Rj Crane

PICTURING THE INDIAN TIGER: IMPERIAL ICONOGRAPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

© 2014 Cambridge University Press. In The Empire of Nature John M. MacKenzie suggests there were three animals in India with which the British had a special hunting relationship, the tiger, the elephant and the pig (179). Of these, the tiger is the one most closely associated with Britains imperial relationship with India. By the mid nineteenth century, as Joseph Sramek explains, tigers. had become invested with several potent meanings (659). Several critics including Sramek and Annu Jalais demonstrate how tigers were closely associated with Indian rulers, and, at the same time, with all that was wild and untamed about the subcontinent. Thus [o]nly by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians (Sramek 659). Through close readings of selected tiger images from the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper considers the way tigers were consistently used as visual signifiers of India in a series of stock-in-trade images which depict tiger hunts, white men protecting white women from tigers, and tigers menacing Indians.

Imperialism as diaspora: Race, sexuality and history in Anglo-India

Within postcolonial studies, Britain’s long contact with India has been read generally only within the context of imperialism to inform our understanding of race, gender, identity, and power within colonialism. Such postcolonial interpretations that focus on single dimensions of identity risk disregarding the sense of displacement, discontinuities, and discomforts that compromised everyday life for the British in India—the Anglo-Indians—during the Raj. Imperialism as Diaspora reconsiders the urgencies, governing principles, and modes of being of the Anglo-Indians by approaching Britain’s imperial relationship with India from new, interdisciplinary directions. Moving freely between the disciplines of literature, history, and art this new work offers readers a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the lives of Anglo-Indians. Focussing on the years between the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Independence in 1947—the period of the British Raj in India—Imperialism as Diaspora at once sets in motion the multidisciplinary fields of cultural and social history, art and iconography, and literary productions while carefully maintaining the tension between imperialism and diaspora in a ground-breaking reassessment of Anglo-India. Crane and Mohanram examine the seamless continuum between cultural history, the semiotics of art, and Anglo-Indian literary works. Specifically, they focus on the influence of the Sepoy Mutiny on Anglo-Indian identity; the trope of duty and the white man’s burden on the racialization of Anglo-India; the role of the missionary and the status of Christianity in India; and gender, love and contamination within mixed marriages.

Contesting the can(n)on: Revisiting Kim in I. Allan Sealy's The Trotter‐Nama

This article reveals the uneasy continuum (and gaps) between Rudyard Kiplings canonical Raj novel, Kim, and I. Allan Sealys The Trotter‐Nama (1988), the text that maps the history of Anglo‐Indians. The article enumerates the principal themes of Anglo‐Indian fiction before demonstrating the way The Trotter‐Nama rewrites and resituates Kim, challenging his view of Anglo‐India and his assumptions about race, and ultimately repositioning it as part of, rather than the principal work in, the Raj canon.

Cave Genres/Genre Caves: Reading the Subterranean Thriller

Subterranean environments are stock settings in popular fiction, and they are especially prevalent in thrillers. As “extreme” environments—profoundly non-human and deeply symbolic—the corridors and chambers of deep caves magnify the tensions between space and place as they are typically defined. This chapter argues that consideration of cave settings in popular fiction requires a more nuanced theoretical vocabulary than is currently available. It analyzes three thrillers set partly in deep caves—Clive Cussler’s Inca Gold (1994), David Poyer’s Down to a Sunless Sea (1996), Nevada Barr’s Blind Descent (1998)—and proposes adding a third term to the glossary of spatial literary studies, “anti-place.”

Empire calling : administering colonial Australasia and India

The essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who served the British Empire in Australasia and India, and those who were subject to their administration. As these essays demonstrate, administrative arrangements involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. Colonial administration involves diverse domains of practice the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems and many forms of activities, including managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policies. In the two parts of this book, the authors from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain examine the ways colonial administrations accumulated and managed information and knowledge about the places and peoples under their jurisdiction. The administration of colonial spaces was neither a simple nor a unilinear project, and the essays in this book will contribute to key debates about imperial history.

Playing the White Man: Ronald Merrick, Whiteness, and Erotic Triangles in Paul Scott's Raj Quartet

In his seminal Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction Bhupal Singh suggests that ‘‘strictly speaking’’, the term Anglo-Indian fiction ‘‘means fiction mainly describing the life of Englishmen in India’’.1 Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet,2 which as Sabina Sawhney (amongst others) has noted, is ‘‘populated almost exclusively by the British’’, clearly fits this narrow definition of the genre. Sawhney goes on to suggest that Scott’s ‘‘monocular vision reinforces the Western European and North American prejudices of the relative importance of various peoples’’.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Sources

All entries in this checklist, wherever practicable, have been set out using MLA guidelines as outlined in the MLA Handbook. The primary sources are arranged chronologically under each of the following subdivisions: A Books; B. Contributions to Books; C. Contributions to Periodicals; D. Screenplays and Television Plays; and E. Miscellaneous. All entries in section C are short stories unless other-