ABSTRACT
How do novels about colonial India articulate notions of community? And how does it gesture towards the idea of belonging to Indian space? The chapter takes up these questions in the final chapter and interrogates them through a constellatory reading of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (first published in 1901), Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (first published in 1907), and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Padmarag (first published in 1924). The chapter queries the representations of space and dwelling in these texts as allegories of the larger socio-spatial community. It shows that Kipling presents Indian space as differential, and the Indians made visible in his narrative either work for the colonial state or are simply social types, constructed with a keen ethnographic eye. The spatial horizon of Tagore’s novel ranges across the domestic and regional scales, and incorporate views of the city and the country that are populated by the Indian elite – anti-colonial and comprador – and the British. His spatial representations make visible peasants, untouchables, and the underclass, gesturing towards Indian society as a spatialized heteroglossia where Hindu parochialism, universal humanism, anti-colonial nationalism, casteism, sexism, and the struggle for women’s emancipation co-exist. The text of Hossain, India’s pioneering feminist, is largely populated by agential women and set in Tarini Bhavan, a shelter for destitute women. The chapter reads Tarini Bhavan as allegorizing the possibility of an egalitarian postcolony where women are at par with men, and control their own lives.
