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Interiors and Interiority in Nineteenth Century India

Lecture | October 12 | 5-7 p.m. | Stephens Hall, 10 (CSAS Conference Room)

Speaker: Supriya Chaudhuri, Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India

Sponsors: Center for South Asia Studies, Department of English

Looking back today at Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological classic, The Poetics of Space, we may be struck by the distance that separates the spatial experiences of European cultural modernity from those of nineteenth and early twentieth century India. Yet the representation of domestic space, of the interiors of houses, remains crucial to the emergent form of the novel and its positing of a psychological ‘interiority’. I will examine some examples of such representation in texts from Bengal to argue for a tension between the physical interior and ‘inner space’. I will suggest that Tagore’s novels, in particular, are engaged in a calculated destabilization of the domestic interior, rejecting its values and projecting instead a deep psychic interiority which is paradoxically linked to an opening outwards to the ‘initimate immensity’ of sky, earth and air.

Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor and Coordinator, Centre of Advanced Study, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India. She was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Oxford. She works both on the English and European Renaissance and on 19th century India, and has published extensively in both fields. She also translates between Bengali and English, and has translated Rabindranath Tagore's novel Relationships for OUP (named among TLS Books of the Year). She is currently engaged in editing a translation of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s non-fictional prose for Oxford University Press. Among her recent publications are Conversations with Jacqueline Rose (University of Chicago Press, 2010), "Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture, Modernity and the Early Bengali Novel," Journal of Victorian Culture, 15.2 (2010), "Mutability, Metamorphosis and the Nature of Power," in Celebrating Mutabilitie, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester University Press, 2010) and "Lucius, thou art translated: Adlington's Apuleius," in Renaissance Studies, 22.5 (2008).

Event Contact: csas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3608