BOOK NEWS: Exploring artistic resistance in writing from and about India

Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance

BY JUDITH BROWN

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009505246

https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/modernism-and-idea-india-art-passive-resistance?format=AR

In his 1909 manifesto Hind Swaraj, Gandhi made an impassioned call for passive resistance that he soon retracted. 'Passive resistance' didn't, in the end, serve his overarching aims, but was troubled on multiple grounds from its use of the English phrase to the weakness implied by passivity. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance claims that the difficulty embedded in the phrase 'passive resistance,' from its seeming internal contradiction to the troubling category of passivity itself, transforms in artistic expression, where its dynamism, ambivalence, and receptivity enable art's capacity to create new forms of meaning. India provides the ground and the fantasy for writers and artists including Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali, Amrita Sher-Gil, G.V. Desani, Virginia Woolf, and Le Corbusier. These artists and writers explore the capacities of passive resistance inspired by Gandhi's treatise, but move beyond its call for activism into new languages of art.

• Provides inter-disciplinary reading of Indian modernism
• Introduces new authors and artists to readers of modernist studies
• Shows how Gandhi's idea of passive resistance is most relevant to Indian arts and literature

Judith Brown is associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form.