Author: Giti Chandra, School of Humanities, Háskóli Íslands (University of Iceland) - Personal Website, Google Scholar, ORCID

Abstracts:
- »Chapter 13, by Giti Chandra, is a powerful reflection on decolonial feminist activism, through Raj Nostalgia literature. This chapter offers a decolonial feminist reading of British colonial fiction. Through an analysis of rape tropes and racialised power dynamics in works like ‘The Raj Quartet’ and ‘A Passage to India,’ Chandra critiques how colonial trauma is represented in ways that obscure the realities of colonial violence, particularly the violence perpetrated against colonised subjects.« (Source: Bhana, Deevia, Tamara Shefer, and Giti Chandra. »Feminisms, decolonial dialogues, and transnational perspectives.« Decolonial Feminisms, Decolonising Feminisms: Transnational Perspectives. Edited by Deevia Bhana et al. London 2026: 14)

- »As Britain lost many of its Asian and African colonies, a new genre of fiction emerged from England, which was quickly labelled ‘Raj Nostalgia.’ Novels of the heyday of the British ‘raj’ flooded the market. While differing in literary quality and layered in terms of political content, these nostalgia novels did share some common tropes, including that of the white, Englishwoman raped by an Indian man. As Salman Rushdie points out, this is a strange trope considering that, given the colonial situation, it should be the Indian woman being raped by the British man. Meanwhile, historians have traced transcripts of interviews with British officers who repeatedly assert that, in all the violence of the ‘mutiny,’ “the thought of rape never crossed the native’s mind.” In the face of the ubiquitous and much perpetuated image of the white woman as an object of lust for the ‘native’ man, this is a remarkable position for so many Englishmen to take. This chapter will consider these competing public ‘memories,’ and their fictional memorialisations, in the light of the uprising of 1857, and through a feminist, decolonial, reading of EM Forster’s A Passage to India and Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown. The chapter flags the significance of a feminist decolonial lens in reading such postcolonial literatures and therefore the larger importance of such interrogations for literary disciplines, both teaching and research.« (Source: Taylor & Francis Online)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of India / British Raj | History of Europe: History of England | Literature: English literature / E. M. Forster, Paul Scott (novelist) | Literature: Novels about rape / The Jewel in the Crown (novel), A Passage to India, The Raj Quartet | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in India