Tropologies of Indianness in Anglophone Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction

While previous studies have explored the literary representation of "India" as a place, a colony, or a modern nation-state, this dissertation focuses on the idea of Indianess as a civilizational essence within the field of Anglophone colonial and postcolonial South Asian fiction. The central finding of this project is that Indianness is often imagined in fiction through a system of recurrent tropes. These tropes include the Neo-Vedantic concept of metaphysical oneness (brahman); the centripetal dynamics of Sanskritization; the ontological modes of "impersonal" being; the Hegelian allegory of "History"; and most importantly, the rhetoric of caste subjectivity (varna). The use of these tropes in fiction reveals a critical disassociation with contemporary grand narratives of "India" as a postcolonial nation-state as well as the fascist Hindutva ideology of purified Hindu-ness. For these reasons, this project uses the term "Indutva" to classify the unique tropologies of Indianness within colonial and postcolonial South Asian literature. The primary texts of this study are E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope (1960), and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). In Passage, Forster illustrates his idea of Indianness through the rituals of the Gokul Ashtami festival, its Brahminical agents of varnic order and its heterotopic confrontations with History. In Serpent, Indianness is explored through the marital crises of Rao's Brahminical protagonist and the symbolic rebirth of varnic Indianness in post-imperial Europe. Finally, in Small Things, Roy engages an allegorical, counter-Indutva critique of civilizational Indianness, as represented by the "History" of violence against lower-caste "Untouchables." This study of Indianness in fiction is grounded in a historical and theoretical framework that takes late eighteenth-century British Orientalism as a starting point for the modernity of Indianness, and it also draws on Sanskrit and vernacular Indian discourses of religion, caste, and metaphysics. The methodology of this project thus draws equally from postcolonial and pre-colonial sources.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0