Consuming India: Identity, commodity, culture and Indians in Britai

Moving beyond discourses of nationalism, national belonging and immigrant nostalgia, Consuming India explores the representation of exotic commodities and bodies which I believe, is not only crucial in analyzing the formation of the South Asian British diaspora in the nineteenth century but also in understanding contemporary and in-vogue discourses like multiculturalism. I start with the critical commonplace that British culture since the early nineteenth-century has steadily exoticized the East. However, rather than read this exoticization solely in terms of the process of legitimating and maintaining colonial domination, my dissertation examines its function in Britain revealing how the representation of the East as exotic masks the undercurrent of xenophobia palpable in metropolitan attitudes to a steadily escalating foreign presence. As I examine events ranging from the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 to the Nationality Act of 1948 and the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush to Robin Cook's "Chicken Tikka Masala" speech of 2001, I explore the triadic relationship between historical events, material objects and racialized bodies in Anglo-Indian encounters in the metropolitan context in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words, I not only examine how these watershed moments necessitate shifting representations of South Asians within the metropolitan context but also demonstrate how South Asian immigrants in Britain engage in self-orientalization, among other strategies, to gain economic and social stability. Simultaneously, I underscore the commodity culture of nineteenth-century colonial and twentieth-century post-colonial Britain, which necessitated and aided such specific self-presentations. Instead of portraying immigrants simply as victims of circumstances, such a reading imbues these figures with considerably more agency and shows them to be actively involved in the construction of their identity. In doing so, I also explore the dynamic relation between exoticism and xenophobia that dominates the British public imagination from the moment Indian immigrants began to arrive at the heart of the empire.;Thus, my dissertation explores how British commodity culture, in a broad sense of the term, impacts both Anglo-Indian encounters in the metropolitan space in colonial times as well as South Asian British literary and cultural production in the post-colonial age. In other words, by looking at literary texts at specific historical moments, I explore how India has been consumed in Britain over a broad historical spectrum and illustrate how fetishism and phobia of the East fundamentally shape colonial-metropolitan interactions and South Asian British cultural production. While most South Asian diasporic studies focus on the "home/abroad" binary, "Consuming India" thus engages with a different set of foci: exoticism, commodification, culture making, and strategies of identification in South Asian literature and culture in Britain.