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Grounded in the methodologies of New Historicism, New Criticism, Subaltern Studies, and Colonial Discourse Analysis, this dissertation explores Englishwomen’s fictions of the nautch girl (or Indian dancing girl) at the turn of the century. Writing between 1880 to 1920, and within the context of the women’s movement, a cluster of British female writers—such as Flora Annie Steel, Bithia Mary Croker, Alice Perrin, Fanny Emily Penny and Ida Alexa Ross Wylie—communicate both a fear of and an attraction towards two interconnected, long-enduring communities of Indian female performers: the tawaifs (Muslim courtesans of Northern India) and the devadasis (Hindu temple dancers of Southern India). More specifically, the authors grapple with the recognition that these anomalous Indian women have liberties (political, financial, social, and sexual) that British women do not. This recognition significantly undermines the imperial feminist rhetoric circulating at the time that positioned British women as the most emancipated females in the world and as the natural leaders of the international women’s movement. The body chapters explore the various ways in which these fictional devadasis or tawaifs test imperial feminism, starting with their threat to the Memsahib’s imperial role in the Anglo-Indian home in the first chapter, their seduction of burdened Anglo-Indian domestic women in the second chapter, their terrorization of the British female adventuress in the third chapter, and ending with their appeal to fin-de-siècle dancers searching for a modern femininity in the final chapter. My project is urgent at a time when imperial feminism is becoming the dominant narrative by which we are being trained to read encounters between British and Indian women, at the expense of uncovering alternative readings. I conclude the dissertation by suggesting that the recovery of these alternative readings can be the starting point for rethinking the hierarchies and the boundaries separating First World from Third World feminisms today. / English

This thesis investigates British fictional representations of India in novels, plays and poetry from 1772 to 1823. Rather than simply correlating literary portrayals to shifting colonial context and binary power relationships, the project relates representations to the impact of India on British popular culture, and print capitalism’s role in defining and promulgating national identity and proto-global awareness. The study contends that the internal historical development of the literary modes – the stage play, the novel and verse – as well as consumer expectations, were hugely influential in shaping fictional portrayals of the subcontinent. In addition, it argues that the literary representations of India were contingent upon authors’ gender, class and their lived or lack of lived experience in the subcontinent. The project seeks to use literary texts as case studies to explore the growing commoditisation of culture, the developing literary marketplace and an emerging sense of national identity. The thesis proposes that the aforementioned discourses and anxieties are embodied within the very literary forms of British India narratives. In addition, it seeks to determine shifts in how Britain’s relationship with the subcontinent was imagined and how events in colonial India were perceived by the general public. Furthermore, the project utilises literary texts as sites to explore the discursive and epistemological strategies that Britons engaged in to either justify or confront their country’s role as a colonising nation.

The Company Man argues that corporate ways of organising communities permeated British imperial culture. My point of departure is the obsession shared between Anglo-Indian writers and imperial policymakers with the threat of unmanageable agency, the employee who will not follow orders. By taking up Giambattista Vico's claim that human subjects and human institutions condition each other reciprocally, I argue that Anglo-Indian literature is properly understood as one of a series of disciplinary apparatuses which were developed in response to that persistent logistical problem: how best to convince plenipotentiary agents to work in the interest of a mercantile employer, the East India Company. The Company Man reconsiders the way we think and write about Victorian imperial culture by taking this institutional approach. For one thing, the dominant position of the Company highlights the limitation of our continuing dependence on the nation as a critical hermeneutic. Additionally, I show how the prevalence of ideas like duty, service, and sacrifice in colonial literature is more than simply the natural output of a nation looking to sacralise everyday practice in the wake of their famous "Victorian loss of faith." Rather, I place these ideas among a structure of feeling, which I call aristocratic virtue, that was developed by imperial policymakers looking to militate against the threat of rogue agents. The subject material under consideration includes novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, personal correspondence, and parliamentary speeches. These texts span a century but are clustered around four nodal points, which illustrate moments of innovation in the technologies of regulation and control. My opening chapter examines how the idea of an overseas empire first acquired virtue in the minds of the British public. The second explores how the Company grafted this virtue onto its corporate structure in its training colleges and competition exams. The third shows how Anglo-Indian literature continued to disseminate the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and noble suffering long after the Company ceded control to the Crown. The final chapter shows how this corporate culture reflects in that most canonical of imperial novels, Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901).

The Company Man argues that corporate ways of organising communities permeated British imperial culture. My point of departure is the obsession shared between Anglo-Indian writers and imperial policymakers with the threat of unmanageable agency, the employee who will not follow orders. By taking up Giambattista Vico's claim that human subjects and human institutions condition each other reciprocally, I argue that Anglo-Indian literature is properly understood as one of a series of disciplinary apparatuses which were developed in response to that persistent logistical problem: how best to convince plenipotentiary agents to work in the interest of a mercantile employer, the East India Company. The Company Man reconsiders the way we think and write about Victorian imperial culture by taking this institutional approach. For one thing, the dominant position of the Company highlights the limitation of our continuing dependence on the nation as a critical hermeneutic. Additionally, I show how the prevalence of ideas like duty, service, and sacrifice in colonial literature is more than simply the natural output of a nation looking to sacralise everyday practice in the wake of their famous "Victorian loss of faith." Rather, I place these ideas among a structure of feeling, which I call aristocratic virtue, that was developed by imperial policymakers looking to militate against the threat of rogue agents. The subject material under consideration includes novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, personal correspondence, and parliamentary speeches. These texts span a century but are clustered around four nodal points, which illustrate moments of innovation in the technologies of regulation and control. My opening chapter examines how the idea of an overseas empire first acquired virtue in the minds of the British public. The second explores how the Company grafted this virtue onto its corporate structure in its training colleges and competition exams. The third shows how Anglo-Indian literature continued to disseminate the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and noble suffering long after the Company ceded control to the Crown. The final chapter shows how this corporate culture reflects in that most canonical of imperial novels, Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [213]-222).

The Company Man argues that corporate ways of organising communities permeated British imperial culture. My point of departure is the obsession shared between Anglo-Indian writers and imperial policymakers with the threat of unmanageable agency, the employee who will not follow orders. By taking up Giambattista Vico's claim that human subjects and human institutions condition each other reciprocally, I argue that Anglo-Indian literature is properly understood as one of a series of disciplinary apparatuses which were developed in response to that persistent logistical problem: how best to convince plenipotentiary agents to work in the interest of a mercantile employer, the East India Company. The Company Man reconsiders the way we think and write about Victorian imperial culture by taking this institutional approach. For one thing, the dominant position of the Company highlights the limitation of our continuing dependence on the nation as a critical hermeneutic. Additionally, I show how the prevalence of ideas like duty, service, and sacrifice in colonial literature is more than simply the natural output of a nation looking to sacralise everyday practice in the wake of their famous "Victorian loss of faith." Rather, I place these ideas among a structure of feeling, which I call aristocratic virtue, that was developed by imperial policymakers looking to militate against the threat of rogue agents. The subject material under consideration includes novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, personal correspondence, and parliamentary speeches. These texts span a century but are clustered around four nodal points, which illustrate moments of innovation in the technologies of regulation and control. My opening chapter examines how the idea of an overseas empire first acquired virtue in the minds of the British public. The second explores how the Company grafted this virtue onto its corporate structure in its training colleges and competition exams. The third shows how Anglo-Indian literature continued to disseminate the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and noble suffering long after the Company ceded control to the Crown. The final chapter shows how this corporate culture reflects in that most canonical of imperial novels, Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901). / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

In the following thesis, two interrelated arguments are offered: firstly, a re-appropriation of the passing figure from an African-American context to the Anglo-Indian context is suggested, which it is argued, will allow new methods for the study of the hybrid figure in British literature to develop. Secondly, the thesis works to critique the relationship between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, suggesting a move away from a discourse concerned with anti-reality and its linguistic-theoretical focus to a framework with stronger roots in the study of postcoloniality as a real, lived condition experienced by a large number of people. The above arguments are realized through a reading of Anglo-Indian literature which closely aligns both the displaced postcolonial figure and the passing figure through a shared ability to perform multiple identities. In adopting the passing figure, Anglo-Indian literature illustrates the rejection of in culture forms of rigid and constraining essentialisms and the commitment to modernist and contemporary cultural discourses of identity construction in the hybrid figure of postcolonial works. Such cultural discourses of identity presuppose the intervention of performativity in the negotiation of multiple selves. Both the hybrid postcolonial figure and the passing figure display an adoption of performance in identity construction. In a theoretical reflection of the multiplicity offered by the passing figure, a number of diverse critical approaches to these Anglo-Indian texts are introduced. Specifically, the aim is to suggest alternative theoretical approaches to the hegemonic poststructuralist critical view. I will argue that the reliance upon poststructuralist theory can be detrimental to the full exploration of the postcolonial identity, due largely to the tendency to privilege textual fee-play over experiential analysis. I am proposing a modification to the relationship between deconstruction and postcolonialism, whereby certain selected deconstructive techniques are appropriated alongside more existentialist concerns that reflect the real, lived conditions of postcolonial environments. In relocating textual critique within an approach more concerned with the real-life experience of multiplicity, this study advocates a continuing relevance of a more existentialist mode of postcolonialism, as exemplified by Sartre and Fanon, and other adjacent theorists. An example of this is that popular and contemporary authors such as Naipaul, Rushdie, Kureishi and Malkani are read in light of “dialogical self theory”, R.D. Laing’s “false-self system”, Fish’s “interpretive communities” thesis and Goffman’s concept of “front”. Dialogical self theory and the false-self system ensure a firm underpinning of the internal psychological structure of the passing figure’s psyche, establishing a discourse of postcolonialism that is centred on the real experience of multiplicity. The following work on interpretive communities and front allow for the connection of the internal construction of self to the wider social environment through the relocation of the passing figure’s identity in relation to the interpretations of the audience.

This thesis deals with the works of Philip Meadows Taylor, nineteenth-century British administrator and author of six novels on Indian themes. His works, published between 1839 and 1878, belong to the little researched early period of Anglo-Indian literature when popular fiction reflected the confidence and beliefs of British rule in India. Meadows Taylor worked in India as a political agent in various parts of Hyderabad from 1824 until his early retirement in 1860. His work, his close friendships with Indians, and his marriage to an Eurasian woman exposed him to various aspects of Indian life closed to many of his British contemporaries in India. This is reflected in his novels, of which the best known is his first, Confessions of a Thug, published in 1839. Subsequent works include Tippoo Sultaun: A Tale of the Mysore War (1841), Tara (1863), Ralph Darnell (1865), Seeta (1873), and A Noble Queen (1878). All these works present Indian scenery and Indian customs vividly and sympathetically, and are characterised by unusually liberal views on such things as interracial marriage, race relations and Indian religious practices; views at odds with those of many of his contemporaries. This thesis examines Meadows Taylor's works, and the connection between his portrayal of British conceptions of India and its people and the historical development of British rule in India. Ultimately Taylor's works illustrate his view that underneath the surface differences of race and religious creed lies a common human experience shared by both East and West, a view which differentiates him from other nineteenth-century writers on India. Other unusual thematic concerns include his use of Victorian concepts of domesticity in Indian settings, his presentation of strongly idealised Indian characters, and his frequent use as subject matter of "pre-colonial" Indian history.

This thesis investigates the dynamics between devadasi women and judges in the Anglo-Indian court in the Madras Presidency of 19th-century colonial India. The thesis focuses on how the devadasis navigated the colonial legal system and the strategies they utilized as well as the role of the judges' preconceived notions and prejudice in determining the decisions they made.