Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947
Alex Tickell
Routledge
<span><p>In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of terrorism, insurgency and the literature of colonial India, Alex Tickell re-envisages the political aesthetics of empire. Organized around key crisis moments in the history of British colonial rule such as the ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta, the anti-thug campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 Rebellion, anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London and the Amritsar massacre in 1919, this timely book reveals how the terrorizing threat of violence mutually defined discursive relations between colonizer and colonized. </p> <p>Based on original research and drawing on theoretical work on sovereignty and the exception, this book examines Indian-English literary traditions in transaction and covers fiction and journalism by both colonial and Indian authors. It includes critical readings of several significant early Indian works for the first time: from neglected fictions such as Kylas Chunder Dutt’s story of anticolonial rebellion <em>A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945</em> (1835) and Sarath Kumar Ghosh’s nationalist epic <em>The Prince of Destiny</em> (1909) to dissident periodicals like Hurrish Chunder Mookerji’s <em>Hindoo Patriot</em> (1856–66) and Shyamaji Krishnavarma’s <em>Indian Sociologist</em> (1905–14). These are read alongside canonical works by metropolitan and ‘Anglo-Indian’ authors such as Philip Meadows Taylor’s <em>Confessions of a Thug</em> (1839), Rudyard Kipling’s short fictions, and novels by Edmund Candler and E. M. Forster. Reflecting on the wider cross-cultural politics of terror during the Indian independence struggle, Tickell also reappraises sacrificial violence in Indian revolutionary nationalism and locates Gandhi’s philosophy of <em>ahimsa </em>or non-violence as an inspired tactical response to the terror-effects of colonial rule.</p></span>