Dissertation: "Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity: Indian Muntiny, History, and the Colonial Imaginary, 1857-1911"

Certified Fall 2009

Gautum Basu Thakur is currently Assistant Professor at Boise State. Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity examines the impact of the 1857 Indian Mutiny on British and Indian cultural consciousness and collective memory. I focus on anxious articulations about material objects, racial and sexual identities, and religion to argue that these are symptomatic of a greater problem in mutiny narratives. Namely, the failure to situate the event, write or define it, in context of grand narratives. I show anxieties about objects, identities, and religion can be read from two corresponding directions. First, as discursively representing the dangers posed by the rebellion to political hegemony and established symbolic systems. And, second, as symptomatic of desires for reclaiming authority and re-constituting sovereign subjectivities. My task has been one of accentuating the tension between these two, suggesting their responsibility in the construction of the event’s affective dispensations in the Anglo-Indian mindscape, and finally, presenting a hypothetical theorization on the relationship between subaltern insurgency and colonialism. This dissertation is the centerpiece of an active research agenda that looks at, first, representations of the Mutiny in “postcolonial” British and Indian writings in comparison to colonial narratives; and, second, how anxiety-ridden articulations about the Mutiny map onto present-day transnational concerns over “homeland” insecurities as manifested in literature, film, and new media.