in some cases, over 1,000 years," Mohanty said. "The way we talk about literary studies in English departments goes back to the 19th century, the Age of Empire. Literary criticism in Europe was tied back then to nationalism. We don't have to adhere to the ethnocentric model of the 19th century. We need a literary criticism to take us out of our tiny little worlds and make us more open-minded, generous, flexible in our cultural attitudes."

Written in the 1890s, Senapati's Oriya novel -- with its satiric narrator telling of a greedy Indian landlord using the colonial legal system to exploit the poor -- is in Mohanty's view an entirely modern work of analytical social realism. He wrote an introduction and was among the translators for the novel's 2005 English-language edition.

"When I was teaching the novel here, several colleagues were reading it," Mohanty said. "One of these colleagues, Paul Sawyer, is one of the most sensitive and intelligent readers I have ever known."

Sawyer, a Victorian literature scholar, said "I'd never heard of either Senapati or 'Six Acres and a Third' but I ended up loving it, in part because -- comparing it mentally with European novels I knew -- it felt both familiar and radically new."

When Sawyer wrote about Senapati for the Cornell journal Diacritics, Mohanty asked him to expand a footnote on George Eliot -- whose "Middlemarch" is a realist work set in Victorian England -- to a new full-length essay.

"Senapati's novel achieved a view of poverty that was, I thought, more profound, more located, than Eliot's -- sympathetic but also tough-minded and unsentimental," Sawyer said.

Horan wrote about feminist aspects of Senapati's novel in Mohanty's course The Modern Indian Novel and developed her paper into an essay first published (along with another essay Sawyer wrote on Senapati) in 2006 in the Indian journal Economic and Political Weekly.

"The novel represents women and men as living in different spheres, yet their abilities and personalities are not based on gender," she said.

"Colonialism, Modernity and Literature" was published by Palgrave Macmillan in March and has been written about in The Hindu (India's oldest English-language newspaper) and reviewed in the United States and Europe. Orient Blackswan's recent Indian edition in English will be followed by a series of volumes in several different Indian languages, containing critical essays and interviews with writers.

"We hope this book is not read just by literary critics, but also by social scientists and general readers, everyone who cares about literature," Mohanty said. "People who have grown up reading this novel in their native tongue are writing to Paul Sawyer saying there are things he discovered that they had not noticed. He made me realize you don't have to be an expert to write insightfully about another culture. Paul approaches this novel with an attitude of cross-cultural humility; he steps out of his comfort zone, and as a result his understanding grows and deepens. That's a model for the future of literary criticism."