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Articulating Silence In The Postcolonial Indian Novel, Kaelin O'Connell

Honors Theses

Whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India can be expressed in writing. As soon as everything of importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year, in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India.

-James Mill, The History of British India, 1817.

This quotation, from the first philosophical history of India, posits the common British colonial notion that language, specifically the written word, might capture all that is "worth …