... In the section on "New Light" literature, the juxtaposition of Akbar Ilahabadi'... more ... In the section on "New Light" literature, the juxtaposition of Akbar Ilahabadi's satirical verse with the reformist literature of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his following is a neat device which highlights the contrary strands in the Urdu literature of the time, while the ... J. MAJEED ...
Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, 2011
This chapter examines how the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) grappled with the proper nam... more This chapter examines how the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) grappled with the proper names of Indian languages and dialects. For the Linguistic Survey, India was a site for integrating the different branches of linguistics as a modern European discipline (phonetics, historical linguistics, dialectology, etymology, and philology) into a unified working project. However, this chapter addresses the modes of thinking and the operations of thought that precede this formal organization into linguistic knowledge. The published volumes of the Linguistic Survey, and especially the unpublished files, foreground the process of naming in the Survey’s attempt to separate individual entities from each other—whether these entities are languages, dialects, individual sounds, or individual persons. At this level, before any formal organization of knowledge, the Survey evinces what might be called a metaphysical mode of thinking. The Survey is an exercise in what Peter Strawson called descriptive metaphysics;1 that is, it seeks to distinguish individual entities or “particulars” from each other. This strand of the Survey reveals a complicated picture of colonial power in the realm of linguistic knowledge that belies the usual characterizations of colonial knowledge in this field in terms of strategies of command and clear-cut definitions.
The articles in this Special Issue come out of papers delivered at a conference called ‘India and... more The articles in this Special Issue come out of papers delivered at a conference called ‘India and South Africa: comparisons, confluences, contrasts’, organised by Javed Majeed and held at King’s College London in October 2012. The aim of the conference was to deepen the interdisciplinary nature of literary studies (especially in its comparative literary dimensions) and Indian Ocean studies by building links between these two areas. From its inception in the 19th century up to the present day the practices and theories of Comparative Literature have, of course, been critical of nationally defined literary canons, and one of its defining aims continues to be transnational readings of literature and literary history. Scholars in Indian Ocean studies have also stressed how their work on transnationalism challenges nationally-based historiographies. In addition, academics in both fields have re-thought the category of ‘Area Studies’, either by moving away from what they see as its constraining legacies, or by appropriating its linguistic and textual expertise in new configurations within a more thoroughly globalised Comparative Literature (Hofmeyr & Williams 2011; Bose 2006:chapter 1; Spivak 2004; Saussy 2006). The conference therefore aimed to create a space for further transnational revisions of ‘Area Studies’ and nationalism in both fields by bringing together their different methodologies. Comparative and connective work on India and South Africa has generated a long historiographical tradition. Its earlier instantiations focused on indentured labour and ‘passenger’ Indians, largely merchants following in the wake of indentured workers. Mohandas Gandhi and his political mobilisations constituted another important focus. In keeping with earlier historiographies of diasporic communities, this body of work was often narrowly ethnicised (focusing only on ‘Indians’ and excluding other groups from the frame) and tended to have a ‘one-way’ orientation, namely it only tracked movement in one direction from South Asia to Africa without looking at reverse movement or asking what the implications of this migration were back home (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2007). The transnational turn and the move beyond nation and area as units of analysis have opened up this field considerably. Studies of ‘Indian’ communities have been de-ethnicised with other communities being brought into the picture.
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity, 2007
Thus, the travelling autobiographies of Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal emerge from, and write back to, a... more Thus, the travelling autobiographies of Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal emerge from, and write back to, a tradition of Indian travelogues in the nineteenth century, in which there was a conflict between the travelling identities of these Indians and the political and imperial frameworks in which they had to travel and represent themselves. One of the ways in which travel disempowered Indian travellers in the nineteenth century was the increasing awareness they had of the global extent of British power as they journeyed from India to Britain, usually on British ships. The further they travelled, the more disempowered they sensed themselves to be in relation to the empire which unfolded before their eyes. They experienced a Eurocentred global planetary consciousness as subjects who were aware of being caught up in its web of power. The self-consciousness of Indian travellers born out of disempowerment is indicative of ‘the simultaneous nonconsistency of subject-positions’1 in their travelogues. As they travelled, Indians became self-aware in the ethnographic gaze of others, while simultaneously being frozen and disempowered by that gaze.
This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early ninete... more This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural id...
Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. ... more Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. Dickinson, “I am bored not only by my creative impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of the fictionform”.2 In many ways, A Passage to India articulated Forster’s dissatisfaction with the genre of the novel as a whole. Stephen K. Land reads Forster’s novels in terms of the ways in which their protagonists either embody or challenge social conventions.3 The aesthetic form and subjectmatter of A Passage to India can also be read in similar terms as a set of challenges to novelistic conventions. This is evident in the way the novel self-consciously plays with conventional literary expectations on a variety of levels. The key here is the deliberate uncertainty of what happens in the caves, which is the open question that structures the novel as a whole. Famously, Forster refused to clarify this, suggesting that neither the narrator nor the protagonists, and so neither the readers also, can ever know what happened in the Marabar caves. It is clear that the notion that a novel with a supposedly third-person omniscient narrator who can inform the reader of what happens within the world of the text is undermined by the absent centre of A Passage to India, in which the status of its central event, and even the nature of what constitutes an event, is left ambiguous and uncertain. But Forster argued that this uncertainty was linked to his theme of India itself. In a letter of June 1924 he wrote: Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity, 2007
In Chapters 4–7, I considered aspects of Nehru’s and Gandhi’s notions of the self, as articulated... more In Chapters 4–7, I considered aspects of Nehru’s and Gandhi’s notions of the self, as articulated in their autobiographies. In this chapter l develop my analysis of Iqbal’s notion of the self further by considering how its metaphysics exemplifies those defining contradictions and tensions in his work which I have already touched upon.
... In the section on "New Light" literature, the juxtaposition of Akbar Ilahabadi'... more ... In the section on "New Light" literature, the juxtaposition of Akbar Ilahabadi's satirical verse with the reformist literature of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his following is a neat device which highlights the contrary strands in the Urdu literature of the time, while the ... J. MAJEED ...
Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, 2011
This chapter examines how the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) grappled with the proper nam... more This chapter examines how the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) grappled with the proper names of Indian languages and dialects. For the Linguistic Survey, India was a site for integrating the different branches of linguistics as a modern European discipline (phonetics, historical linguistics, dialectology, etymology, and philology) into a unified working project. However, this chapter addresses the modes of thinking and the operations of thought that precede this formal organization into linguistic knowledge. The published volumes of the Linguistic Survey, and especially the unpublished files, foreground the process of naming in the Survey’s attempt to separate individual entities from each other—whether these entities are languages, dialects, individual sounds, or individual persons. At this level, before any formal organization of knowledge, the Survey evinces what might be called a metaphysical mode of thinking. The Survey is an exercise in what Peter Strawson called descriptive metaphysics;1 that is, it seeks to distinguish individual entities or “particulars” from each other. This strand of the Survey reveals a complicated picture of colonial power in the realm of linguistic knowledge that belies the usual characterizations of colonial knowledge in this field in terms of strategies of command and clear-cut definitions.
The articles in this Special Issue come out of papers delivered at a conference called ‘India and... more The articles in this Special Issue come out of papers delivered at a conference called ‘India and South Africa: comparisons, confluences, contrasts’, organised by Javed Majeed and held at King’s College London in October 2012. The aim of the conference was to deepen the interdisciplinary nature of literary studies (especially in its comparative literary dimensions) and Indian Ocean studies by building links between these two areas. From its inception in the 19th century up to the present day the practices and theories of Comparative Literature have, of course, been critical of nationally defined literary canons, and one of its defining aims continues to be transnational readings of literature and literary history. Scholars in Indian Ocean studies have also stressed how their work on transnationalism challenges nationally-based historiographies. In addition, academics in both fields have re-thought the category of ‘Area Studies’, either by moving away from what they see as its constraining legacies, or by appropriating its linguistic and textual expertise in new configurations within a more thoroughly globalised Comparative Literature (Hofmeyr & Williams 2011; Bose 2006:chapter 1; Spivak 2004; Saussy 2006). The conference therefore aimed to create a space for further transnational revisions of ‘Area Studies’ and nationalism in both fields by bringing together their different methodologies. Comparative and connective work on India and South Africa has generated a long historiographical tradition. Its earlier instantiations focused on indentured labour and ‘passenger’ Indians, largely merchants following in the wake of indentured workers. Mohandas Gandhi and his political mobilisations constituted another important focus. In keeping with earlier historiographies of diasporic communities, this body of work was often narrowly ethnicised (focusing only on ‘Indians’ and excluding other groups from the frame) and tended to have a ‘one-way’ orientation, namely it only tracked movement in one direction from South Asia to Africa without looking at reverse movement or asking what the implications of this migration were back home (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2007). The transnational turn and the move beyond nation and area as units of analysis have opened up this field considerably. Studies of ‘Indian’ communities have been de-ethnicised with other communities being brought into the picture.
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity, 2007
Thus, the travelling autobiographies of Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal emerge from, and write back to, a... more Thus, the travelling autobiographies of Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal emerge from, and write back to, a tradition of Indian travelogues in the nineteenth century, in which there was a conflict between the travelling identities of these Indians and the political and imperial frameworks in which they had to travel and represent themselves. One of the ways in which travel disempowered Indian travellers in the nineteenth century was the increasing awareness they had of the global extent of British power as they journeyed from India to Britain, usually on British ships. The further they travelled, the more disempowered they sensed themselves to be in relation to the empire which unfolded before their eyes. They experienced a Eurocentred global planetary consciousness as subjects who were aware of being caught up in its web of power. The self-consciousness of Indian travellers born out of disempowerment is indicative of ‘the simultaneous nonconsistency of subject-positions’1 in their travelogues. As they travelled, Indians became self-aware in the ethnographic gaze of others, while simultaneously being frozen and disempowered by that gaze.
This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early ninete... more This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural id...
Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. ... more Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. Dickinson, “I am bored not only by my creative impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of the fictionform”.2 In many ways, A Passage to India articulated Forster’s dissatisfaction with the genre of the novel as a whole. Stephen K. Land reads Forster’s novels in terms of the ways in which their protagonists either embody or challenge social conventions.3 The aesthetic form and subjectmatter of A Passage to India can also be read in similar terms as a set of challenges to novelistic conventions. This is evident in the way the novel self-consciously plays with conventional literary expectations on a variety of levels. The key here is the deliberate uncertainty of what happens in the caves, which is the open question that structures the novel as a whole. Famously, Forster refused to clarify this, suggesting that neither the narrator nor the protagonists, and so neither the readers also, can ever know what happened in the Marabar caves. It is clear that the notion that a novel with a supposedly third-person omniscient narrator who can inform the reader of what happens within the world of the text is undermined by the absent centre of A Passage to India, in which the status of its central event, and even the nature of what constitutes an event, is left ambiguous and uncertain. But Forster argued that this uncertainty was linked to his theme of India itself. In a letter of June 1924 he wrote: Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity, 2007
In Chapters 4–7, I considered aspects of Nehru’s and Gandhi’s notions of the self, as articulated... more In Chapters 4–7, I considered aspects of Nehru’s and Gandhi’s notions of the self, as articulated in their autobiographies. In this chapter l develop my analysis of Iqbal’s notion of the self further by considering how its metaphysics exemplifies those defining contradictions and tensions in his work which I have already touched upon.
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