The Rhetoric of English India

Rating:
Summary: The allegorization of empire:the suspicious narrative
Review: Suleri's first two essays deal with Edmund Burke and Warren Hastings and the trial which began in 1787 and ended in 1794. Burke studied India for eighteen years and so aquired much more knowledge than his peers had attempted to aquire but his version of India was perhaps in the end no more real than theirs. Suleri sets up the actual trial which was on its surface an impeachment of th East India Companys Warren Hastings but in reality was a discourse about the nature of empire raising questions of power and accountability between merchant and government. Suleri finds the discourse to be one which enabled each in defining the other to also be made aware of its own nature. Burke was an especially interesting figure bringing to bear on the discourse a formidable intellect perhaps better suited for the aesthetic sphere than the political and indeed the trial was initially attended by the public as if it were high theatre. Burke's attempts to describe India are given thorough scrutiny by Suleri. Burke seems to make the point that India is beyond the Englishmans ken and yet he nonetheless makes many attempts to put India into words and Suleri makes much of the language he uses ie "we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us", such phrases Suleri feels speak volumes in our understanding of the dynamic that is English India.
The travel logs of Fanny Parks & Harriet Tytler are interesting to Suleri insofar as they present a particularly female challenge to the traditionally masculine discourse of empire. The female travel log was usually a passive document of 'sketches' which rendered a dynamic continent also passive by focusing on the India of the past, ruins and relics. Parks however does not content herself with the picturesque past but focuses on the dynamic present, with a special attention being given her female Indian counterparts.
The last four essays are on Kipling, Forster, Naipaul & Rushdie.
The Kipling essay focuses on the adolescence of Kim and how that adolescent openness closes into a narrower vision when Kim comes of age. She thus reads Kim as an "allegory of colonial education".
The Forster essay concentrates on the relationship between Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India and how their relationship is indicative of the larger inability of cultural exchange between England and India.
The Naipaul and Rushdie essays are especially impressive as Suleri offers a complete reading of their works to date. She addresses some of the criticism of Naipauls work ,particularly of his Indian travel piece Area of Darkness, but she reads even that work as a natural step in his progress towards self-perception that finds its most complete expression in Enigma of Arrival. Her overall view of the author is much more generous than many other critical views of Naipaul as she reads in his work, "ironies of enablement" that she feels have continued relevance to the newer generation postcolonial authors.
Shame, Midnights Children & Satanic Verses by Rushdie all receive excellent and sustained attention. Suleri praises Rushdies postmodernist histories for their value as reconciling myths that create new openings.
Excellent book.