Indian nationalism and Indo-Anglian literature: A critical re-evaluation of writing race into the English language

Leading Indo-Anglian scholars and authors valorize an Indian national identity in Indian writing in English that is based finally on essentialist notions of Indianness. My dissertation examines selected Indian novels in English by R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, and Bharati Mukherjee to show that nationalist claims to Indianness have limited, rather than expanded, the scope of Indo-Anglian studies. The novels of an earlier generation of Indian writers coming out of British colonialism have been privileged by Indo-Anglian critics because they supposedly express strong nationalist identifications. But critics have not taken into account the problematic, disrupting status of the English language in these novels. My reading of Narayan's The English Teacher demonstrates that Narayan's nationalist identifications waver between a deep affiliation with the British humanistic tradition and an abstract resentment against colonial power. Narayan's use of translation in The Guide elides the categories of social class and gender when it is these categories that provide access to a stratified India that is more "real." My study of Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope shows that Rao's essentialist nationalist identifications are delineated at the expense of castes other than Brahmin and any consideration of gender. His experimentation with the English language in Kanthapura does not produce a viable Indianization of the English language.; The writing of a more recent generation of Indian immigrant writers has been largely ignored by nationalist critics because it calls into question the essentialist truths of nationalism that have been traditionally ascribed to Indo-Anglian literature. In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie examines Indian nationalism as an ideological construct that cannot be disengaged from its discursive practice; his use of translation indicates, rather than disguises, the social categories of class and gender. In Wife and Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee outlines a project that is intended to challenge both Indian and North American nationalist discourses of femininity and "the melting pot," respectively.; In conclusion, I re-define Indo-Anglian studies as the study of a highly political and global category of literature about (and not necessarily in) the Indian subcontinent that records the conditions of multicultural, multilingual Third World, post-colonial discourses.