Thrilling Empire": Indian history and questions of genre in Victorian popular fiction (original) (raw)
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Revolutions, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2019
This article aims to offer a limited panorama of the novels that compose the genre of Mutiny fiction and to analyse its mutations through time. By tracing the generic origins of the Mutiny novel and analysing how it variously draws on the chivalrous tradition, the Gothic, and other genres (adventure fiction, romance, and melodrama, among others), I would like to show that the various examples of the Mutiny novel genre have often been used to promote imperial values, or to criticise the Empire retrospectively, as Flaminia Nicora’s work has shown, but also that these novels have continuously responded to historical events. My contention is that the Mutiny motif has been instrumental in building a historical narrative of England and that its continued presence merits being studied.
'Providential' Campaigns: Intertwining Thuggee and the Sepoy Mutiny in Colonial Fictions
Rupkatha, 2020
This article examines how some colonial fictions intertwine historically unconnected Thuggee and the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 to make sense of Indian resistance to British rule. This was done by only a few writers. The article tries to find out what led these colonial writers to link the two unconnected events. To do this, representations of Thuggee and the Mutiny in the works of Captain Meadows Taylor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Emilio Salgari are scrutinized. The article also considers other relevant works, like those by Sir George MacMunn, Hermann Goedsche, Jules Verne and Francisco Luis Gomes. It tries to ascertain whether a writer's nationality affected his conceptualization of the relationship between Thuggee and the Mutiny in any significant way. In doing so, it seeks to highlight how representations of Indian insurgency in colonial writings varied in accordance with the writer's nationality and outlook vis-à-vis British colonialism in India.
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This chapter examines the novels’ claim to veracity by closely reading the texts in light of their presentation of India and Indians. It identifies four primary tropes which may be seen clearly across both novels: Indians’ lack of or extravagance in clothing, their apparent love for ornamentation, the unsettling opacity of their cities, and the fanatical superstition of their religions. Though both authors had no personal experience of the Mutiny or of travel in the Indian subcontinent, the events, persons, and places they create appear premised on rich and intimate acquaintance with the same. In other words, the discursive creation of India in these novels is on the same lines as that in the popular press and on the stage: the boundaries of fact and fiction seem blurred with the extensive historical referencing to actual sites and battles of the Mutiny.
The 'Loyal Indian Woman' in 'Mutiny Fiction'
"The Indian Historical Review," Vol 34, No.2, 2007, pp. 36-57, 2007
Most readings of the colonial literary productions generated by the Rebellion of 1857 have foregrounded the ‘mutilated memsahib’. This paper shifts the focus to a hitherto ignored trope, viz. that of the 'loyal Indian woman ' which appears recurrently in the literary discourse of the Rebellion in the nineteenth century. It examines this trope through the figure of the devoted ayah, the loyal dancing girl, the faithful concubine/wife, as well as inter-racial female friendship. This paper seeks to show how this figuration of gendered colonised loyalty constituted one of the important discursive strategies and was shaped and reinforced by the exigencies of empire and post-Rebellion insecurities.
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2018
The fascination with the presence of the Indian/Oriental idol in Victorian London is a literary cornucopia that manifests variously in end-of-the-century fiction, particularly in Marsh's The Goddess: A Demon and Anstey's A Fallen Idol. These idols, Hindoo in Marsh and Jain in Anstey, are overdetermined in their association with Buddhism, Theosophy, and Spiritualism. What is determinative are the tensions between them and the anxieties about anti-colonial insurgency in the imperial metropolis. This discussion investigates the uncanny threat of the lifeless yet life-like colonial object that the idols signify and then analyzes the machine/automaton-like nature of this object, one that echoes with several narratives of insidious colonial insurgence. Besides suggesting the late-nineteenth-century English fears of an angry wave of Indian anti-colonial insurgency, the idols also come to embody the Western tensions surrounding industrialization and colonialism that were reaching their peak in the English readerly imagination of the 1880s and 1890s.