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Tropologies of Indianness in Anglophone Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction

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Tropologies of Indianness in Anglophone Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction TROPOLOGIES OF INDIANNESS IN ANGLOPHONE COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL SOUTH ASIAN FICTION by Prasad Ramray Bidaye A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Program in South Asian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Prasad Ramray Bidaye 2014 Tropologies of Indianness in Anglophone Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction Prasad Ramray Bidaye Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Program in South Asian Studies University of Toronto 2014 Abstract 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 ii 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. iii Acknowledgments This project was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute India Studies Research Fellowship, the Humber College-OPSEU Locals 562 and 563 Employee Scholarship Fund, the Diljit and Gulshan Juneja Award for South Asian Studies, the Indo-Canadian Advisory Group Bursary for the Study of India, the Dipty Chakraborty Bursary for Bengali Studies, and other sources through the University of Toronto’s Department of English, the Centre for South Asian Studies, and the Centre for Comparative Literature. I present this work at the feet of my gurus: Baba, Dada, and Nanasaheb. I am grateful for your guidance and inspiration, and for removing all obstacles and keeping my mind, faith, and confidence strong at every stage of this project and beyond. I am honoured to have had the fortunate experience of working closely with my supervisor, Chelva Kanaganayakam. I thank him for encouraging my explorations of religion, fictionality, and Indianness, while challenging me to discover the central arguments and interventions of my research, and for being patient and supportive of my process at all times. I am also deeply grateful to my committee of Uzoma Esonwanne, Victor Li, and Neil ten Kortenaar for their critical feedback and editorial guidance. This project has travelled across three departments, three countries, and two continents. At U of T, J. Edward Chamberlin, John Fleming, Elizabeth D. Harvey, and Mary Nyquist facilitated my shift from Comparative Literature to English and South Asian Studies, and the Administrative Officers of the Department of English – especially Gillian Northgrave, Marguerite Perry, and Tanuja Persaud –provided invaluable support during my transitional phases. The focus of this project was strengthened through the mentorship of Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Eric Cazdyn, Lubomír Doležel, Kanishka Goonewardena, Greig Henderson, Linda Hutcheon, Reid Locklin, Heather Miller, Ajay Rao, Stephen J. Rupp, Paul Stevens, Tyler Evans-Tokaryk, and Ming Xie. I am also indebted to my mentors from my years at York University: Aijaz Ahmad, Ian Balfour, Reza Baraheni, Arun Mukherjee, B. W. Powe, and Winston Smith. More recently, I am grateful to my iv colleagues at Humber College and give special thanks to Joe Aversa, Vera Beletzan, and Paula Gouveia for accommodating the completion of this project. In 2005, I was fortunate to to visit Raja Rao’s home in Austin, Texas. I am thankful to his wife Susan for allowing me to videotape a semi-formal interview with her and her late husband, and also to my Texas family for facilitating this visit: Shetye and John Cypher, Shakuntala and Gajanan Shetye, Alka and Prashant Valanju, and Sanvita Sample. My research on Rao was furthered through valuable exchanges with M. Letizia Alterno, John Murray VII, and Stephen Slemon. In 2006, I undertook a four-month-long research trip to India for this project, and I am deeply grateful to all of my extended family and close friends for hosting this visit; special thanks must be given to Vaishali and Jayant Manerkar as well as Arvind and the late Jyotsna Jathar for accommodating my extended stays in Mumbai and Pune. The research on this trip was facilitated through the generous assistance of R. Raj Rao, Kamalakar Bhat, and Aniket Jaaware at the University of Pune; Nilufer Bharucha and Abbas Rangwala at the University of Mumbai; Sudha Pandya, Aditi Vahia, Rajan Barrett, O. P. Juneja, and Gita Viswanath at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda; and Nilanjana Deb and Rafat Ali at Jadavpur University in Kolkata. I am very grateful to the late Dilip Chitre and P. Lal for meeting with me personally to discuss my research interests and to Dilip’s wife Viju for providing me with rare copies of his texts for my work and beyond. I also received valuable intellectual engagement and hospitality from the families of Asha and Victor Gadkar, Gajanan Nadkarni, Sudhir Bedekar, Col. Divekar, and especially Jayant Deshpande, who introduced me to bhakti and bhasa literatures in translation. From 2007 to 2012, I had the opportunity to share aspects of this work in a variety of scholarly settings: conference presentations at CACLALS, SALA, and Humber-LAS; an invited lecture for the Munk School’s Asian Institute; job talks and interviews with faculty from Skidmore, St. Olaf, and St. Jerome’s; and guest lectures as well as in-class discussions at all three campuses of U of T. I was also fortunate to discuss my research and receive useful guidance from Mansour Bonakdarian, Madhuri Deshmukh, Leela v Gandhi, Zulfikar Ghose, Dilip Menon, Harjot Oberoi, Sheldon Pollock, and Lee Schlesinger. I am honoured and blessed with an incredibly diverse, resourceful, and supportive circle of colleagues and friends in and around Toronto. There are over a hundred individuals to name who have done everything from sharing articles to watching laptops to listening to me brainstorm for hours over coffee to hosting feasts and parties, ensuring a healthy balance of the personal and the professional at all times. Chandrima Chakraborty, Arun Chaudhuri, Carol-Lynne D’Arcangelis, Malini Guha, Aparna Halpé, Gurbir Jolly, Mark Jones, Pasha M. Khan, Adil Mawani, Julie and Harish Mehta, Hiren Mistry, Romi Mikulinsky, Kelly Minerva, Mandeep and Devi Mucina, Kashinath Namjoshi, Soraya Peerbaye, Imara Ajani Rolston, Piali Roy, Muhammad Sid-Ahmad, Aparna Sundar, Swapna Tamhane, and Anil Varughese, made up the core of my adda circle. I also owe much of my well-being during this period to Ali and his family at the Innis Café, the Dragon Athletica community, the Charles Street Family Housing community, and dear friends Usha Agarwal, Mohini Athia, Gary Abugan, Harjeet Badwall, Domenic Ali, Farheen Beg, Joaquin Claussell, Pamela Coles, Brother Dub, Asha Gosein, Cornelius Harris, Hang-Sun Kim, Cassandra Lord, Nitin Manohar, Lisa Pike, Cynthia Quarrie, Leila Sarangi, Anne Solomon, Scott Staring, and and Stephen Yeager. My deepest gratitude goes to my family: the unconditional love and support of my parents Aruna and Raya Bidaye; my siblings Sumita and Maneesh; my in-laws, the late Carol and Amal Batacharya; Amit, Cathy, Leena and the late Ashok Bidaye; the Parkar mandal of North America; and the Rundle, Sclisizzi, and Sanchez families. Closest to my heart are my partner and most trusted critic, Sheila Batacharya, our son Soumil and our soon-to-be-born baby. The four of you are the rock of my being, and so much of what I have learnt, experienced, and examined in this dissertation comes directly from you. I dedicate this work to your blessed presence in my life and the honourable memory of my grandparents: Usha and Mangesh Karmalkar, who fought for India’s independence by participating in Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha; and Indira and Ganpati Bidaye, who left me an inheritance with which I was able to travel throughout India in 1997 and take the first steps towards discovering the topic of this dissertation. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1 Indutva: An Introduction 1 Preface 1 1.1 The Colonial Origins of Civilizational Indianness 4 1.2 Pre-colonial Concepts of Caste 8 1.3 Caste Subjectivity and Sanskritization 16 1.4 Neo-Vedanta and the Hegelian Rhetoric of “History” 22 1.5 Precedents and Debates 29 Chapter 2 E.
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