Dementia in recent Indian fiction in English

Abstract

Indian Writing in English (IWE) has shied away from discussing dementia. Three recent texts have reversed the trend: Anuradha Roy’s The folded earth (2012), Ranjit Lal’s Our nana was a nutcase (2015) and Pankaj Varma’s Silver haze (2014). In this particular text, Varma equates dementia with Alzheimer’s disease at one point in the novel (Varma, 2014, p. 236). Novels dealing with other kinds of health conditions such as Parkinson’s disease in Rohinton Mistry’s Family matters (2002), old age and its associated eccentricities in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s The last burden (1993), Weight loss (2006) and Way to go (2010) or Cotard’s syndrome in Manu Joseph’s The illicit happiness of other people (2012) share some themes with dementia texts.