ENG 217 - Reading India

1 course unit

For two centuries, India was both “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire and a bewilderingly complex civilization whose mysteries rendered it largely illegible to outsiders. In the sixty years since independence, a wide array of English-language writers have taken up the charge of representing India, both from within the subcontinent itself and from such far-flung sites of the Indian Diaspora as London, Trinidad, Toronto, and New York. This course will explore some of the more intriguing ways in which India has been represented by colonizers, natives, and first and second-generation emigrants alike, ranging from Kipling’s “city of dreadful night” and E.M. Forster’s acid depictions of British misfeasance in the late imperial period to the social comedies of R.K. Narayan, the dizzying experiments with magic realism of Salman Rushdie, and the cultural collisions recorded by such London-based writers as Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali in the last decade of the twentieth century.
Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
Meets general academic requirements L or D and W or HU and DE and W.