The general focus of this small but lively conference was ‘Fiction in English from the Indian Subcontinent and the South Asian Diaspora’, and the specific though somewhat overlapping topics for the two days were ‘The Politics of Fiction’ with Aijaz Ahmad as the charismatic opening speaker, and ‘Fiction in English in Multilingual Societies’ the theme paper which was presented by Meenakshi Mukherjee. Except for these two keynote speakers no one came from India, although quite a few were of South Asian origin. These participants, mostly youthful and energetic, were from Denmark, Germany, UK (Sussex, Kent, Leeds, London) and the USA (Harvard).

The joint organizers of this meet—Tabish Khair (University of Copenhagen) and Nanette Hale (University of Aarhus) regretted that budgetary constraints confined them to a two-day event, making it impossible to accommodate all the papers they had received. Those that were finally presented mostly explored new grounds. For example Minoli Salgado’s application of ‘Chaos Theory’ to the works of immigrant writers, Peter Morey’s imaginative foregrounding of the body in his reading of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Sharmila Sen’s paper ‘Urdu in Custody’ highlighting the process of Merchant-Ivory becoming the custodians for Anita Desai’s novel, and the two papers on Amitav Ghosh—one on Literary Geography (Martin Leer), the other on ‘Historicizing Scientific Reason’ (Claire Chambers)—were all off the beaten postcolonial path. Tobias Wachinger (incidentally, his twenty-ninth birthday was celebrated during the conference) challenged the valorization of cultural fusion, daring to discuss ‘The Infertility of Hybridity’. Munizha Ahmad from SOAS bracketed Ahmed Ali and Attia Hosain to dissect the nostalgia inherent in their displaced sensibilities. Tabish Khair’s paper brought together three rather dissimilar texts—all dealing with mothers’ grief over dead children—by Mahasweta Devi, Shashi Deshpande, and Jhumpa Lahirito examine the impact of culture and politics on the different ways of negotiating with the knowledge of loss. In a paper titled ‘Female Agency: A Fiction?’ Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn read Difficult Daughters, Small Remedies and Where Dreams Travel against the grain to problematise the issue of woman’s empowerment.

The most remarkable paper of the conference was the very first one: ‘Late Landings and the Fictions of Amnesia’, a title chosen, Aijaz Ahmad said, as a gesture towards mandatory postcolonial obscurity, so that afterwards he was free to speak clearly. The issues Ahmad raised are far too wide ranging to be neatly summed up here but the running thread was his sadness at the "shared forgetting" of the Indian writer in English as well as the reader of this fiction of the rich plurality of their past and present. He took serious exception to Salman Rushdie’s comparing Urdu and English as two languages that came from outside and got naturalised in India, because Urdu never had a habitation outside the subcontinent. He was also critical of Rushdie’s use of the word ‘Islamic invasion of India’ to refer to the invasion by Turkish and Persian chieftains. By the same logic, he said, the British rule of India would have to be called ‘Christian Conquest’.