Images of the Raj: South Asia in the literature of Empire

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CHOICE Review

Goonetilleke's important study of this group of English novels of the Raj stems in part from his insistence on treating his authors primarily as fiction-makers, not as historians. The five novelists on whom he concentrates-Kipling, Woolf, Forster, Orwell, and Paul Scott-in themselves provide a historical perspective on their chosen works, allowing Goonetilleke to move chronologically from the 1887 Proclamation of Victoria as Empress of India through the last days of that Empire that each of them served, thus embodying in their fictions the shifting relationships between colonizers and colonized. The author's English university education, enabling him to move at ease among the materials of English literary history and criticism, coupled with his ``own basis in Asian conditions,'' prompts an effectively fresh response, opening new perspectives for his Western readers. By reevaluating the relative importance of Kipling's Kim and his Lama, he makes us look again at the novel's ambiguous ending; by contrasting rather than connecting Forster's Mrs. Moore with Professor Godbole (A Passage to India, 1924), he enriches traditional readings of Mrs. Moore's Marabar Caves experience. Serviceable bibliography and notes. Highly recommended.-J. Sudrann, emerita, Mount Holyoke College