This thesis attempts to reformulate the concept of hope represented in, and inflected by, the Indian English novel. This comparative literary study focuses primarily on Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry, whose novels offer myriad examples and resultant effects of a reflexive hope. I argue in light of their work to refigure hope in its varied and multiple articulations: positive and negative, for-life and for-death, dependency, waiting, nostalgia, narcissism. All of these, I suggest, manifest in a nominal-messianic hope that formulates a powerful critique of global capital most advantageously constellated in these Indian English novels. I arrive at this from the early writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and his unshakable belief in socialist progress that informs the productive tension within hope that inform the readings of Ghosh’s and Mistry’s novels. Concomitant to this thesis on hope is the recalibration of definitions of poverty to the principles of capabilities that allow for the simultaneous discussion of how the state can shape social opportunities for its citizens. This, I argue, is necessary for the flourishing of more nuanced understanding of hope. Moving away from purely quantitative measurements of poverty to more qualitative capabilities pushes the novel to the foreground of these arguments. Just as Nehru explores his own formulations of hope and hopefulness through the poetry of Matthew Arnold, the Indian English novel, here, is best able to enunciate a reflexive hope that is central to the notion of capabilities. This is why poverty studies in India needs the Indian English novel.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

I investigate the spoken dialogue of four Indian novels in English: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1935), Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan's The World of Nagaraj (1990), and Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters (2002). Roger Fowler has said that literature, as a form of discourse, articulates ideology; it is through linguistic criticism (combination of literary criticism and linguistic analyses) that the ideologies in a literary text are uncovered. Shobhana Chelliah in her study of Indian novels in English concludes that the authors use Indian English (IndE) as a device to characterize buffoons and villains. Drawing upon Fowler's and Chelliah's framework, my investigation employs linguistic criticism of the four novels to expose the ideologies reflected in the use of fictionalized English in the Indian context. A quantitative inquiry based on thirty-five IndE features reveals that the authors appropriate these features, either to a greater or lesser degree, to almost all their characters, suggesting that IndE functions as the mainstream variety in these novels and creating an illusion that the authors are merely representing the characters' unique Indian worldviews. But within this dialect range, the appropriation of higher percentages of IndE features to specific characters or groups of characters reveal the authors' manipulation of IndE as a counter-realist and ideological device to portray deviant and defective characters. This subordinating of IndE as a substandard variety of English functions as the dominant ideology in my investigation of the four novels. Nevertheless, I also uncover the appropriation of a higher percentage of IndE features to foreground the masculinity of specific characters and to heighten the quintessentially traditional values of the older Brahmin generation, which justifies a contesting ideology about IndE that elevates it as the prestigious variety, not an aberration. Using an approach which combines literary criticism with linguistic analysis, I map and recommend a multidisciplinary methodology, which allows for a reevaluation of fictionalized IndE speech that goes beyond impressionistic analyses.