Early Twentieth-Century Fiction e20fic19.blogs.rutgers.edu Prof. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Early Twentieth-Century Fiction e20fic19.blogs.rutgers.edu Prof. Andrew Goldstone (andrew.goldstone@rutgers.edu) Office hours: Murray 019, Thursdays 11:30–1:30 or by appointment

schedule ▶ no class Thursday ▶ paper 2 due Friday 10 p.m. ▶ last class Monday ▶ exam distributed Saturday 12/21 at 8 a.m. ▶ exam due Monday 12/23 at 11 a.m. on Sakai

exam ▶ 3 essay questions ▶ open book (and course slides) ▶ comparative topics ▶ coverage requirements ▶ cite specific evidence!

paper 2 ▶ cite specific evidence! ▶ motive ▶ argument ▶ due Friday 10 p.m. on Sakai Assignments

Tagore’s modernity: review ▶ the supernatural is linked to the past ▶ skepticism as modern structure of feeling ▶ Weber on rationalization: “the disenchantment of the world” ▶ bureaucrats, trains, empires…. ▶ but the story rests on: uncertainty ▶ the past: not even past (cf. Faulkner)

We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West…. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” 1835. globalizing English: cultures of empire

globalizing English: cultures of empire We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West…. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” 1835.

globalizing English: a political context 1857 Sepoy Rebellion (“Mutiny”) and direct rule 1885 First meeting of Indian National Congress 1895 Tagore, “The Hungry Stones” 1905 Partition of Bengal 1919 Rowlatt Acts; Amritsar massacre 1920 Gandhi’s first non-cooperation movement 1932 Yeravda Pact between Gandhi and Ambedkar 1935 Government of India Act 1935 Popular Front program of the 3rd International 1935 Anand, Untouchable 1942 Quit India movement 1947 Independence and Partition

Imperial Gazeteer of India , vol. 26, Atlas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 20. Digital South Asia Library.

“small lives, humble distress” ▶ like Tagore: ▶ colonial modernity seen from the edge ▶ ordinary existence is where meaning lies ▶ unlike Tagore: ▶ the colonial situation really matters ▶ caste is in the forefront ▶ Anand’s outraged commitment vs. Tagore’s melancholic contemplation

Before us the thick dark current runs. periphery again A brook ran near the lane, once with crystal-clear water, now soiled by the dirt and filth of the public latrines situated about it, the odour of the hides and skins of dead carcases left to dry on its banks, the dung of donkeys, sheep, horses, cows and buffaloes heaped up to be made into fuel cakes. (3) He jumped aside, dragging his boots in the dust, where, thanks to the inefficiency of the Municipal Commitee, the pavement should have been but was not. (32)

periphery again A brook ran near the lane, once with crystal-clear water, now soiled by the dirt and filth of the public latrines situated about it, the odour of the hides and skins of dead carcases left to dry on its banks, the dung of donkeys, sheep, horses, cows and buffaloes heaped up to be made into fuel cakes. (3) He jumped aside, dragging his boots in the dust, where, thanks to the inefficiency of the Municipal Commitee, the pavement should have been but was not. (32) Before us the thick dark current runs.

comparative peripheries ▶ the periphery (the South in Faulkner, Toomer, Hurston) ▶ bad infrastructure ▶ power elsewhere; law replaced by force; rigid social hierarchies ▶ overflow, grotesquerie, life with the dead ▶ the colony (Anand…and?) ▶ “civilization” belied by visible coercion (military) ▶ color lines (town/cantonment) ▶ “colonial mimicry” (Homi Bhabha) ▶ uneven development (modernization, but spotty) ▶ multilingualism, stratified

expatriates Dublin, 1904. Trieste, 1914. (Joyce, Portrait ) Trieste–Zürich–Paris 1914–1921 (Joyce, Ulysses ) Simla—s.s. Viceroy of India —Bloomsbury September–October 1933 (Anand, Untouchable )

whose words? Describe some aspects of the novel’s relationship to Standard English in its narrative language. Compare this to Bakha’s relationship to Standard English. Generalize later. Find specific examples first.

audiences “Bhangi! (Sweeper) Bhangi!” (69) (10n) He remembered so well the Tommies’ familiar abuse of the natives: ‘Kala admi zamin par hagne wala’ (black man, you who relieve yourself on the ground). (12) ‘You are becoming a gentreman, ohe Bakhya! Where did you get that uniform?’ (10)

It is to the directness of his attack that Mr. Anand’s success is probably due. (Forster, afterword, 141) Indians, like most Orientals, are refreshingly frank; they have none of our complexes about functioning. (142) By caste he is a Kshatriya, and he might have been expected to inherit the pollution-complex….He has just the right mixture of insight and detach- ment. (143) mediators ▶ Anand arrives in London 1925 to do a Ph.D. at UCL ▶ works at Woolfs’ Hogarth press 1929–1930 ▶ E.M. Forster helps U to publication by left-wing house Wishart in 1935 after 19 rejections (too much feces in it)

mediators ▶ Anand arrives in London 1925 to do a Ph.D. at UCL ▶ works at Woolfs’ Hogarth press 1929–1930 ▶ E.M. Forster helps U to publication by left-wing house Wishart in 1935 after 19 rejections (too much feces in it) It is to the directness of his attack that Mr. Anand’s success is probably due. (Forster, afterword, 141) Indians, like most Orientals, are refreshingly frank; they have none of our complexes about functioning. (142) By caste he is a Kshatriya, and he might have been expected to inherit the pollution-complex….He has just the right mixture of insight and detach- ment. (143)

language and affiliation Gandhi: Why don’t you write in your language? K. C. Azad: I have no language. My mother tongue is Punjabi. But the Sarkar [government] has appointed English and Urdu as court lan- guages!…Few of us write in Punjabi. The only novel writer is Nanak Singh. There are no publishers in Punjabi or Urdu….In English—my novel may get published in London… Gandhi: Acha! Write in any language that comes to hand. But say what Harijans say! Anand, Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi, Arnold, 1991), 23; qtd. in Snehal Shingavi, The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India (London: Anthem, 2014), 35.

“say what Harijans say” He felt that the poet [Iqbal] would have been answering the most intimate questions in his (Bakha’s) soul, if he had not used such big words. (137) For, although he didn’t know it, to him work was a sort of intoxication which gave him a glowing health and plenty of easy sleep. (11) How a round base can be adjusted on a round top, how a sphere can rest on a sphere is a problem which may be of interest to those who think like Euclid or Archimedes. It never occurred to Sohini to ask herself anything like this. (15)

caste: the basics ▶ endogamy, hereditary occupations, ritual hierarchy ▶ varṇa (“class”/estate): Brāhmaṇ, Kṣatriya, Vaiśya, Śūdra ▶ jāti (“birth [group]”): kin/tribe/communal group ▶ late 1800s: British Census puts all jātis in a varṇa ▶ caste as putative “essence” of Hindu India ▶ those on the bottom: ▶ “outcaste” or “untouchable” ▶ harijan (Gandhi) ▶ Scheduled Castes (1935 Act, 1950 Constitution) ▶ Dalit (contemporary)

The contempt of those who came to the latrines daily and complained that there weren’t any latrines clean, the sneers of the people in the out- castes’ colony, the abuse of the crowd which had gathered round him this morning. It was all explicable now. A shock of which this was the name had passed through his perceptions, previously numb and torpid… “I am an Untouchable,” he said to himself, an “Untouchable!” (42) “But, you eater of your masters! why did you sit down on my doorstep, if you had to sit down at all! You have defiled my religion! You should have sat there in the gulley!”… She saw the sadhu waiting. (60) That the Mahatma should want to be born as an outcaste! That he should love scavenging! (130)

another affiliation In the world of that time, it was not possible for the voice of the rejected to be heard. Anand, South Asian Literary Recordings Project, Library of Congress, New Delhi Office, 2000[?]. www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/delhi/salrp/mulkrajanand.html.