British imperialism and the rhetoric of cross-cultural representations in 'Kim', 'Hindupore', 'The Prince of Destiny' and 'A Passage to India

This dissertation concentrates on the connection between British imperialism and the rhetoric of cross-cultural representations in four colonial novels which could be held participating in provoking, stimulating, manipulating, or counteracting the revival of Indian (mainly Hindu) culture and civilization. The rationale for this approach is Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. The dominant influence of Rudyard Kipling's Indian verses, stories and novels in England and in colonial India, the Hindu cultural revival elements in S. M. Mitra's Hindupore and Sarath Kumar Ghosh's The Prince of Destiny, and the Eurocentric treatment of Indian culture in Forster's letters, essays, and A Passage to India together serve for us to imagine a historical literary discursive cultural war under British imperialism. This dissertation does not aim to demonstrate that such a cultural war is representative of the British-Indian relations between 1901 and 1924, but to investigate the rhetorical nature of this cultural war which could be imagined through select literary texts as well as through their social, historical and cultural contexts.;Engaged in a substantial examination of chosen colonial texts to facilitate the construction of a truthful and enlightening theory for post-colonial studies, this dissertation may claim the following contributions: it elucidated the complicated nature and function of culture, especially in chapters 1 and 7, successfully traced the historical interaction between the evolution of British imperialism in India and the rise of Hindu revivalism in chapter 2, convincingly settled critics' disputes over Kipling's attitude toward the lama and the Buddhist philosophy in Kim in chapter 3, dissected the ambivalent and varied nature of the counterdiscourses of the two colonized Indian writers in chapters 4 and 5, and provided a persuasive analysis of Forster's liberalism and of his attitude toward the British Raj in A Passage to India in chapter 6. As a whole, this dissertation had, as Timothy Brennan put it, brought "new life to Kim and A Passage to India by juxtaposing them to two Indian contemporaries.".