Description

This presentation draws from my doctoral research on the novels of E. M. Forster, Raja Rao and Arundhati Roy. India, the authors suggest, is essentially a religious society. It is not necessarily a Hindu society, but one that disciplines all religions to adapt to the customs of caste hierarchy and the ideals of Vedantic metaphysics. While such characteristics have been propagated before by orientalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cultural visions of Forster, Rao and Roy are uniquely of the twentieth-century because they are doubly inscribed with critiques of reason, history, nationalism and other grand narratives of modernity. This presentation will focus on the role of E. M. Forster?s A Passage to India (and the episode of the Gokul Ashtami festival in particular) as a foundational event in the literary history of Indianness within global Anglophone writing. I will deconstruct Forster?s portrayal of the festival for signs of caste order and counter-modernity, and also briefly discuss how this idea of Indianness is inherited and contested by both Rao and Roy. Though this presentation grounds itself within the field of literary studies, I anticipate a larger conversation on how these fictions of Indianness distinguish themselves from the phenomena of Hindutva, communalism, orientalism, post/modernism and other contemporary engagements with religion and politics.

Prasad Bidaye is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and completing his Ph.D. In collaboration with the Centre for South Asian Studies.