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Journal of World History 9.1 (1998) 127-129



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Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History. By Teresa Hubel. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 234. $65.25 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Teresa Hubel's well-meaning but ultimately unsatisfactory book attempts to replot the idea of India at a time of contest between nationalism and imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century. She chooses to do so through a reading of texts both fictional and nonfictional, some as well known as E. M. Forster's Passage to India and [End Page 127] others resurrected here after a long sleep. This is an ambitious book in its time frame, in the texts chosen, and in its dangerous assertion that an imperialist mindset denies existence to the idea of a unity (whether geographical or cultural) called India.

Hubel's claim that India can indeed be read as a unity and that only Western representation disunifies that entity is certainly of a piece with her curiously naturalized reading of nationalism, which sees it somehow voicing an entity that she calls India. This is a curiously ahistorical and binary position for someone who claims to be working from a postcolonial model. In this book, the main terms employed seem emptied of other than a rhetorical meaning. Not only does Hubel see nationalism—or oppositions to it—everywhere she looks, but all analyses of which she disapproves are lumped under the mysterious heading of "middle-class scholarship," which appears guilty of "incredibly generalized presumptions" (p. 120). This seems ironic since generalizations are precisely what Hubel herself calls upon throughout the book, and nowhere more than in her own founding presumption of a vision of Indian unity. Hubel may not be alone in unconsciously seeing and saying "India" when in fact she means "Bengal," but this elision is none the less culpable for its irritating and inaccurate frequency.

The notion of a recognizably middle-class text is a motif that reappears with some frequency in the book, even though readers are never informed precisely what constitutes such a text. Forster is described as a middle-class writer, and to the extent that he was an educated man but from a nonaristocratic and nonconformist background, his texts certainly could be dubbed middle-class in this rather prosaic manner. But that is not, I suspect, what the author is getting at when she specifically tells us that she is pointing out "the inability of middle-class texts to speak for us all" (p. 85). One might equally argue that Forster cannot speak for us "all" as a male writer or as an English-speaking writer. If Hubel is intending to undermine the alleged universalities of the literary (or indeed historical) canon, so be it, but to dub texts middle-class without explanation and to employ the term with apparent contempt surely needs justification and, I would hope, historicization.

I worry, too, that these seemingly unhistoricized readings of a series of quite interesting texts lead Hubel into extraordinary and sometimes contradictory conclusions. I have some sympathy with her attempt to question the impermeability of the barriers traditionally dividing "fact" from "fiction," but these readings seem wilfully to deny historical context. Having spent most of a chapter resurrecting the fiction of Sarah Jeanette Duncan as a means of offering an alternative to the work of mainstream male authors, such as Rudyard Kipling and Forster, Hubel contradicts her reading of the woman novelist almost [End Page 128] immediately. At page 68, Duncan is seen to be writing about nationalism sympathetically; at page 70 she is represented as using her characters to challenge imperialism. But at page 71, we find her following Kipling in not needing to justify that imperialism. Which is it to be? Since in Hubel's work texts are anything but unstable, despite the postcoloniality claimed for her reading on the dust jacket, these successive contradictions left this reader more than a little bewildered. That Duncan, like any other writer, might have felt...

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