Being English

Indian Middle Class and the Desire for Anglicisation
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-367-40858-9
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Buch, Englisch, 204 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 467 g

This book critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India.

It looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The book explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of India to appropriate the English language and lay claim to an “English” identity. It discusses this unique quest for “Englishness” by reading the works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie.

An important intervention, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, Indian English literature, South Asian studies, cultural studies, and English literature in general.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chattopadhyay, Sayan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements. Introduction: Contours of Englishness in Colonial India 1. Nineteenth-century Bengal and the Emergence of Indian Middle-Class Anglicization 2 Images of Indian Womanhood and the "English" Self of Cornelia Sorabji 3. The Tradition of National Autobiographies and Nirad Chaudhuri’s Homeward Journey to England 4. Anglicization, Citizenship, and Nirad Chaudhuri’s Critique of the Colonial Metropolis 5. Dom Moraes’s Anglicization and the Ambiguity of Return 6. Coda: Anglicization and Aporia. Bibliography. Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Sayan Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He received his doctorate degree from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He was the recipient of the 2010–2013 Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship and was the Baden Württemberg visiting fellow at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg in 2017. His research has been primarily in the area of Indian middle-class self-fashioning and its literary manifestations.