Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

xi, 246 leaves : ill. ; 25 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.1975) from the Dept. of English, University of Adelaide

This thesis examines Indian author Raja Rao’s critically neglected work. I read Rao’s production as a strategic, yet problematic, negotiation of hegemonic narrativizations of Indian history, which attempts both to propose alternative histories and deconstruct the ontology of modern western historiography. Rao’s often criticised use of essentialism in his works is here examined as a strategic deconstructive tool in the hands of the postcolonial writer. More specifically, I wish to show how his early novels Kanthapura and Comrade Kirillov resist colonial depictions of India through both linguistic and cultural structures. Rao’s stylistic negotiation is effected through a use of the English language mediated by the Indian writer’s sensibility. Both novels enforce strategies working through opposition. They provide alternative accounts counterbalancing strategic absences in the records of colonial Indian historiography while attempting to recover the voice of protagonist subalterns. In my examination of his later novels The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare and The Chessmaster and His Moves, I argue that a more effective strategy of intervention is at work. It attempts to disrupt from within the discursive features of post-Enlightenment European modernity, more specifically the premises of Cartesian oppositional dualities, homogeneous ideas of linear time, and the centrality of imperial spaces, while problematising the hybrid and heterogeneous character of Rao’s narrative.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.