Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial IndiaThe continual, unpredictable, and often violent "traffic" between identities in colonial and postcolonial India is the focus of Parama Roy's stimulating and original book. Mimicry has been commonly recognized as an important colonial model of bourgeois/elite subject formation, and Roy examines its place in the exchanges between South Asian and British, Hindu and Muslim, female and male, and subaltern and elite actors. Roy draws on a variety of sources—religious texts, novels, travelogues, colonial archival documents, and films—making her book genuinely interdisciplinary. She explores the ways in which questions of originality and impersonation function, not just for "western" or "westernized" subjects, but across a range of identities. For example, Roy considers the Englishman's fascination with "going native," an Irishwoman's assumption of Hindu feminine celibacy, Gandhi's impersonation of femininity, and a Muslim actress's emulation of a Hindu/Indian mother goddess. Familiar works by Richard Burton and Kipling are given fresh treatment, as are topics such as the "muscular Hinduism" of Swami Vivekananda. Indian Traffic demonstrates that questions of originality and impersonation are in the forefront of both the colonial and the nationalist discourses of South Asia and are central to the conceptual identity of South Asian postcolonial theory itself. |
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Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India Parama Roy Limited preview - 2023 |
Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India Parama Roy Limited preview - 2023 |
Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India Parama Roy No preview available - 1998 |
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actress ambivalence Anglo-Indian Arab Bengali Bhabha biography Bombay cinema bourgeois British Burton Calcutta century colonial discourse crime criminal critical Culture Dacoity Delhi despite disciples discipleship edited English erotic Essays female femininity Feminism feminist figure film formation function Gandhi Gayatri Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gendered goddess Gopal guru heterosexual Hindu Hinduism History Ibid identity imagined imperial impersonation Indian nation Indian women instance Kali Kim's Kipling's literary male masculinity mimic mimicry modern Mother India Muslim Naren Nargis Nargis's nationalist native Nehru Nivedita novel Oxford University Press Partha Chatterjee Personal Narrative poet poetry political popular postcolonial questions Raj Kapoor Rama Ramakrishna Ranajit Guha Religion religious representation Richard Francis Burton role Routledge Rudyard Kipling Sarojini Naidu sati seems sexual Sleeman social South Asian speak spiritual Spivak star Strickland Subaltern Studies Swami Vivekananda thug thuggee Thuggee and Dacoity tion trope western women woman York and London