Nation, native, narrative: The fetish and imagined community in India

This dissertation analyzes the construction of postcolonial national identity through the images and rhetoric of and about the Indian sub-continent. It examines the complex dialectic between the British colonial past and the Indian postcolonial present through the framework of fetishized national identity on both sides, and explores the definition of Indianness in the current context of First-world/Third-World relations through neocolonial texts that define national identity. The process of othering in colonial discourse, through the figures of the sati, the ayah, the sahib, and the memsahib, was crucial in the formation of a fetishized Englishness. Similarly, the woman-as-mother, or the subaltern, have become embodiments of national identity in the postcolonial Indian imaginary. Equally compelling are images of Third-World poverty or exoticism in neocolonial travelogues or mass media texts that are then equated with a certain part of the world. By deconstructing such fetishized definitions, this dissertation reveals the anxieties and fears beneath these imaginings. In doing so, this project demonstrates how postcolonialism itself may be complicit with other colonizing discourses. The fetish is thus utilized as a critical device to reverse the "imperial gaze" and begin a questioning of subject-object power relations within the postcolonial rhetoric of Indian nationalism. Such a move facilitates new ways of imagining the Self that can provide resistance to the colonizing process of Othering in the rhetorical quest for postcolonial national identity.