English Language and Literature Commons^™

"The Bride Of His Country": Love, Marriage, And The Imperialist Paradox In The Indian Fiction Of Sara Jeannette Duncan And Rudyard Kipling, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction:

For many literary scholars and general readers, the expression 'Kipling's India' neatly delineates the imperialist society that existed on the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. The phrase, however, is deceptive in its simplicity. It does not reveal, or even imply, the internal workings behind what is certainly a vast imaginative construct, a construct that involves a specific political ideology, various cultural myths, and an extraordinary emotional investment. In the words of one critic, Kipling was "a mythmaker for a culture under protracted stress" (Wurgaft xx). He voiced the bewilderment and memorialized the tragic — and sometimes pathetic …

Yaari With Angrez: Whiteness For A New Bollywood Hero, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.

The High Cost Of Dancing: When The Indian Women's Movement Went After The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction: On the other side of patriarchal histories are women who are irrecoverably elusive, whose convictions and the examples their lives might have left to us--their everyday resistances as well as their capitulations to authority--are at some fundamental level lost. These are the vast majority of women who never wrote the history books that shape the manner in which we, at any particular historical juncture, are trained to remember; they did not give speeches that were recorded and carefully collected for posterity; their ideals, sayings, beliefs, and approaches to issues were not painstakingly preserved and then quoted century after century. …

Dr. Balachandra Rajan: From India To Canada, Fragments In Search Of A Narrative - In Memoriam, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

A heartfelt memorial piece for Dr. Balachandra Rajan, an Indian diplomat and poetic scholar, written by Teresa Hubel. Introduction: While preparing to write this tribute to Dr. Balachandra Rajan, I found myself wondering what in his eminent life I should be recalling for your benefit. Which events or personal preferences, habits, gestures, or even political commitments and publications can be tallied up to create some kind of coherent narrative that conveys the gist of him? The dilemma is that, when it comes to Dr. Rajan (who in my memory can never be remembered as anyone other than Dr. Rajan, not …

Devadasi Defiance And The Man-Eater Of Malgudi, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction: In 1947, after over 50 years of agitation and political pressure on the part of a committed group of Hindu reformers, the Madras legislature passed an act into law that would change forever the unique culture of the professional female temple dancers of South India. It was called the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act. Despite having the wholehearted support of the Indian women’s movement of the time, the Act represented the imposition of androcentric values on a matrifocal and matrilineal tradition, a tradition which had for centuries managed to withstand the compulsions of Hindu patriarchy. The devadasis were …

In Search Of The British Indian In British India: White Orphans, Kipling’S Kim, And Class In Colonial India, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction: Contemporary scholars struggling to keep their work politically meaningful and efficacious often, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad of race, gender and class. But though this three-part mantra is persistently and even passionately recited, usually in the introductory paragraphs of a scholarly piece, ‘attentive listening,’ as historian Douglas M. Peers asserts, ‘reveals that class is sounded with little more than a whisper’ (825). Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, …

Excavating The Expendable Working Classes In "The Imperialist", Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

You can’t get much more middle class than Sara Jeanette Duncan’s turn-of-the-century novel The Imperialist. Its middle-classness calls out from virtually every page and through almost every narrative technique the novelist employs from her choice of theme—the debate over imperial federation, conducted some hundred years ago primarily in elite political circles—to her setting—the social world of the commercial classes who live in a prosperous southern Ontario town (which she names Elgin but which most critics suspect is Duncans own hometown of Brantford in very thin disguise)—and finally to her protagonists, the Murchisons, whose middle-class values are proudly paraded at every …