ENGL 327(S) Fictions of the British Raj *
The great impact of the British Raj-the 200-year dominion of the British Empire over most of the Indian subcontinent-on the people of what we now know
as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh sometimes leads us to forget how powerfully
India influenced the British in turn. British colonizers found themselves both
fascinated and, in turn, subtly shaped by the largely imaginary India that their
ideology had led them to project, and as the Empire's struggle to control a vast
and bewilderingly diverse land showed increasing strains, they were forced to
recognize the ways in which what it meant to be English had been distorted and
re-defined by their projections and by the exercise of their own power. Conversely, educated Indians were induced to construct for themselves hybrid, Anglicized identities and modes of behavior that complicated their social and political relations with the less fortunate majority of their fellow Indians. This course
focuses principally on fiction about India written in English during the last half-
century of the Raj (1900-1947), by both Indian and British novelists. In it we
will consider such issues as what it might mean to be "authentically" Indian;
how religion complicates political identity and behavior in British India; to what
extent adapting to British structures of authority-even simply writing in English-may compromise an Indian's efforts to speak and act for his or her
people; how the politics of colonization are reflected in ideologies and conflicts
of gender; in what ways the identity and social relations of both Anglo-Indian
and indigenous communities were changed by the emergence of nationalist
movements such as Gandhi's Congress party and the Muslim League; and how
such socio-political issues are mediated in the successive modes of fiction (Victorian romance, modernism, social realism) adopted by the writers we will study. While some readings will introduce important religious and political contexts, as well as theoretical models for understanding colonialist ideologies, our
principal analytic attention will be literary, focused on novels such as Kipling's
Kim, Forster's A Passage to India, Narayan's Swami and Friends, Anand's Untouchable, and Rao's Kanthapura. We will also study films by the great Indian
director Satyajit Ray, and may read one or two works translated into English
from Bengali (e.g., Tagore's The Home and the World) or set in our period but
written after it (e.g., Rushdie's Midnight's Children).
Format: discussion. Requirements: active participation in class discussions, two
papers, and a final exam.
Prerequisite: a 100-level English course except 150. Enrollment limited to 25
(expected: 20). Preference given to English majors.
(Post-1900)