This seminar examines the fragmentary (khaṇḍ, ṭukṛā, ansh) as an aesthetic and political category in South Asian modernism. While literary modernism has often been associated with fragmentation as a response to the dislocations and discontents of modernity, South Asian writers, artists, and filmmakers have deployed the fragment in very distinct ways,  shaped by the overlapping experiences of anti-colonial movements, partition, migration, multilingualism, and uneven flow of capital and  knowledge. Rather than treating the fragment as evidence of loss or incompletion alone that registered these experiences, the seminar intends to explore it as a generative mode of formal experimentation and aesthetic knowledge.

Through a range of South Asian modernist texts, the seminar will investigate forms such as the vignette, aphorism, incomplete sequences, montage, episodic or fractured narratives, reinvention of older fragmentary forms (such as doha or sher), and intermedial fragments. These formal practices challenge conventional assumptions about narrative unity, coherent subject-positions, linear historical development and totalised worldviews. The seminar is positioned to offer alternative genealogies of the fragment in South Asia, which are not merely inherited from European modernisms, but are steeped in the contradictions of colonial modernity, divided and divisive histories,  and plural  and unformed modes of experience.

In focusing on the relationship between the fragment, literary form, and  the political, the seminar will raise and respond to the following questions: what is the status of the fragment in South Asian Modernism? Is there an economy of the fragment that displaces the metanarratives of the nation, the novel, the lyric, the subject? Do fragments illuminate the limits of representation? Are fragments always anti-monumental, incomplete, unformed, or do they become their own totality? What do fragments threaten, and what do they legitimise?