Objectives

The goal for this class is fairly straightforward: to come to a greater and more complex understanding of the tangled interelationship of Great Britain and the Indian subcontinent, as it’s played out over the past several centuries.

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To this end, we’ll be reading and critiquing a wide variety of texts: early settlers’ and travellers’ accounts of Britons in India; novels; colonial administrators’ diaries; poetry; films; critical and theoretical essays—even a dictionary. Working roughly in chronological order, we’ll examine the curious collision of cultures engendered by Britain’s colonial expansion into South Asia: we begin near the end of the 18th century, when Britain’s foothold in the continent became quite pronounced—and conclude in present-day England, where waves of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigration have changed the face of the former imperial centre.

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Londonstani, Gautam Malkani
Indian Ink, Tom Stoppard

+ a photocopied packet, to be purchased the first day of class