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WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/westminsterresearch Nationalism and internationalism in selected Indian English novels: 1909 – 1930 Tanmayee Banerjee School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © The Author, 2014. This is an exact reproduction of the paper copy held by the University of Westminster library. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: (http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] Nationalism and Internationalism in Selected Indian English Novels: 1909 – 1930 Tanmayee Banerjee A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages University of Westminster April 2014 Affirmation Herewith I declare that the work submitted is my own. Appropriate credit has been given to thoughts that were taken directly or indirectly from other sources. -- Tanmayee Banerjee Acknowledgements I owe my sincerest gratitude to all the institutions, organizations and individuals who have been directly and indirectly involved in this project. At the very outset, I thank the British Library in London. My project is based on some rare books and manuscripts which have been preserved by the India Office Library, a section of the Asian and African Studies. This has been the most important repository without which this project would not have been possible. I thank the extremely efficient, knowledgeable, cooperative and ever-smiling staff of the British Library who have enriched my experience of academic research and have made it even more gratifying. Apart from the British Library, the repositories which I have had to depend upon were the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, the National Library in Kolkata, Central Library of the University of Calcutta, archive of Anandabazar Patrika in Kolkata, and of course the library of the University of Westminster, London. My sincerest thanks to the University of Westminster for all the facilities and for making this project materialize. I thank Dr. Debra Kelly for her useful workshops and sessions throughout the course. I also thank Mr. Mike Fisher for clarifying all confusions regarding the various formalities I had to go through throughout this entire period of four years. I am sincerely obliged to Dr. Leigh Wilson for supervising this project as my Director of Studies. I thank her for bearing with me while she had to go through innumerable drafts of the thesis which had to be revised again and again. Her priceless tips on writing and her expert comments at every stage have helped to develop my tangled ideas and thoughts into a properly structured thesis. Dr. Dibyesh Anand, my second supervisor, has also played a very important role in this project. This project required a detailed study of Indian history, especially, the history of Indian nationalism and freedom movement. I thank Dr. Anand for guiding me P a g e | iii to the best of his ability in the analysis of the intricacies of the nationalist ideas which I have dealt with. I am also thankful to Steve Barfield for helping me with the project at the initial stage. I would like to thank the editor of Desh magazine (a fortnightly publication of ABP Pvt. Ltd.) and the librarian of Anandabazar Patrika (Kolkata) who helped me procure some important sources from their archive, and Gwyn Redgers of the Sylvan Debating Society (London) for sharing his research findings with me. Peter Hingley of the Royal Astronomical Society, London had been extremely enthusiastic in digging out some really interesting information from the archives of the society and sending me photocopies of a few documents which he thought would be useful to my research. It broke my heart when I came to know of his death in 2012. I will never forget Mr. Hingely’s contribution. May his soul rest in peace. I am extremely thankful to my teachers, Prof. Ramkrishna Bhattacharya and Prof. Suhas Kumar Biswas, for helping me with translations and some of the technical issues involved with writing. My sincerest thanks to Rajat Kanti Sur who took every effort to get hold of some rare publications without which I would not have been able to do proper justice to one of the authors and his works I have dealt with. I would like to thank Jayanta Bhattacharya for providing me with important information regarding some of the resources which proved extremely valuable. I am also thankful to Syamantak Ghosh and Debdatta Chowdhury for getting me in touch with the right people at the right time. Special thanks to my colleagues of room number 417 who have made this room a perfect space for academic engagements. I would like to thank my friends and family members for their whole-hearted support and encouragement. The names which deserve special mention are those of my aunts Gouri and Gayatri Banerjee, my parents Debjani and Deba Ranjan Banerjee and my parents-in-law Sujata and Saroj Kumar Mukherjee. Last but not the least, I have not enough words to express my sincerest gratitude to my husband Dr. Sayandip Mukherjee for helping me solve the technical problems I faced while producing the digital version of final draft. I am also thankful to him for P a g e | iv sharing with me his practical experiences which he had gathered during his PhD. This helped me to keep calm and gather strength during the phases of my disappointment. Without his constant encouragement and reassurance this journey would have been a lonely and desolate one. Abstract The thesis aims at analyzing the ideas of Indian nationalism and Indian identity as constructed and disseminated through four Indian English novels published between 1909 and 1930. The novels to be dealt with in this thesis were authored and published during two of the very important phases in the history of Indian nationalist movement – the Swadeshi Movement (1903-1908) and the Non Co-operation Movement of the 1920s. Thus, this thesis will prove how Indian English novels published before 1930, the majority of which have not been studied with proper attention, bear prominent impressions of the idea of Indian nationalism which was developing coterminously with the publication of these novels. It will show how the novels published in two different phases of the Indian nationalist movement bear similar and dissimilar impressions of the developing imagination of India as a nation. Secondly, this thesis aims at establishing the unique aspect of Indian nationalism that the authors emphasize through their narratives, that is, the idea of internationalist nationalism. The authors believed in an idea of nationalism in which loyalty to one’s own nation does not entail the disavowal or denigration of the interests of other nations. Thus their idea of nationalism, as professed through their works, contained the implication of a humanistic internationalism. Though some of these novels have been mentioned in previous researches, detailed analytical study of the works from the perspective of nationalism and internationalism has not been attempted till date. Whatever might be the reasons behind their slipping into oblivion, there would remain an immense void if this phase of evolution in Indian English literature is neglected. P a g e | v ... [With thy beaming bounty rises India out of slumber I bow down to thee …]1 -- Rabindranath Tagore 1 From the unpublished translation of Tagore’s poems by Prof. Suhas Kumar Biswas. Contents Affirmation ................................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... ii-iii Abstract ..................................................................................................................................iv-v Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1-41 Literature review…………………………………………………………………………....4 Structure and form of the novels……………………………………………………………8 Early Indian English fictions which predate Indian Nationalism………………………….14 Indian Nationalism: A frame of reference for the narratives………………………………19 Chapters……………………………………………………………………………………38 1. Narrating India: Elite Nationalism and Political Mythology in Two Novels of 1909 ... 42-98 Background of The Prince of Destiny: The New Krishna .................................................... 44 Background of Hindupore: A Peep Behind the Indian Unrest ........................................... 52 Themes of The Prince of Destiny and Hindupore ………………………………………...57 Construction of India and Indian Identity ..........................................................................