Towards "A New History of Man": Anticolonial Liberation and the Anti-Nationalist Possibilities of Friendship in South Asian Literature

Abstract

This dissertation argues that friendship can enliven the revolutionary humanist politics of twentieth century anticolonial movements. Twenty-first century nationalism, including that of former colonies, extends the violence of empire and breaks from the visions of anticolonial revolutionaries, such as Frantz Fanon, who sought to overthrow imperial domination by also progressing beyond the nation-state. Through a study of friendships that emerge in the context of anticolonial struggle and form across racial, class, caste, national, gendered, and religious differences, I argue that friendship is crucial to the development of a politics rooted in the wellbeing of the global collective and oppositional to both colonialism and nationalism. The main focus of this project is South Asia. Taking the fortification of Hindu nationalism in postcolonial India as a departure point, I read a set of literary texts situated in the South Asian anticolonial context that depict friendships formed across racial, class, caste, national, gendered, and religious difference. I demonstrate how many of these friendships contest strict divisions between self and Other and the colonial, class, and nationalist structures that keep these divisions intact. I organize each chapter according to three spaces that recur in South Asian literature as crucial to the creation and mobilization of friendship across difference: the ship, the home, and the ashram. Moving between these three spaces, I argue that in the emotional bonds of friendship, we can trace the emergence of a collective politics—one that refuses the divisions of self and Other central to the projects of empire and the basis upon which contemporary nationalisms thrive.