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The Mahatma Misunderstood

The Mahatma Misunderstood

Snehal Shingavi

(2013)

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Abstract

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.


 “Richly historicized and rigorously attentive to form, this book evades stale theoretical assumptions and makes an important contribution to the study of Indian English fiction. Inviting a reconsideration of the problematic of anticolonial nationalism, Shingavi offers lucid and erudite Gramscian readings of significant texts and their engagement with the fraught hermeneutics of Gandhi as Mahatma.” —Dr Priyamvada Gopal, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge


Snehal Shingavi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas, Austin, where he specializes in the teaching of English, Hindi and Urdu literature from India and Pakistan.


“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.

In doing so, the volume challenges the orthodoxy in postcolonial and subaltern studies which contends that nationalists and nationalisms use independence to bring to power a bourgeois elite, who produce a story about the nation that erases the unevenness of minority experiences and demands in favor of simplified, majoritarian citizenship. Instead ‘The Mahatma Misunderstood’ demonstrates that nationalist fiction (and by extension the nationalist political movement) was marked from the beginning by a deep ambivalence about the relevance of nationalist agitation and mainstream nationalist politics for minorities in colonial India, and sought to recast anticolonial politics through novelistic debates with the spokesman for Indian nationalism, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The volume thus articulates a recuperative theory of nationalism in the Indian case, in order to move thinking about nationalism beyond the current impasse produced by postcolonial theory in an era of transnational capitalism that too frequently forgets, underestimates or represses the national in the transnational.

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
FRONT MATTER\r i
Half Title i
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
CONTENTS\r v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\r vii
INTRODUCTION\r 1
Chapter 1 THE MAHATMA AS PROOF: THE NATIONALIST ORIGINS OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH\r 13
Chapter 2 “THE MAHATMA DIDN’T SAY SO, BUT …”: MULK RAJ ANAND’S UNTOUCHABLE AND THE SYMPATHIES OF MIDDLE-CLASS NATIONALISTS 29
The Politics of Untouchability in Late-Colonial India 31
Anand and Gandhi 34
Caste and Colonial Modernity 41
Anand and the Ethics of Solidarity 45
A Novelistic Structure of Solidarity 51
Chapter 3 \"THE MAHATMA MAY BE ALL WRONG ABOUT POLITICS, BUT ...\": RAJA RAO'S KANTHAPURA AND THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION OF THE INDIAN, SECULAR, NATIONALIST MIDDLE CLASS\r 59
Religious and Gandhian Discourses in Karnataka 59
The Uneven Development of Literary Secularism 64
Kanthapura and the Rearguard Action of Authenticity 70
Narrating from the Position of Underconfidence 79
The Congress in Karnataka 86
Kanthapura and the Politics of Postindependence Communalism 96
Democracy and Authenticity 100
Chapter 4 THE MISSING MAHATMA: AHMED ALI AND THE AESTHETICS OF MUSLIM ANTICOLONIALISM\r 105
Nationalist Politics and Delhi 105
Muslim Literature, Identity and Weddings 114
The Urdu Literary Antecedents to Twilight in Delhi 116
Ahmed Ali and the Fallout from Angare 121
The Marriage in Twilight in Delhi 124
The Politics of Ali’s Delhi 134
Ali’s Novelistic Politics 145
Chapter 5 THE GRAMMAR OF THE GANDHIANS: JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN AND THE FIGURE OF GANDHI\r 155
Chapter 6 THE MAHATMA MISUNDERSTOOD: THE ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATIONALIST DIALECTIC\r 175
Mazzini Misunderstood 179
The Communists in India 186
Gramsci on Transformism 190
Conclusion DANGEROUS SOLIDARITIES\r 193
END MATTER\r 204
NOTES 204
Introduction 204
Chapter 1 The Mahatma as Proof: The Nationalist Origins of the Historiography of Indian Writing in English 204
Chapter 2 “The Mahatma didn’t say so, but …”: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and the Sympathies of Middle-Class Nationalists 205
Chapter 3 “The Mahatma may be all wrong about politics, but …”: Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and the Religious Imagination of the Indian, Secular, Nationalist Middle Class 206
Chapter 4 The Missing Mahatma: Ahmed Ali and the Aesthetics of Muslim Anticolonialism 207
Chapter 5 The Grammar of the Gandhians: Jayaprakash Narayan and the Figure of Gandhi 207
Chapter 6 The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Arrested Development of the Nationalist Dialectic 207
BIBLIOGRAPHY 209
INDEX 223