Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2016 European Society for the Study of English.

Overview

Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and life-writing. The book's four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal, to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of India in the British metropolitan imagination at this relatively early stage for Indian migration. Focussing on a range of remarkable Indian 'arrivants' -- scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists including Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore -- Indian Arrivals examines the take-up in the metropolis of the influences and ideas that accompanied their transcontinental movement, including concepts of the west and of cultural decadence, of urban modernity and of cosmopolitan exchange. If, as is now widely accepted, vocabularies of inhabitation, education, citizenship and the law were in many cases developed in colonial spaces like India, and imported into Britain, then, the book suggests, the presence of Indian travellers and migrants needs to be seen as much more central to Britain's understanding of itself, both in historical terms and in relation to the present-day. The book demonstrates how the colonial encounter in all its ambivalence and complexity inflected social relations throughout the empire, including at its heart, in Britain itself: Indian as well as other colonial travellers enacted the diversity of the empire on London's streets.

Full Product Details

Author:   Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature in English, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 13.80cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   0.378kg
ISBN:  

9780192855671

ISBN 10:   0192855670
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   30 September 2021
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Indian Arrival-Encounters between Indians and Britons, 1870-1915 I Encounter II Interconnected Cultural Terrains III Cross-border Poetics IV Arrivals and Arrivants V The Enigma of Arrival VI Chapters 1: Passages to England: Suez, the Indian pathway I Ondaatje's 'fragmentary tableaux' II Across the Black Waters III The 'magnificent ditch' in its imperial context IV British perspectives V Indian passages to England: travelling in the west VI Forged through the medium of travel: Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu 2: The Spasm of the Familiar: Indians in late nineteenth-century London I 'EL to England to discover India' II Native and foreign in England III 'Versions of our old route': India-in-Britain IV City networks: 'No route back' V A poetics of crossing: 'that world-wide circle EL like an electric current' 3: Lotus Artists: Self-orientalism and Decadence I 'Catching the nearing echo': 1890s poetic encounters between India and Britain II The fantastical 1890s III 'Lotus-eyed' Ghose 'the Primavera poet' IV 'so impetuous and so sympathetic': Sarojini Naidu as self-orientalist V Cornelia Sorabji: 'getting England into my bones' 4: Edwardian Extremes and Extremists, 1901-13 I Difference within II India Housed and Unhoused III Indian Bloomsbury IV On or about 1912 5: Coda-Indian Salients 6: Works Cited

Reviews

Indeed while Indian Arrivals offers much which to engage, it also makes for very engaging reading. It twins impressive archival research with an imaginative handling of the material. * Victorian Studies * The range of texts examined is impressive, and includes not only literary works, but also correspondence, journals and memoirs ... [a] carefully researched and beautifully written book [...] which sensitively and empathetically explores the multi-layered meanings of 'arrival'. * Amelia Bona, H-Net Reviews * At the core of this book, supplying both its motivation and its story is a paradox of the alien and the familiar... A comprehensive and rewarding exploration of a fascinating period in British and Indian literary history * Marie Ni Fhlathuin * Elleke Boehmer is one of the very few genuine literary all-rounders, as capable of writing excellent fiction as she is works of literary scholarship. Her latest, deservedly praised, novel, Shouting at the Dark (2015), must have been written alongside her latest scholarly work, which examines the writings of a number of Indians who undertook the journey to Britain in the high imperial decades of 1870-1915 (250). * Anshuman A. Mondal, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies * Boehmer is an authority on post-colonial literatures ... this is a luminous literary history. * Times Higher Education * this is a comprehensive and rewarding exploration of a fascinating period in British and Indian literary history. * Maire Ni Fhlathuin, Review of English Studies *

"Indeed while Indian Arrivals offers much which to engage, it also makes for very engaging reading. It twins impressive archival research with an imaginative handling of the material. * Victorian Studies * The range of texts examined is impressive, and includes not only literary works, but also correspondence, journals and memoirs ... [a] carefully researched and beautifully written book [...] which sensitively and empathetically explores the multi-layered meanings of 'arrival'. * Amelia Bona, H-Net Reviews * At the core of this book, supplying both its motivation and its story is a paradox of the alien and the familiar... A comprehensive and rewarding exploration of a fascinating period in British and Indian literary history * Marie Ni Fhlathuin * Elleke Boehmer is one of the very few genuine literary all-rounders, as capable of writing excellent fiction as she is works of literary scholarship. Her latest, deservedly praised, novel, Shouting at the Dark (2015), must have been written alongside her latest scholarly work, which examines the writings of a number of Indians who undertook the journey to Britain in the ""high imperial decades"" of 1870-1915 (250). * Anshuman A. Mondal, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies * Boehmer is an authority on post-colonial literatures ... this is a luminous literary history. * Times Higher Education * this is a comprehensive and rewarding exploration of a fascinating period in British and Indian literary history. * Maire Ni Fhlathuin, Review of English Studies *"

Author Information

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She has published Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002), Stories of Women (2005), and the biography Nelson Mandela (2008). She is the author of four acclaimed novels, as well as the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). She edited Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (2004), and the anthology Empire Writing (1998), and co-edited J.M. Coetzee in Writing and Theory (2009), Terror and the Postcolonial (2009), The Indian Postcolonial (2010), and The Postcolonial Low Countries (2012). She is the General Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series.

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