Negotiating the modern: Orientalism and 'Indianess' in the Anglophone world.

摘要

India and Indians feature prominently in contemporary Anglophone fiction. The last quarter of a century has seen a boom in English language writing from and about Britain's Empire in South Asia. The Booker and Pulitzer prizes for prose fiction frequently consider and reward both writers and topics whose ethnic and cultural histories travel through South Asia. Yet, this is not the first time that India appears prominently in the literary world of English-language readers. Another literary "boom" involving India and Indian writers occurred in the early years of the twentieth century.; In this project, I seek to explicate a long-standing literary celebration of "India" and "Indian-ness" by charting a cultural history of India in Great Britain and the United States. I locate moments (in intellectual, religious and cultural history) where India and Indianess are offered up as solutions to modern moral, ethical and political questions. Beginning in the early 1800's, South Asians actively sought to occupy and modify discourses nurtured and sustained by scholarly Orientalism: the study of the East (Asia Minor and Major) via Western (European) epistemological frameworks. Tracing the varying fortunes of Orientalist scholars from the inception of British rule in East India, my study charts some of the key Indologists---scholars of India, and particularly of Indian "texts"---of the nineteenth century. I note that the rhetorical constructions of East and West deployed by both colonizer and colonized, as well as attempts to synthesize or transcend such constructions, are crucial to delineating and defining conceptions of the "modern." Examining the impact of these confluences in religious, intellectual and political discourse in India and Great Britain, I contend that an increasing desire amongst Indians for political sovereignty, in conjunction with the deeply racialized formations of imperialism, produces a shift in a dialogic relationship between South Asia and Europe that had been initiated and sustained by orientalists. This impetus pushed scholarly discourse about India in Europe, North America and elsewhere, out of what had been a role in the politics and theology of Europe and into high "Literary" culture.