Review in Postcolonial Text, 2015, by Anita Ananthram (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural a nd the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representati o s have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastora l/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian villa ge vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terr ain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers c hose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Thr ee the work of Raja Rao ( Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan ( The Legends of Khasak , 1969) and in Chapter Four th...
Gandhi, Utopianism and the Construction of Colonial Difference
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2001
This article explores the dynamics of Gandhi's political emergence at the head of the Indian nationalist movement in 1919 and argues that the form of his ideology had a decisive impact in transforming the political field in India from an elite-based constitutional politics to a field of mass political participation. It argues that utopianism enabled Gandhian discourse to resolve the ideological crisis in which Indian nationalism had found itself at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century. Tracing the lineages of this ideological dilemma, the article then argues that utopianism permitted Gandhi to articulate a sense of cultural difference from the colonial Other based on a rejection of the modernity associated with it, while simultaneously occluding Gandhi's own modernism which he used as the basis for his programme of social reform. Examining Gandhi's seminal work Hind Swaraj, the article analyses the rhetorical strategies employed by Gandhi in order to open up this space of symbolic difference. These strategies articulated a political discourse which sought to reconcile differences within Indian society in order to project a unified difference against the colonial power. As such, it enabled a politics at once more radical than Indian nationalism had hitherto been without alienating the groups which had felt threatened by earlier periods of political 'extremism'.
Book Review: Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures by Anupama Mohan
LSE Review
Book Review: Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures by Anupama Mohan blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/11/15/book-review-utopia-and-the-village-in-south-asian-literatures/ Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures provides a searching exploration of twentieth-century literatures of the Indian subcontinent by refocusing attention on works that engage with the village and the rural as a trope. Anupama Mohan breathes new life into Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia and continues a conversation with thinkers of utopia about the need for recuperating the utopian potential in postcolonial writings. Gerardo Serra believes that the book has the potential to enrich the perspective of development scholars who are interested in the complexity and the dynamism of the rural village.
Gandhi's Ideas on Village Community and Modern Civilisation
2015
This article explores the Gandhian idea of Indian village community and his notion of modern civilisation. The village for Gandhi reflected the essence of Indian civilization. According to him, Indian villages were self-sufficient units; he used this notion as a political symbol to strengthen anti-imperialist struggle in India. Gandhi characterised modern cities as symbols of colonial domination, decay and degradation. He emphasised on the programme of rural development. He also identified limitations such as untouchability, pollution etc. in India’s villages and favoured their eradication. This article will explore all this and also try to understand the relevance of Gandhian ideas in today’s context.
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj: A resistance against west
2020
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had always envisioned an Independent India which is free from the British Raj not just politically, but also sociologically, culturally and ideologically from the influence of the west. In his book Hind Swaraj he explicates his understanding of “Swaraj”, “Modern Civilization” and the nature of the increasingly “mechanical world”. His views often seem to be “Anti-modern” in nature. However, in this paper an attempt has been made to show how on the contrary Gandhi's views can be read as “Modern” and very much relevant to the times he lived. His vision of an “Alternate worldview” free from western influence can be read as “modern” and “novel” in its own right.
When New Directions reprinted Rao’s novel Kanthapura in 1967, the assumption was that the work would interest an American readership. Arguably, the novel’s foregrounding of Indian nationalism through the Gandhian character of Moorthy facilitates its canonization in a national literary tradition that appeals to a foreign audience. Nevertheless, the text’s representation of peasant insurgency at Skeffington Coffee Estate offers one of the few local accounts of uprisings in the historiography of empire, even if produced by an elite author from high caste standing. This essay attempts to read the novel’s two divergent impulses of peasant rebellion and the consolidation of nationalism in light of Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (1983). While the novel dramatizes the villagers’ activities against their cruel landowners, Guha suggests that such accounts warrant suspicion because they function in the service of the colonial regime, forgoing the peasant as the subject of his own history. Given the role of the Gandhian nationalist as the primary mover of the diegesis, I ask whether the seditious activities of laborers in the novel can be considered apart from Indian nationalism, i.e., whether it gives access to “pure” rebel consciousness. In doing so, I examine the techniques of folk narration, lyrical style, mythical deference, and the image of transcendence to consider how they might render (or fail to render) the “peasant-rebel’s awareness of his own world and his will to change it.”
Contested Times: The Politics of Gandhi Yug
2017
This paper examines the early 20th century period known as ‘Gandhi Yug’ (1915-1945) in Gujarati literature. It revisits and delineates important historical and political events that shaped the ethos of its nationalist times such as the creation of a new public sphere with the arrival of Gandhi from South Africa; the salience of the peasant both in politics and literature; the establishment of the Gujarat Vidyapith in 1920; the first comprehensive dictionary in Gujarati in 1929, and the emergence of the ‘folk’ as a cultural category. This paper argues that although Gandhian thought was increasingly influential in early 20th century Gujarat, this was a contested age with a multiplicity of voices, competing imaginations and an array of conflicting intellectual positions often homogenised under a label like ‘Gandhi Yug’. The paper also examines the question of violent resistance and the competing conceptions of region and nation that shaped the politics of these writers and thinkers. Through these examinations, the paper attempts to complicate the canon of ‘Gandhi Yug’ and also show that 'Gandhianism' itself was assimilated in complex ways, not always uniformly, not always unanimously.