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Indian Gurus remain an important issue in the contemporary world and affect politics, culture and commerce alike. This spiritual/economic figure has become a worldwide phenomenon, signalling that syncretism is taking place on a global scale. At the same time, the concept of the guru will remain a constant challenge to ideas of enlightenment and democracy. The present book focusses on this challenge presenting contributions from an interdisciplinary perspective. German, Indian and American scholars have explored guruism in tradition, economy and Jungian psychology as well as in contemporary literature, travel writing and film. Individual studies of gurus such as Ramana Maharshi or Osho/Bhagvan, but also Gandhi and Tolstoi furthermore illustrate the spiritual globalization that has been taking place over the last century.
Gautam Chakravarty explores representations of the event which has become known in the British imagination as the 'Indian Mutiny' of 1857 in British popular fiction and historiography. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, autobiographies and state papers, Chakravarty shows how narratives of the rebellion were inflected by the concerns of colonial policy and by the demands of imperial self-image. He goes on to discuss the wider context of British involvement in India from 1765 to the 1940s, and engages with constitutional debates, administrative measures, and the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian novel. Chakravarty approaches the mutiny from the perspectives of postcolonial theory as well as from historical and literary perspectives to show the extent to which the insurrection took hold of the popular imagination in both Britain and India. The book has a broad interdisciplinary appeal and will be of interest to scholars of English literature, British imperial history, modern Indian history and cultural studies.
Working at the interface of historical and fictional writing, Ralph Crane considers the history of India from the Revolt of 1857 to the Emergency of 1975 as it is presented in the works of twentieth-century novelists, both Indian and British, who have written about particular periods of Indian history from within various periods of literary history. A constant thread in the book is the exploration of the use of paintings as iconography and allegory, used in the novels to reveal aspects of British-Indian relationships.
The proliferation of historical novels with more or less overt metafictional traits in the late seventies and eighties in Britain is a particularly arresting phenomenon at a time when historians are openly questioning the validity of the traditional concept of history understood as a scientific search for knowledge. This apparent contradiction justifies the attempt made by the contributors of this volume to analize the relationship between history and literature in English. The reader will find four preliminary essays on The End of the Classical Period establishing the characteristics of the appropriation of history since the appearance of Sir Walter Scott's historical romances with special emphasis on the Victorian novel (Dickens, Eliot, Mrs Humphry Ward), the Irish ballad and Post-Independence Indian historical fiction, as a necessary preface to the main group of essays on The Postmodernist Era devoted to establishing the common as well as the individually distinctive traits in the writings of some of the most accomplished contemporary writers in English: the more centered British novelists Margaret Drabble, Julian Barnes and William Golding as well as the more ex-centric Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson plus the playwright Caryl Churchill, and the black American novelist David Bradley.
At a time when the world, Europe especially, is once more threatened by murderous conflicts between groups of people claiming ethnic and national identity as a basis for sovereignty over specific territories, it is timely to consider the part that literature has played and is playing in the creation of ethnic and national stereotypes. What role do such stereotypes have in literature? How are they created? From what materials are they constructed? What purpose do ethnic and national stereotypes serve? Can it ever be a useful one? Are they avoidable? Can we live without them? What can be done about the deleterious effects they may be thought to produce? Stereotyping is worldwide — is there a tribe, race and nation in existence which escapes being stereotyped by its neighbours? In what sense are these stereotypes accurate? How are these stereotypes reflected in and reinforced by literature? Should and can literature do anything about them? In Beyond Pug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, literary scholars, as well as academics engaged in sociological and psychological research, consider these and other questions by examining the work of specific authors and the circumstances in which stereotyping plays such a crucial part.
Eastern Figures is a literary history with a difference. It examines British writing about the East – centred on India but radiating as far as Egypt and the Pacific – in the colonial and postcolonial period. It takes as its subject "the East" that was real to the British imagination, largely the creation of writers who described and told stories about it, descriptions and stories coloured by the experience of empire and its aftermath. It is bold in its scope, with a centre of gravity in the work of writers like Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, and Orwell, but also covering less well-known literary authors, and including Anglo-Indian romance writing, the reports and memoirs of administrators, and travel writing from Auden and Isherwood in China to Redmond O'Hanlon in Borneo. Eastern Figures produces a history of this writing by looking at a series of "figures" or tropes of representation through which successive writers sought to represent the East and the British experience of it – tropes such as exploring the hinterland, going native, and the figure of rule itself. Eastern Figures is accessible to anyone interested in the literary and cultural history of empire and its aftermath. It will be of especial interest to students and scholars of colonial and postcolonial writing, as it raises issues of identity and representation, power and knowledge, and centrally the question of how to represent other people. It has original ideas and approaches to offer specialists in literary history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultural historians, and researchers in colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, and Asian area studies and history. It is also aimed at students in courses in literature and empire, culture and imperialism, and cross-cultural studies.
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