ABSTRACT
Drawing on theorizations of the romance that suggest the form deploys the antinomy of good and evil, the chapter focuses on two colonial romances, Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (first published in 1872) and Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s Bengali novel Anandamath (first published in 1882), to examine their articulations of utopian spaces and subjects. It illuminates the strategies through which Seeta presents the eponymous heroine Seeta and the colonial official Cyril Brandon as epitomes of good while Azarel Pande embodies the principle of evil. It shows the romance extending this antinomy of good and evil to its spatial imaginary thus positing notions of good and evil locales. Further, the chapter suggests that the narrative suffers from anxieties about the inter-racial marriage of Seeta and Brandon as well as the existence of the mutinous subject Azrael Pande. These anxieties are resolved by killing off the characters, thereby effecting a kind of social catharsis that transforms the narrative world in a utopian vein. Chatterji’s Anandamath codes the narrative’s two co-existing spatialities – the ahistorical space of the forest and the famine-afflicted village – with the good-evil antinomy where the forest signals, in an anachronistic vein, the future space of the postcolony in the present. The novel also deploys the good-evil antinomy to characterize social groups, namely, Hindus, Muslims, and the British. The utopian horizon of Chatterji’s text is the decolonization of Indian space but the attempt to narrativize the overthrowing of British rule creates an impossible vision of decolonization, and a crisis for the narrative. This is resolved, I show, through the use of the deus ex machina at the novel’s denouement that not only defers the end of British rule to an indeterminate future but also acquiesces to the logic of colonial progressive history.
