Inventing India

Civil Service Rules: (Post)Colonial Memoir and the Raj Revival, 1970–1985

“…The tour diary was thus an official document, and not the qualitative text that might be assumed from its name, but the fact that these men were habituated towards keeping accounts of their movements and daily life is a significant context for the archive of memoirs they would later be invited to produce; it reinforces the idea that the British experience of India always possessed an essentially narrated quality, echoing not only the kinds of travel writing and memoir that were popularised by Empire and colonialism more generally but corresponding to British understandings of India as inherently textually produced. 36 This state of general linguistic fluency and verbal acuity within the ICS is also reinforced by the working culture and professional hierarchy of the Government of India during British rule, with storytelling and the generation of narrative key to the preservation of that hierarchy. The ICS, itself echoing the East India Company that it succeeded, placed great emphasis on the significance of seniority, the weight of experience and the communication of that acquired knowledge in written or oral form.…”

The Commitment to LOT

“…The number of possibilities for a pro-LOT argument that instantiates (I) transcends systematicity arguments, properly so-called. Examples include the well-known arguments that start from productivity 50 or inferential coherence in thinking, 51 but also thought, 52 the tracking of objects, 53 broad content 54 or the complexity of behaviour. 55 Georges Rey 56 speaks of eight consequences of intentional realism (or 'essential mentalism,' as he calls it) that may be better explained (if at all) by LOT rather than by connectionist models, and to that extent, eight possible starting points for a pro-LOT argument.…”

Narrating “Dark” India in Londonstani and The White Tiger: Sustaining Identity in the Diaspora

“…In contrast, Pinky's position is that of a desi, albeit an Americanized one, and her disgust with India and the morality of her rich husband's family is far more damning, as the response of both an outsider and insider. If Rushdie's Midnight's Children is an attempt to write India and Indian characters into a narratologically sophisticated and thematically expansive "world novel", 19 Adiga's White Tiger in contrast cuts India off from the larger international world and its values, placing it in a kind of moral quarantine.…”

“…7 In narratological contrast to this romance of selectivity, but with a similar ideological impulse, is the narrative of (utter) inclusivity, a playful attempt to reduce disparate particulars (histories, events, political positions, personalities) to a similar metafictional level. This expansive magic-realist form can be seen as a project of re-writing national history and trauma as a larger "world" event, 8 thus moving beyond the stifling impasse of the third-world nation's colonial legacies and developmental problems. It is probably best exemplified in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, but is also seen in novels like Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain, and the more metafictional among Amitav Ghosh's works like The Calcutta Chromosome and The Circle of Reason.…”