Landscaping India: from Colony to Postcolony

Syracuse University SURFACE English - Dissertations College of Arts and Sciences 8-2013 Landscaping India: From Colony to Postcolony Sandeep Banerjee Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/eng_etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Geography Commons, and the South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Banerjee, Sandeep, "Landscaping India: From Colony to Postcolony" (2013). English - Dissertations. 65. https://surface.syr.edu/eng_etd/65 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts and Sciences at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in English - Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT Landscaping India investigates the use of landscapes in colonial and anti-colonial representations of India from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries. It examines literary and cultural texts in addition to, and along with, “non-literary” documents such as departmental and census reports published by the British Indian government, popular geography texts and text-books, travel guides, private journals, and newspaper reportage to develop a wider interpretative context for literary and cultural analysis of colonialism in South Asia. Drawing of materialist theorizations of “landscape” developed in the disciplines of geography, literary and cultural studies, and art history, Landscaping India examines the colonial landscape as a product of colonial hegemony, as well as a process of constructing, maintaining and challenging it. In so doing, it illuminates the conditions of possibility for, and the historico-geographical processes that structure, the production of the Indian nation. The dissertation begins by examining the concept of the nation in spatial-temporal terms, and as imbricated in the uneven and global processes of capitalism. The next two chapters examine the deployment of landscape in British and Indian literary and cultural productions at two specific local sites. The second chapter focuses on British and Indian contestation of the landscape of the colonial city of Calcutta, the capital of British Indian space. The third chapter focuses on the British claims and Indian counter-claims over the Himalayan landscape. Both chapters demonstrate how the Indians counter the British landscaping of these sites to produce their own counter-conceptions. In other words, it shows how Indians appropriate for themselves the landscapes of Calcutta and the Himalaya. The fourth chapter examines the idealization and idolization of the Indian landscape in Vande Mataram (1882), the national song of the post-colonial Indian nation-state, and its role in structuring the idea of India as a motherland. I argue that while the song’s anti-colonial spatial imagination is inspired by the quotidian reality of British India ravaged by famines, its reliance on a pastoral ethos and Hindu “commonsense” also posits the laboring classes and Muslims as outsiders to India, in addition to gesturing towards a patriarchal and hetero-normative national ethos. The fifth and final chapter examines the nation as a scalar manifestation of the landscape form, and explores the contending conceptions of the Indian nation-space, and Indians, in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (1907). It investigates how these novels address the questions of belonging to India, and “Indian-ness,” by interrogating, in particular, the novels’ depictions of their Irish foundling protagonists. The chapter contends that Tagore’s idea of the nation as a universal space of humanity repudiates Kipling’s imperialist vision of India as a space of irredeemable difference, and highlights how Tagore’s articulation of “India” and “the Indian,” provides a dissenting perspective from contemporaneous trends in anti- colonial nationalism that assumed a decidedly Hindu tenor. The chapter also highlights how Tagore, by focusing on the scale of the home, and the inequitable gendered division of labor within it, critiques Indian nationalists for their refusal to incorporate a critique of gender inequality and patriarchy within the framework of national liberation. LANDSCAPING INDIA: FROM COLONY TO POSTCOLONY by Sandeep Banerjee B.A. (Hons.), English, Jadavpur University, India, 1998. M.A., English, Jadavpur University, India, 2000. M.Phil., English Romantic Studies, University of Oxford, UK, 2002. Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English. Syracuse University August 2013 Copyright © Sandeep Banerjee 2013 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation, and researching for it, would have been quite impossible without the support – intellectual, personal, and financial – that I so generously received. For the University Fellowships during the academic years 2007 – 08 and 2011 – 12, I am grateful to the Graduate School of Syracuse University. I also thank the Humanities Center of Syracuse University for selecting me as a Dissertation Fellow for 2012 – 13. These fellowships supported me financially and relieved me from teaching, allowing me to focus solely on my research and writing. I also thank the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs for a Goekjian Summer Research Grant, and the South Asia Center of Syracuse University for a Bharati Memorial Research Grant. These grants allowed me to conduct archival research at the British Library in London, and at the National Library in Calcutta. The staff of the British Library helped me make sense of their collections, especially the India Office Records, for which I remain extremely grateful. I also thank the staff of the E. S. Bird Library at Syracuse University – in particular, those at the Inter-Library Loan department – for their continued help and support over the years that have been critical for my research. And while it is not customary to thank libraries with which one has a purely personal connection, I simply must make an exception here. A very special thank you to the Children’s Library at Aurobindo Bhavan, Calcutta for introducing me to the world of books, and sustaining me with the joys of reading through my junior and middle school years. For their support, encouragement, critiques, genuine warmth, and their exceptional mentorship, I thank my dissertation committee: Crystal Bartolovich, Don Mitchell, Kevin Morrison, Subho Basu, and Manan Desai. v Crystal Bartolovich has supported this project from the time it was just a few pages of scribbled notes, and in more ways than I can recount. She has been an exceptional mentor who has pushed me to think and write better, asked difficult questions at all times, and groomed me to take on the challenges of the North American academy. I thank her, knowing that I cannot thank her enough. Don Mitchell introduced me to “landscape,” to Marxist geography, and to the broad contours of “Western Marxism.” He also re-introduced me to Raymond Williams. I am grateful to him for his intellectual generosity and unfailing support, but especially for asking me “so what?”, so relentlessly, as I wrote this dissertation. I thank Subho Basu for helping me understand the complex and variegated world of South Asian colonial history. Syracuse would surely have been bleaker without his personal warmth, and his lively presence in our lives. I also thank Kevin Morrison and Manan Desai for supporting my project. I am especially grateful to Kevin for continually reminding me that my project could, and should, engage with Victorian studies. Donald Morton made “theory” accessible, and – more importantly – intelligible. I am grateful to him for helping me to think conceptually, and prodding me to develop my own understanding of Marxism and post-structuralism. I am grateful to Susan Wadley of the South Asia Center of Syracuse University for her continued support, and for providing me a venue to present my work. I also thank Terri Zollo of the English Department for her help – especially to negotiate departmental and university guidelines – and for being the most efficient person I have encountered. Amlan Das Gupta has been a mentor from my undergraduate days, who introduced me to the exciting world of literary and cultural studies. I am grateful to Amlan-da for his intellectual generosity and personal warmth; but above all, for teaching me to read critically, and for vi encouraging me to think independently. I also thank Ananda Lal for his support of my work, but also for insisting that I think of returning to the academy. I am thankful to my parents Santosh Banerjee and Shibani Banerjee for many things, and it will be nothing short of ridiculous if I were to try and list them out. But I want to say this: my mother introduced me to a world that taught me, long before Raymond Williams, that culture was truly “ordinary”; my father supported my sense of curiosity about the world for as long as I can remember, suggesting it could be intellectually stimulating, and rewarding. And I am of course truly grateful that they supported my seemingly mad decision to quit a mid-career professional job in New Delhi to pursue research in upstate New York. I thank Diptosh Majumdar for being a very unlikely boss who encouraged me to move out of journalism and return to academia. I am grateful to Pratap Mitra beyond words for his numerous acts of kindness, both great and small. For those wonderful times together at Syracuse, I am grateful to Victoria Arnold, Shane Avery, Rinku Chatterjee, Razima Chowdhury, Steven Doles, C. J. Dosch, Kiffen Dosch, the late Joe Hughes, Kathryn Lulofs, Jackson Petsche, Retika Rajbhandari, Gohar Siddiqui, Elizabeth Stearns, Jared Stearns, Kritika Thapa, and Melissa Welshans. Anirban Acharya, Koel Banerjee, Tanushree Ghosh, Muralikrishna Iyer, Auritro Majumder, and Shrimoy Roy Chaudhury gave life to the numerous adda sessions filled with endless hilarity, inane discussions, thoughtful debates, wonderful music (often from Anirban’s violin), and some excellent food. These friendships made everyday life in Syracuse memorable in so many ways.

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