Literature of British India

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The British, crazy about Indian food and regarding chicken tikka masala as their “national dish”? The field sport cricket, invented in Britain, now closely followed in India and Pakistan while superseded in Britain by soccer/football? These odd but seemingly innocuous facts point to the rich and often quite dark history of British India. This history involves the development of British administrative and commercial governance by Britons in India and adjacent states, with origins as far back as the 1600s. We explore novels, short stories, and films treating the high-point of British-Indian power for Britons, around the 1880s, and follow through to its dissolution in 1947. We pay added attention to the aftermath of the Empire up to the present. Most of our reading materials are by British individuals who found themselves in British India and took to writing about it for a homeland marketplace with a taste for the “exotic.” We read some canonical authors--such as E.M. Forster with A Passage to India, George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling—and several less canonical authors. We also watch two modern Indian films set in British India and conclude with the Indian Salman Rushdie’s remarkable novel Midnight’s Children. Written work includes several short papers and regular (required but ungraded) reading journals.