The late colonial self: The nationalist autobiography in India, 1927--1951

This dissertation examines four examples of the "nationalist autobiography" in order to complicate our understanding of nationalist thought in the late colonial period in India. Nationalist autobiographies are texts that narrate the story of a life by presenting the private and public history of the self in the context of the public history of the nationalist movement, and by extension, the history of the Indian nation. Such texts began to appear in late 19 th century Bengal, but here I examine texts written between 1927 and 1951. Scholars have argued that in the years after the arrival of Gandhi onto the Indian political scene after World War I, nationalism became the main source of political and cultural self-identification. By distinguishing and critically examining the different narratives of the autobiographical self, and the corresponding narrative of the nation, within each of these texts, I illustrate that two of the writers under consideration---Gandhi and Nehru---present multiple, conflicting narratives of the nation, while the other two writers---Desani and Chaudhuri---articulate postnational autobiographical identities. Read together, I argue that in the period of high, mature nationalism in India, these writers question the power of a singular narrative of the nation, and the nation more generally, to shape their autobiographical lives. By illustrating that these four writers articulate their autobiographical identities in a transnational frame, from the space of exile, and as postnational, I argue that a critical examination of these particular texts, and the historical period between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, is crucial in understanding the trajectory of nationalist thought in India and provides one possible historical and theoretical genealogy of postcolonial criticism as it has developed in and about South Asia. In my readings of these texts, I engage with several different disciplinary and theoretical models: postcolonial criticism, Indian historiography, theories of the autobiography, and theories of nationalism. I apply literary and textual analysis to a group of texts generally examined by historians and political scientists.