Book Review: Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

The second edition of Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (2019) updates the 1998 first edition. Routledge Publishers hailed the first edition as “a ground-breaking critical introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies”. John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University since 2014, Leela Gandhi has been researching the cultural history of the Indo-British colonial encounter. As a renowned scholar on transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, she is the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and editorial board member of Postcolonial Text. Her position as director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and her research on intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are part of her varied and important contributions.

Detecting the Diagnosis: Parasitology, Crime Fiction, and the British Medical Gaze

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie traces the cultural encounters between the parasitologist and the scientific detective in the medico-popular imagination, revealing how such meetings helped to embed the figure of the doctor-detective in public understandings of science. Parasitologists like Ronald Ross and David Bruce were routinely reported in newspapers using detective fiction’s most famous archetype: Sherlock Holmes, a frame of reference that blurred the boundaries between romance and reality. Recognising the continued cultural currency of Holmesian detection in clinical and diagnostic medicine, she re-immerses the ‘great detective’ and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, in the literary-historical contexts of the fin de siècle, demonstrating how material and rhetorical entanglements between criminality, tropical medicine, and empire constructed the microscopic world as new kind of colonial encounter.

Expeditions into ‘Central Man’: Imperial Romance, Tropical Medicine, and Heroic Masculinity

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie considers how parasitology became rhetorically and materially entangled in the imperial imagination with travelogues, anthropological treatise, imperial romance fiction, and missionary biography. These modes jointly constructed the colonial encounter as a feat of manly endurance, using the linguistic enjoinment of medicine and exploration to frame parasitologists as modern heroes. Examining the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s conceptualisation of the heroic in history and imperial cartography as a strategy of representation, she demonstrates how tropical illness became a subject associated with pioneers, poets, and prophets, mapped onto the larger field of empire by the adventure mode. Through close readings of Henry Seton Merriman’s With Edged Tools (1894), John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909), and Joseph Hocking’s The Dust of Life (1915), she demonstrates the utility of forms like the ‘soldier hero’ and ‘imperial hunter’ in elaborating masculine citizenship in the context of tropical illness and ‘muscular Christianity’.

Imperial Aetiologies: Violence, Sleeping Sickness, and the Colonial Encounter

In this chapter Taylor-Pirie examines how one particular tropical disease—sleeping sickness—was conceptualised as a form of tropical violence across a range of medical and nonmedical genres. Using the repetition of an African curse ‘owa na ntolo’ as an access point, she reveals how sensational literary depictions of sleeping sickness circulated between newspaper reports and clinical case studies, augmenting debates about racial susceptibility. Depictions of African sleeping sickness, she argues, were filtered through an emotional register that produced new aetiologies of race and illness visible in Henry Seton Merriman’s hugely popular imperial romance novel With Edged Tools (1894), as well as in medical essays and tropical travel guides. The melodramatic mode and a flexible approach to representations of disease transmission produced Africa as a place productive of illness and immorality in equal measure. Ultimately, she demonstrates how Britain’s encounters with tropical disease—fictional and nonfictional—were used to map not only the epidemiological but also the sociocultural topographies of empire.

Ramana Maharshi and the Colonial Encounter

<p>Recent scholarship on Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) follows the romanticism of hagiographical literature, presenting him as a purely spiritual and timeless figure, thus ignoring the political contours of colonial India. Scholarly literature, then, has effectively deracinated this internationally acclaimed figure from one of the most fascinating and transformative historical periods of the modern era. The current study seeks to correct ahistorical representations of Ramana Maharshi by considering the historical processes that determined his status as a Maharshi (Great Vedic Seer) and Advaitin. I aim to show that Ramana Maharshi's image as a timeless and purely spiritual figure actually locates him in his historical situation, and further, that his status as a Maharshi (Maharṣi) and Advaitin reflects the ways in which "the political‟ and "the spiritual‟ interacted during colonial India. This thesis will delineate the process by which Ramana's status as a Maharshi allowed his religious identity to shift from an unorthodox, localised, and ethnic-sectarian form to one in which he symbolised a religious authority in an orthodox and pan-Hindu way. In a broader context, then, this thesis seeks to address the following question: how, and to what extent, did colonial dynamics affect the ways that Hindus interpreted and represented their religious figures during the nationalist period? Here I will demonstrate that Ramana Maharshi represents a compelling case study in the ways in which Orientalist stereotypes about a "mystical East‟ affected the intersection of politics and religion in colonial India.</p>

Ramana Maharshi and the Colonial Encounter

<p>Recent scholarship on Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) follows the romanticism of hagiographical literature, presenting him as a purely spiritual and timeless figure, thus ignoring the political contours of colonial India. Scholarly literature, then, has effectively deracinated this internationally acclaimed figure from one of the most fascinating and transformative historical periods of the modern era. The current study seeks to correct ahistorical representations of Ramana Maharshi by considering the historical processes that determined his status as a Maharshi (Great Vedic Seer) and Advaitin. I aim to show that Ramana Maharshi's image as a timeless and purely spiritual figure actually locates him in his historical situation, and further, that his status as a Maharshi (Maharṣi) and Advaitin reflects the ways in which "the political‟ and "the spiritual‟ interacted during colonial India. This thesis will delineate the process by which Ramana's status as a Maharshi allowed his religious identity to shift from an unorthodox, localised, and ethnic-sectarian form to one in which he symbolised a religious authority in an orthodox and pan-Hindu way. In a broader context, then, this thesis seeks to address the following question: how, and to what extent, did colonial dynamics affect the ways that Hindus interpreted and represented their religious figures during the nationalist period? Here I will demonstrate that Ramana Maharshi represents a compelling case study in the ways in which Orientalist stereotypes about a "mystical East‟ affected the intersection of politics and religion in colonial India.</p>