Reading the Child between the British Raj and the Indian Nation A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2013 Veronica Barnsley School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Contents Abstract 5 Declaration 6 Copyright Statement 6 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 Between the British Raj and the Indian Nation 29 The Emergence of the Child 33 Of Child Of Nation: Constancy 42 Of Child Of Nation: Growth 48 Transculture/Transgenre 62 1. Sweet and Versatile: The Child in Kipling’s Indian fiction 67 The Child as Hook and Anchor 77 Plain Tales and ‘Small Books’: Kipling’s Early Stories 84 Rulers and Mascots: ‘His Majesty the King’ and ‘The Drums’ 89 Imitation/Separation: ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ and ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ 94 The Child of Old: ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’ 99 ‘Because I am a man, because I am a wolf’: The Jungle Books 103 2 Making the Child Master: ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ 109 ‘Thou art a man-cub’: Mowgli the Boy 111 ‘Beyond his age’: Mowgli the Man 116 Conclusion: ‘It is but a tale I told thee’ 122 2. Infancy and India in the Works of Flora Annie Steel 133 Model Memsahib = Woman Writer 139 The (Dis)appearance of the Child 148 Housekeeping: the Indian Servant as Child 154 Housekeeping: The British Child 162 The Child Story-teller 168 On the Face of the Waters: Mutiny History and the British Family 173 The Angelic Child 179 ‘That other child over across the seas’ 184 ‘Every feeling is historical’ 187 Conclusion 194 3. The Anti-colonial Child: Mulk Raj Anand’s early writing 195 The Child and the Writer: Seven Summers 210 Breaking into Bloomsbury 220 3 Other Real Worlds : Untouchable 225 Remembering Gandhi 230 Awkward Translations 234 Modernist Mediations: Reading Coolie after Untouchable 243 Conclusion 260 Conclusion 262 Works Cited 274 Archival Sources 291 Internet Sources 291 Total number of words: 86034 4 Abstract We all claim to ‘know’, in some manner, what a child is and what the term ‘child’ means. As adults we designate how and when children should develop and decide what is ‘good’ for them. Worries that childhood is ‘disappearing’ in the global North but not ‘developing’ sufficiently in the South propel broader discussions about what ‘normal’ development, individual and national, local and global, should mean. The child is also associated across artistic and cultural forms with innocence, immediacy, and simplicity: in short with our modern sense of ‘interiority’, as Carolyn Steedman has shown. The child is a figure of the self and the future that also connotes what is prior to ‘civilised’ society: the animal, the ‘primitive’ or simply the unknown. The child is, according to Jacqueline Rose, the means by which we work out our relationship to language and to the world and, as Chris Jenks expresses it, ‘the very index of civilization’. In this study I begin with the question that Karin Lesnik-Oberstein asks: ‘why is the child so often portrayed as ‘discovered’, rather than “invented” or “constructed”?’. I am concerned with how the child is implicated as ‘knowable’ and with asking what we may lose or gain by applying paradigms of childhood innocence or development to the nation as it is imagined in British and Indian literature at the ‘zenith’ of the British Raj. In order to unpick the knot of factors that link the child to the nation I combine cultural constructivist approaches to the child with the resources of postcolonial theory as it has addressed subalternity, hybridity and what Elleke Boehmer calls ‘nation narratives’. In the period that I concentrate on, the 1880s-1930s, British and Indian discourses rely upon the child as both an anchor and a jumping off point for narratives of self and nation, as displayed in the versatile and varied children and childhoods in the writers that I focus on: Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel and Mulk Raj Anand. Chapter 1 begins with what have been called sentimental portrayals of the child in Kipling’s early work before critiquing the notion that his ‘imperial boys’, Mowgli and Kim, are brokers of inter-cultural compromise that anticipate a postcolonial concern with hybridity. I argue that these boys figure colonial relations as complicated and compelling but are caught in a static spectacle of empire in which growing up is not a possibility. Chapter 2 turns to the work of Flora Annie Steel, a celebrated author in her time and, I argue, an impressive negotiator between the positions of the memsahib (thought of as both frivolous and under threat) and the woman writer determined to stake her claim to ‘knowledge’ of India across genres. From Steel’s domestic manual, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, to her ‘historical’ novel of the Indian Mutiny, the child both enables the British woman to define her importance to the nation and connotes a weakness against which the imperial feminist defines her active role. In Chapter 3 I discuss the work of Mulk Raj Anand, a ‘founding father’ of the Indian- English novel, who worked to unite his vision of an international humanism with the Gandhian ideal of a harmonious, spiritually inflected Indian nation. I look at Anand’s use of the child as an aesthetic position taken by the writer from the colonies in relation to the Bloomsbury avant-garde; a means of chronicling suffering and inequality and a resource for an idiosyncratic modernist method that has much to say to current theoretical concerns both with cosmopolitanism and materiality. 5 Declaration No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institution of learning. Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and she has given the University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for the administrative process. ii. Copies of this thesis, whether in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs or tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and and Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University of Manchester IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http//www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in the University’s policy on Presentation of Theses. 6 Acknowledgements I cannot say how grateful I am to my supervisors, Daniela Caselli and Anastasia Valassopoulos. Their research interests help me to imagine the ‘two sides’ of this project, the child and the nation, and their tenacity and encouragement in reading and re-reading my, often fanciful, attempts to bring it into being have been invaluable. I have also benefited from the insights of Howard Booth on Kipling and Robert Spencer has been a formidable but inspirational member of my research panels. The insights of the Postcolonial Reading Group, including Humaira Saeed, Matt Whittle and Rena Jackson, have also been a huge help in thinking through the issues in this thesis. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing me with financial support and the University of Manchester for additional contributions towards attending conferences that have been beneficial to my work. Thanks also to fellow PhD students who have made the process much more enjoyable than I could have imagined. Thanks to Kathy Frances and Jade Munslow Ong for fun, friendship and indulging the whims of my children abit too much. Thanks also to Michael Durrant for cheap wine and laughs, Lucia Nigri for tirimasu and the funniest text messages, Maysa Jaber for working as hard as I should and Clara Bradbury- Rance for cinematic distractions that inadvertently contributed to this project. Finally, Andy Frayn and Chris Vardy for being helpfully calm when I was trying to teach and submit a final draft. The non-PhD friends I have to thank will never read this, but can be represented by Lucy ‘Spew’ Bowen who called me up every few weeks for the last four years to ask ‘So have you finished the thesis yet?’ I am also grateful to my parents, Barbara and Jim, and to Jack, Joe and Hannah for keeping any doubts that I would ever finish being a student under wraps and for their love and support. My parents-in-law, Pat and Brian also deserve thanks for encouragement and energetic childcare. A final big thank you to Dave for cooking me eggs even though you don’t eat them, amongst a thousand other things, and to Jessie and Meg for hindering this project in the best possible ways.