Synopses & Reviews
In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of terrorism, insurgency and the literature of colonial India, Alex Tickell re-envisages the political aesthetics of empire. Focusing on key crisis-moments in the history of colonial India, such as the Black Hole of Calcutta, the anti-thug campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 Rebellion, anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London and the debates about terror generated by the Amritsar massacre in 1919, this timely book reveals how extra-judicial violence was integral to colonial sovereignty and explores how the terrorizing threat of violence mutually defined discursive relations between colonizer and colonized.
Based on original archival research and drawing on recent theoretical work on sovereignty and the exception, Terrorism, Insurgency and Empire, 1830-1947 examines Indian-English literary traditions in transaction and covers fiction and journalism by both colonial and Indian authors, tracing their contending engagements with terror. It includes critical readings of several significant early Indian works for the first time, from neglected fictions such as Kylas Dutt 's fable of anti-colonial rebellion A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 (1835) and Sarath Kumar Ghosh 's epic The Prince of Destiny (1909), to dissident periodicals like Hurrish Chunder Mukherji 's Hindoo Patriot (1856-66) and Shyamji Krishnavarma 's Indian Sociologist (1905-14). These are analysed alongside canonical works by Anglo-Indian authors such as Philip Meadows Taylor 's Confessions of a Thug (1838), Rudyard Kipling 's short fictions, and novels by Edmund Candler and E.M. Forster. As a reflection on the cross-cultural experience of terror, this highly original study concludes with a reappraisal of Gandhi 's political philosophy of ahimsa or non-violence as an inspired tactical response to the terror-effects of colonial rule.
Synopsis
This book is an interdisciplinary study of representations of terrorism and political violence in the fiction and journalism of colonial India. Focusing on key historical episodes such as the Calcutta Black Hole, the anti-thuggee campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 rebellion, and anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London, it argues that exceptional violence was integral to colonial sovereignty and that the threat of violence mutually defined discursive relations between colonizer and colonized. Moving beyond previous studies of colonial discourse, and drawing on contemporary analyses of terrorism, Tickell examines texts by both colonial and Indian authors, tracing their contending engagements with terrorizing violence in selected newspapers, journals, novels and short stories. The study includes readings of several significant early Indian-English works for the first time, from dissident periodicals like Hurrish Chunder Mookerji's Hindoo Patriot (1856-66) and Shyamji Krishnavarma's Indian Sociologist (1905-9) to neglected fictions such as Kylas Dutt's parable of anti-colonial rebellion Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 (1845) and Sarath Kumar Ghosh's The Prince of Destiny (1909). These are examined alongside works by better-known Anglo-Indian authors such as Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1838), Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters (1897), Rudyard Kipling's short fictions and novels by Edmund Candler and E.M. Forster. The study concludes with an analysis of Indian-English fiction of the 1930s, notably Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1935), and goes on to read Gandhi's philosophy of ahimsa (non-violence) as a strategic response to a colonial and nationalist terror-politics.