Description
Book SynopsisGal Gvili examines how Chinese writers’ image of India shaped the making of a new literature and spurred efforts to achieve literary decolonization. She argues that multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections empowered Chinese literary figures to resist Western imperialism and its legacies through novel forms and genres.
Trade ReviewGvili’s brilliant study unearths the archives of modern China’s India and their stakes for the present.
Imagining India in Modern China showcases the importance of Indian literature to Chinese anticolonial thought. More startlingly, it has us revisit the British Empire’s role in India-China relations as a literary—and not just a historical—mediation. -- Tamara T. Chin, author of
Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic ImaginationThis book frees us from the usual story of China and the West and points to new horizons for scholarship and teaching.
Imagining India in Modern China will astonish readers with its rich array of sources and its stories of writers and thinkers who traveled—and read, wrote, and translated—across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. -- Michael Gibbs Hill, author of
Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese CultureRich in historical detail,
Imagining India in Modern China offers a fascinating look at the development of comparative anticolonial thinking and its imagination of a shared precolonial Asian past. Gvili shows how this attempt to get past the colonial world struggled with the dominance of its knowledge practices, especially those codified in English. An invaluable work for scholars of world literature and Global South literature and thought. -- Aamir R. Mufti, author of
Forget English! Orientalisms and World LiteraturesImagining India in Modern China offers an outstanding and much-needed analysis of the Chinese engagement with Indian literature during the twentieth century. Through detailed case studies and by demonstrating the possibilities and limitations of the “south-south” paradigm, Gvili makes significant contributions to the fields of postcolonial studies, Asian literature, and China-India studies. -- Tansen Sen, author of
India, China, and the World: A Connected HistoryGal Gvili's remarkable
Imagining India in Modern China is a fascinating and pathbreaking exploration of the importance of India to modern Chinese literature and culture, and in particular the anticolonial dynamics of the Chinese Indian imagination. Contributing significantly to the decolonization of both comparative literature and Asian studies and reconfiguring China-India engagement, this book charts much-needed scholarly pathways. -- Karen Thornber, author of
Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, CareImagining India will offer provocative reading for all those working on China and the Global South, as well as on issues of realism and religion in modern Chinese literature. * Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: South-North-South
1. Unsettling the Violence of Comparison
2. What Is Rising There in the East?
3. Folklore, (Il)literacy, and Cyclical Realism
4.
Śakuntalā in China
Epilogue: After 1962: The Ongoing Literary Work of Mourning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
