Imperial visions and narrations: |British imperialism in India and its reflections in literature 1857-1947

Abstract

This study attempts an analysis of novels written about the British India of the 1857-1947 era.The novels have been chosen according to their authors' personal experience in India and the times and themes of their concern. They are valuable sources of information about the birth, rise, and fall of imperialist ideologies and practices in India, and throw light on the social, racial, cultural, and political conflicts that resulted from these ideologies and practices. The analysis of the visions and narrations of Kipling, Forster, Orwell, Narayan, and Scott reveals not only the effects of imperialism on the colonisers and the colonised, but also a dominant discourse which emerges especially from the English authors. The history of British imperialism in India and its effects, India and Indians are not always presented objectively or truthfully in these novels, and this points to the influence of some of the dominant views of the authors' time and to the reasons of the creation of some common prejudices and illusions about India. In this sense they also reflect the close ties bet\veen culture and imperialism. The deconstruction of the myths about India and the revelation of the imperial process, especially from a social and cultural perspective, gains importance as some of these myths about India are still alive today.