Writing the Nation's Destiny: Indian fiction in English before 1910

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of proto-national identity in Indian – English fiction before the formative nationalist novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Questioning theoretical connections between Indian – English fiction and the secularism of the Nehruvian national project, my essay argues that primordialist nationalism and culturally transacted concepts of communal/racial identity were key elements in the political imagining of early Indian fiction in English.

Notes

S Khilnani, ‘Gandhi and Nehru: the uses of English’, in AK Mehrotra (ed), A History of Indian Literature in English, London: Hurst, 2003, p 148.

J Nehru, The Discovery of India, London: Meridian, 1960, p 240.

G Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, p 9.

J Nehru, An Autobiography, London: The Bodley Head, 1989, p 149.

Ibid, p 151.

J Nehru, letter in S Gandhi (ed), Freedom's Daughter: Letters between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1922 – 39, London: Hodder & Staughton, 1989, pp 145 – 146.

J Nehru, 1989, p 374.

C Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, Oxford: Berg, 2001, p 9.

Khilnani, in A History of Indian Literature in English, p 152.

A Nandy, Time Warps, London: Hurst, 2002, p 69.

A Tickell, ‘Terrorism and the informative romance: two early Indian novels in English’, Kunapipi, 25 (1), 2003, pp 73 – 83.

S K Ghosh, The Prince of Destiny: The New Krishna, London: Rebman, 1909.

See M Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p 63.

P Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse London: Zed, 1986, p 73.

See B C Chatterji, Anandamath, Basanta Koomar Roy Trans., New Dehli: Orient Paperbacks, 1992.

Ibid, p 73.

See SM Mitra, Hindupore, London: Luzac, 1909, p 142.

This text is not available in translation. Readers can refer to the original work in Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Bankim Rachanābalī, Jogesh Chandra Bagal ed., Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1965.

Bhatt, 2001, p 31.

Ghosh, p 495.

See Chatterjee, 1986, p 75.

Bhatt, 2001, p 16.

See P Joshi, In Another Country, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p 162.

S Bayly, ‘Race in Britain and India’, in P Van der Veer & H Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p 78.

R Edmond, ‘Home and away: degeneration in imperialist and modernist discourse’, in H Booth & N Rigby (eds), Modernism and Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, p 40.

R Edmond, ‘Home and away: degeneration in imperialist and modernist discourse’, in Modernism and Empire, p 40.

Ibid, p 42.

FM Müller, in TR Trautmann, Aryans and British India, Berkeley: University of California, 1997, p 178.

Ibid.

Ibid, p 186

Bayly, 1999, p 82.

KK Sinha, Sanjogita, or the Princess of Aryavarta, Dinapore: Watling Printing Works, 1903, p iii.

Ibid, pp 266 – 267.

Bhatt points out that ‘Whereas most Theosophists considered Americans, Europeans and Indians as “Aryans”, Dayananda rejected this for his view that only the inhabitants of Aryavarta (“India”) could be so designated’: 2001, p 19.

C Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s, London: Hurst, 1996, p 57.

Ibid.

Ghosh, p 12.

For a more detailed investigation of the ‘cross-border’ affiliations of early anti-colonial nationalism, see E Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial 1890 – 1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

See B Anderson, Imagined Communites, London: Verso, 1987.

B Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, London: Verso, 1998.

W Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880 – 1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 184.

Ghosh, pp 244 – 245.

Ibid, p 493.

This term comes from David Harvey's work on the way modernity has been characterised by a radical redefinition of global space and time. Harvey states ‘I use the word “compression” because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterised by [a] speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us’: The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell 1993, p 240.

A Lyall, in V Chirol, Indian Unrest, London: Macmillan, 1910, p ix.

Ibid.

H Johnstone, in P Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society, London: Routledge, 1992, p 183.

Mitra, 1909, p 291.

Ghosh, p 390.

The importance of Japan as an ‘alternative’ model for Indian nationalist aspirations also anticipates the later political sympathies and alliances of Bengali nationalist leaders such as Subas Chandra Bose. In 1943, after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, Bose created the provisional government of ‘Azad’ (free) India, and with Tojo's consent took command of the ‘Indian National Army’ made up of Indian POWs in Singapore. Declaring war on Britain and America, the INA marched for Delhi, but was defeated at Imphal in the summer of 1944. See S Wolpert, A New History of India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

E Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in Modern India, London: Hurst, 1996.

Ghosh, p 588.

Bhatt, 2001, p 10.

Nehru, 1989, p 151

Trautmann, 1997, p 211.

Chatterjee, 1986, p 79.

See Bhatt, 2001, p 18.

P Heehs, Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, p 4.

Ghosh, p 471.

Ibid, p 493.

Greenslade, 1994, p 192.

Ibid.

Nehru, 1989, p 146.

Khilnani, in A History of Indian Literature in English, p 148.

p 58.

Nehru in Khilnani, ‘Gandhi and Nehru: the uses of English’, in A History of Indian Literature in English, p 153.

Nehru, 1960, p 47, my italics.