Writing, Violence and Empire: Terror and Insurgency in Indian Fiction 1830-1947

Writing, Violence and Empire; Terror and Insurgency in Indian Fiction, 1830-1947' traces an evolving pattern of literary tropes that engage with the violence of the colonized, but also develops on existing critical readings of the literary culture of colonial India in its attention to the transactions and interdiscursive representation of violence in work by both colonial and Indian authors. The fictions I have rediscovered in my recent research shed new light on elite Indian perceptions of violent uprisings such as the 1857 'Mutiny", showing an awareness of their political impact, while also revealing how Indian authors read, engaged with and challenged the staging of such events in colonial writing. In the subject-other relations of colonial rule, violence occupies a particularly interesting place because of the way it discloses, and complicates, the mutually constitutive aspect of both positions. By its very nature, anti-colonial violence refuses the hierarchies of colonial rule and denies its subject-other positions, but at the same time violent resistance has an exceptionally 'dialogic' discursive after-life, mirroring the violence of colonialism back at the colonizer, playing on the latter's pre-existing, culturally-coded fears and anxieties, and, as it is suppressed, feeding into new, updated narratives of colonial identity and control.

My research covers five key points, between 1830 and 1947, in which colonial authority in India is challenged and, in each case but the last, re-established or rearticulated through the experience of civil violence or armed rebellion. Examined in selected fiction and life writings, these nodal points are the anti-thuggee campaigns of the 1830s; the 1857 rebellion; the threat of violence, and political memory of rebellion in the 1880s; Indian revolutionary terrorism in Edwardian London; and Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns in the 1920s/30s. In the standard historical studies of India there is broad agreement that in the majority of these cases British colonial rule demanded new imaginative strategies to justify its presence. Furthermore, the ideological role of English literature in the subcontinent can be traced in a pattern of thematic topoi that respond to these political developments. Thus, for instance, 'riot' motifs, a stock feature of literature in the 1880s as Bart Moore-Gilbert has noted, occur infrequently in writing pre-1857, when colonial confidence was relatively high. On the other hand, the literary interest in thuggee declines after 1857 when it no longer reflects prevailing reformist attitudes.
In its present form, near completion, my research envisages colonial control and anti-colonial agency, as a linked discursive process in which the colonial monopoly on violence is continually re-narrated and challenged by emergent colonially-educated Indian elite. This occurs most noticeably in the processes of the colonial legal system and in the failure of the 'rule of law' exposed in scandals such as the Ilbert bill controversy of 1883. As a translator cadre between colonizer and colonized, nineteenth-century anglophone Indian authors often endorse colonial culture while imagining its (violent) demise, and it is this close, often ambivalent process of literary-political transaction that my project has addressed.