UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Mahatma Misunderstood: the politics and forms of South Asian literary nationalism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/77d6z8xw Author Shingavi, Snehal Ashok Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Mahatma Misunderstood: the politics and forms of South Asian literary nationalism by Snehal Ashok Shingavi B.A. (Trinity University) 1997 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Prof. Abdul JanMohamed, chair Prof. Gautam Premnath Prof. Vasudha Dalmia Fall 2009 For my parents and my brother i Table of contents Chapter Page Acknowledgments iii Introduction: Misunderstanding the Mahatma: the politics and forms of South Asian literary nationalism 1 Chapter 1: The Mahatma as Proof: the nationalist origins of the historiography of Indian writing in English 22 Chapter 2: “The Mahatma didn’t say so, but …”: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and the sympathies of middle-class 53 nationalists Chapter 3: “The Mahatma may be all wrong about politics, but …”: Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and the religious imagination of the Indian, secular, nationalist middle class 106 Chapter 4: The Missing Mahatma: Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and the genres and politics of Muslim anticolonialism 210 Conclusion: Nationalism and Internationalism 306 Bibliography 313 ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, this dissertation would have been impossible without the support of my parents, Ashok and Ujwal, and my brother, Preetam, who had the patience to suffer through an unnecessarily long detour in my life. There are neither sufficient words nor gestures to demonstrate just how grateful I am for all of the things that they have done for me over the years. I am also greatly indebted to the intellectual support, advice, and mentorship provided to me by the members of my committee: Abdul Jan Mohamed, Vasudha Dalmia, and Gautam Premnath, and to temporary but still invaluable members of my committee, Priya Joshi and Marcial Gonzalez. Abdul Jan Mohamed, the chair of this project, stood up for me in ways that can never be repaid at times when no one else would. Vasudha Dalmia opened more doors for me than I ever knew could be opened; to her I especially credit my love for Premchand. Gautam Premnath and Marcial Gonzalez are model scholar-activists whose examples I strive to follow. Priya Joshi introduced me to the world of Indian Writing in English and I have not turned back since. Countless instructors, mentors, and advisors aided me in this process. David Lloyd, Chris Nealon, Steven Goldsmith, Richard Halpern, Eric Falci, Munis Faruqui, Adnan Malik, Stephen Best, Anne-Lise Francois, Richard Hutson, Michael Rubinstein, and Muhammad Warsi have all contributed my development. Not enough can be said about Donna Jones, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Schweik, all of whom shaped my thinking about the discipline of literature and provided more help and generosity than I had right to ask for. I have to thank especially Janet Adelman who made it possible to survive iii through and thrive while teaching “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance”; the class would not have been possible without the incredibly principled position she took. There were also friends made during the process, all of whom are reflected in some ways throughout this dissertation. Connie You, Helga Erickson, Michael Farry, June Yoshi, Joseph Nugent, Emily Anderson, and Kimberly Johnson deserve much credit for putting up with some of the worst expressions of my ideas earliest and for being friends through some of the most trying times of graduate school. Ruth Jennison provided me with my first serious model of Marxist theory and practice and is responsible for turning me into an activist. Certain fellow students have a warm place in my heart, because without their friendship, the last leg of the writing would have been impossible. Christine Hong never had a shortage of encouraging words, seeing design in my chaos. Marguerite Nguyen, Melissa Fabros, and Tolani Adeboye are the fiercest friends without whom sanity is impossible to imagine. Siddharth Patel, always supportive, has heard more complaints about the process of writing than humanly tolerable and more iterations of the various arguments than reasonable. Ajay Satpute has been my friend for too long for me to be able to summarize his role in my thinking in a few words. Sarah Wolf, kindred spirit, lent eyes, ears, shoulders and heart throughout the entire process of writing this dissertation. Dana Blanchard pushed me when I had run out of steam. Debates with Michael Smith made my time at Berkeley exciting. Philip Gasper made me believe that scholars had something meaningful to offer activists. iv Several activists in the International Socialist Organization have provided camaraderie, engagement, and energy: Elizabeth Terzakis, John Patel, Jean Woolsey, Jessie Muldoon, Kathryn Lybarger, Steven Damewood, John Green, Alessandro Tinonga, John Gallagher, George and Poly Vouros, Michelle Simon, Cameron Sturdevant, Adrienne Johnstone, Amanda Maystead, Ragina Johnson, Rachel Odes, Crystal Bybee, Scott Johnson, Katrina Storey, Jeff Martin, Andrew Libson, Brian Belknap, Brian Cruz, and Jeremy Tully. The work that this dissertation represents pales in comparison to the work that they do, tirelessly and without recompense. Participating in the Students for Justice in Palestine fully made me a radical, and the friends made there will always be credited with the central theme of this dissertation (that nationalism can be redeemable). I am grateful as well for time spent with the United Students Against Sweatshops, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, the Campus Antiwar Network, the Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE/UAW local 2865), and the Friends of South Asia. Finally, I am thankful for the support of the faculty and staff in the University of Mary Washington’s English, Linguistics and Communications Department, who were encouraging through the last year of the process of writing this dissertation: Constance Smith, Gary Richards, Maya Mathur, James Harding, Collin Rafferty, Marie McCallister, Teresa Kennedy, Claudia Emerson, Chris Foss, Mara Scanlon, and Antonio Barrenechea. This dissertation bears the impress of the ideas and encouragement provided by many of the people I have listed above. The errors in the project that follow, it bears underlining, are my own. v Introduction: Misunderstanding the Mahatma: the politics and forms of South Asian literary nationalism The title of this dissertation is necessarily tendentious. I cannot claim a monopoly on accurate interpretations of the long career of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose writings fill more than fifty volumes. What I have been interested in doing is examining why the fact of Gandhi’s influence has been so distorting on histories of Indian nationalist thought and, in particular, on the history of Indian literature of the twentieth century. Few discussions of the movement for Indian independence from British colonization can avoid the long shadow that Gandhi casts over the events and ideas of the period. Gandhi’s shadow, though, is both the safest vantage point from which to survey the terrain of Indian nationalism and a distorting screen through which the landscape is made to appear less troubling or treacherous than it is. This necessarily makes discussions of the gravitational pull of Gandhi’s influence on the movement for Indian independence more than a little difficult, since one is never sure how much distortion one is accounting for, and it appears, then, that no matter how much one recalibrates, one is always encountering the Mahatma in a consciously or unconsciously misunderstood manner. The more one attempts to find Gandhians behaving in ways prescribed by Gandhi the less satisfied one is with the results. There are historical reasons for these mistakes, of course, not the least of which are Gandhi’s willingness to accommodate a number of disparate ideas in the Congress Party, the wide range of sources from which he apparently drew inspiration, and the highly provisional and non-theoretical nature of 1 much of his writing. But the problem still remains: Gandhi was many things to many people but at no point were their ideas reducible to his, no matter how charismatic and important a figure he remains. In post-independence India, however, Gandhi’s ideas are no longer an unqualified good; whether because Gandhi may have offered suspiciously limited programs to minorities or because he “appeased” Muslims, both left-wing and right-wing detractors have found reasons to make Gandhi the root of the problems facing the post- independence nation-state. There are a few reasons to be suspicious of Gandhi’s own responsibility for the crimes of India, not the least of which is that by the time that independence was negotiated Gandhi was at the lowest point in his influence over the movement and the Indian National Congress. But even if we accept the controversial thesis that Gandhi bears the lion’s share of the blame, there are two problems that come immediately to the fore in attempting to separate Gandhi from his putative followers and assigning blame and responsibility accordingly. First, many intellectual strains attempted