Abstract
The Indian Imagination is an interdisciplinary study in the humanities and a critical discourse on patterns of consciousness. Essentially a work in twentieth-century literature, this book focuses on literary developments in English both in the colonial and postcolonial periods of Indian history. Six divergent writers—Aurobindo Ghose (Sri Aurobindo), Mulk Raj Anand, Balachandra Rajan, Nissim Ezekiel, Anita Desai and Arun Joshi—are studied as representations of a consciousness that emerged from a confrontation between tradition and modernity and from a deep sense of tradition during the colonial and postcolonial periods. British India is a historical configuration of the European fantasy of colonialism and imperialism, the fantasy that was finally dissolved in the first half of this century but only to be reinstituted by another fantasy or dream, of the restructuring of sociohistorical reality of an independent India, a sovereign nation-state. Aurobindo and Mulk Raj Anand are active participants in the representation of these two sides, the colonial India and the postcolonial India. And so is Balachandra Rajan, the well-known Miltonist. Nissim Ezekiel, Anita Desai and Arun Joshi are youthful voices of new India.
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Notes
Refer to some of the assumptions in Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88.
Also see Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and ‘National Allegory,’ (1987), Marxist Literary Theory, ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 375–98.
K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, 5th ed. (New Delhi: Sterling, 1990).
See Marilyn Butler’s commentary on the consolidation of the British Empire in her “Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of Romantic Poetry and Criticism,” Romantic Revolutions ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990) 134–35.
See Laurence Binyon, “Introductory Memoir,” Songs of Love and Death by Manmohan Ghose, ed. Laurence Binyon, 3rd ed. (Calcutta: U of Calcutta, 1968) 1–15.
See Bloom’s essays “Introduction” and “Clinamen or Poetic Misprision,” in The Anxiety of Influence:A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1973) 5–16, 19–45.
G. H. Langley, Sri Aurobindo: Indian Poet, Philosopher and Mystic (London: David Marlowe, 1949) 19.
See Meenakshi Mukherjee’s discussion in chapter 2 of The Twice Born Fiction:Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1974).
In V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas introd. Ian Buruma (London: Penguin, 1992), the historical containment of the Hanuman House and the oppositional issue of Mr Biswas’s homelessness are significant aspects of coloniality.
Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (London: Chatto, 1956) appeared in the United States as Mano Majra.
See Fredric Jameson’s discussion in his The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 150–51.
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K. Nagarajan cited in Dorothy M. Spencer, Indian Fiction in English (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1960) 36–37.
For Anand’s treatment of the Gandhi-Ambedkar controversy see Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998) 220.
Also see Teresa Hubel’s “Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Untouchable,” Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) 147–178.
H. M. Williams, Indo-Anglican Literature 1800–1970:A Survey (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1976) 69.
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See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Sym-bolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981) 68–74.
See Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, rev. 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1958).
Cited by Brook Thomas in the epigraph to his essay “Preserving and Keep-ing Order by Killing Time in Heart of Darkness,” Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Mar-tin’s, 1989) 237.
See Georg Lukics, The Historical Novel trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, preface by Irving Howe (Boston: Beacon, 1963) 171ff.
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Of course, McGann refers to Frantz Fanon’s famous study The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove, 1963).
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Cited in Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995) 55.
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Cited in Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969) 170.
For divergent critical interpretations of E. M. Forster see Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991).
See Rana Kabbani’s discussion in his Europe’s Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 129–33.
See Henri Peyre’s introduction, The Failures of Criticism, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967) 1–25.
Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford UP, 1964) viii.
Coleridge cited in Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989) 27.
See Meena Alexander, “Shelley’s India: Territory and Text, Some Problems of Decolonization,” Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996) 169–78.
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990) 158.
cited in R. Sitaramiah, “The State of Literary Criticism,” Writing in India: The Seventh P. E. N. All India Writers’ Conference, Lucknow 1964 (Proceedings), ed. Nissim Ezekiel (Bombay: P. E. N., 1965) 200.
Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1917) 32.
Mulk Raj Anand, Is There A Contemporary Indian Civilisation? (London: Asia, 1963) 178.
See J. M. Blaut’s conceptualization of diffusionism or Eurocentric diffu-sionism in The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Dffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford, 1993).
Cited in Ruth Aproberts, “Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars” (a review article on theYale edition of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy), Amer-ican Scholar 64 (1995): 146.
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© 2000 K. D. Verma
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Verma, K.D. (2000). Indian Writing in English: Structure of Consciousness, Literary History and Critical Theory. In: The Indian Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61823-1_1
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