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Browsing by Subject "South Asia"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Magic, Madness and Mud: The Progressive Realism of Premchand, Manto and Chughtai
    (2018-12) Durham, Emily
    This project takes up the question of Progressive Realism through the essays and short stories of three seminal authors: Munshi Premchand, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, and Ismat Chughtai, which circulated in journals during the years immediately preceding and following independence, a period of intense debate about the role of literature regarding the emerging nation. This dissertation explores the ways in which these three authors sought to engage new publics through their work while at the same time complicating some of the most prevalent ideas about nationhood and national belonging. Through close readings of these short forms which made up the majority of social commentary during this period in India, along with the work of critics like Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Namwar Singh and Jean-Luc Nancy, this project seeks to look beyond the usual commentary on Progressive Literature as for or against leftist propaganda and instead focuses on the ways in which the devices of an innovative and unique realism brought into print social actualities that had never before been expressed, and which continue to have a profound impact on the social and political debates happening in India today.
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    Transgressing the boundaries of the nation: decolonization, migration, and identity in France/India, 1910-1972
    (2013-04) Namakkal, Jessica Louise
    Transgressing the Boundaries of the Nation: Decolonization, Migration, and Identity in France/India, 1910-1972_ argues that the state-based discourse of decolonization, which is widely circulated in most histories of decolonization, does not reflect the lived experience of the colonial subjects who negotiated multiple identities and moving borders throughout what I call the "long history" of decolonization. Examining the five French colonies in India, which remained French until 1962, destabilizes the dominant narrative of decolonization in India, of an anti-colonial nationalist liberation struggle successfully completed with the liberation of India in 1947. Beginning in the 18th-century, when British and French imperial forces were fighting for control of South Asia, the two European powers projected competing ideologies of empire, and over time, national belonging. By the late 19th-century, the French-Indian colonies were physically divided from British India by fences, and passport controls and custom borders were erected to patrol the imperial borders. After 1947, as independent India worked to bring French India into the Indian Union, the same borders were used to distinguish foreigner from citizen, French-Indian from Indian, a colonial-juridical designation that had turned many neighbors into strangers, and lead to the migration of over 7,000 French-Indians to France after 1962. Based on archival research conducted in India, France, and England, I show that while decolonization ruptured the geography and political structure of the imperial world, the institutional structures of colonialism and capitalism, intertwined with the imperial mission of modernity and progress, have continued on into the post-colonial world, re-establishing hierarchies of race, caste, class, and gender in the metropole as well as in anti-colonial nation-states.