Academic literature on the topic 'British in Burma-Fiction'

Abstract Following his 1925–1931 overland trek across southwestern China to colonial Burma, Ai Wu's 1935 Travels in the South (the author's canonical collection of autobiographical travelogue fiction) represents a Sinophonic detouring of the key literary impulses of the author's May Fourth forebears and his left-wing literary contemporaries, especially with its social realist expressions of gendered frontier primitivism, interethnic romantic desire, and international leftist solidarity. Ai Wu's southbound transborder itinerary and “street education”—marked by a repetition of trespasses and evictions—develop a “counterpoetics of trespass” blurring boundaries between social realist fiction and autobiographical travelogue while intertextually rerouting romantic primitivism in depictions of indigenous women through counterpoetically anemic prose. Initially taking his cue from Lu Xun, Ai Wu similarly inscribes his literary mission as one of national redemption but in a way that conforms to the leftist internationalist ideals of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which Ai Wu joined after he was forcibly repatriated to China by British colonial authorities in 1931. Ai Wu's Sinophone transborder counterpoetics activate latent self-reflections on the narrator's own male Han-centric exoticism toward indigenous Shan and Burman women and on his unfulfilled desire to forge meaningful relationships with them. Rather than assimilating or subordinating his depictions of these women into a projection of a Chinese leftist national cause, Ai Wu ultimately sublimates his romantic desires into an allegory for Burma's anticolonial resistance movement.

Nigerian-British writer and playwright Biyi Bandele Thomas’ novel Burma Boy (2007) is inspired by his father’s combat experience in the Burma Campaign of World War Two. This postmemorial re-enactment not only commemorates his father but also the marginalised black African soldiers who participated in that campaign. Critical attention paid to Bandele’s work has noted his surrealistic and satirical style, usually in alignment with a post-colonial epistemology. This paper aims to show how the novel evokes the origins of a trauma and the futility of war within an African consciousness, alongside broader ontologies concerning the modern condition. I contend that through an aesthetics of the Absurd, as outlined by Albert Camus, Burma Boy not only evokes the absurdity of war but transcends its temporal wartime boundaries by offering a broad reflection on the fundamental cause of the author’s father’s wartime trauma: the divorce of humankind from the reality of existence. Thus, I conclude that this post-generational novel leverages an aesthetics of the Absurd to address contemporary political and environmental concerns.

This article examines the dissemination of military propaganda and the operation of censorship structures within the Indian Army ‘units’—a term used in historically contemporary documentary sources to denote regiments, divisions or battalions—serving in the eastern provinces of the subcontinent during the Second World War. Instead of presenting propaganda as merely being misleading information, this work operates with Philip Taylor's interpretation of it being a combination of ‘facts, fiction, argument or suggestion’, and concentrates instead on unravelling its form and the intent behind its deployment. Moreover, the often artificial distinction between ‘propaganda’ and ‘counter-propaganda’ is avoided, since the many wartime British public relations projects in South Asia that were aimed at contradicting particular enemy claims were very frequently represented as having other concerns. Particular attention is devoted to describing the military's attitudes towards policies of propaganda and information between 1942 and 1945, as these years saw Eastern India, defined in wartime official documents as being comprised of Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, the eastern districts of the United Provinces and the sparsely populated frontier areas bordering Burma, develop into an important base of operations against the Japanese armies located in Southeast Asia.

This paper studies the postcolonial approach in the novel The Glass Palace, written by Amitav Ghosh, one of the well-known writers in Indian English literature. This research is an attempt to analyse The Glass Palace through the systematic investigation of postcolonial discourse. The present study assesses the novel through close reading, considering the theories and terms given by various postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, and Frantz Fanon. The colonial period lasted until 1947 in India, and the end of the 20th century marked the end on colonisation in most of the colonised countries of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. After India got independence from British rule, writers like Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth commenced new drifts in their writings by intertwining history with fiction. Historical events and imperialism were there in most of their fiction. In The Glass Palace, too, the author has blended two genres, history and fiction. Historical personages and events reflected in the novel like Invasion of British Army over Burma in 1885, Indian Rebellion of 1857, The Quit India Movement in 1942, and The Second World War in 1939-45, Riots in India, Ghadar Movement; and the personages like The royal family of Konbaung dynasty, Mahatma Gandhi, Dadasaheb Ambedkar, Taraknath Das, Lala Har Dayal are some real historical figures in the novel. In this critique of post-colonialism, theories given by postcolonial theorists in the field of postcolonial studies are scrutinised, i.e. hegemony, subaltern, exile and displacement, diaspora, mimicry, hybridity, ambivalence, and otherness.

Abstract This chapter considers the law in two related aspects: the written law and its institutions, and the unwritten law—what might be called the law of failure—that ensures that all attempts to escape in Orwell’s fiction come to nothing. Orwell was temperamentally a rebel, but in Burma he had been a lawman. The British Empire prided and justified itself on the rule of law: government was bound by the rule of law, and anti-British nationalists, like the lawyers Gandhi and Nehru, could use the law to their advantage. But the law that mandated equality was over-ridden by the code of the pukka sahib, which ensured that some people remained more equal than others. These themes are played out in Animal Farm, where a Utopian written law is corrupted and betrayed. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the language Newspeak is designed to take the place of the law, making rebellion unspeakable. Would it work?