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Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Nationalism

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Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company And The Construction Of British India, 1757-1857, Nida Sajid May 2011

Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company And The Construction Of British India, 1757-1857, Nida Sajid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis investigates the discursive strategies employed by the East India Company during the early colonial period to legitimize mercantile imperialism as an act of preservation for the fast-disintegrating political order that was the Mughal empire in India. By arguing that the interrelationship of myth, history and archive was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, my thesis offers a new reading of the representations of the political debates surrounding the Company’s scandals and imperial ambitions in the English public sphere. It further demonstrates the centrality of the India question in defining the contours of some …


Alternative Be/Longing: Modernity And Material Culture In Bengali Cinema, 1947-1975, Suvadip Sinha Apr 2011

Alternative Be/Longing: Modernity And Material Culture In Bengali Cinema, 1947-1975, Suvadip Sinha

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Engaging in a dialogue with the recent body of scholarship on alternative/multiple modernities, postcolonial studies, Marxism and thing theory, this thesis has two main objectives: first, to examine how the transition of post-colonial India from a primarily feudal to a capitalist form of economy facilitated a historical-materialist relationship with things, objects and commodities; and second, to explore how this relationship challenges and ruptures the singularly hegemonic narrative of modern capital. Spanning a historical and political period from late-colonial India to the urban modernity of 1970s’, Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (1958) and Pratidwandi (1971), Riwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958), Tapan Sinha’s Harmonium (1963), …