India's uncanny: Anglo-Indians as (post)colonial Gothic

Abstract

This paper engages with Freud's theorisation of the uncanny to argue that the Anglo-Indian community occupies a position as India's unheimlich. Although familiar to the Indian nation, the community is alienated from it through narrative processes that construct the nation as progressive and independent from British colonial power. Dominant narratives of the Indian nation are strongly marked both by the anti-colonial Indian nationalism which characterised the freedom struggle and the repression of the ‘effects’ of British colonialism, including Partition and the existence of the Anglo-Indian community. I explore the ways Gothic strategies are often employed to signify Anglo-Indians as India's uncanny, and assert that such representation highlights the return of that which is repressed in the narration of the nation whilst highlighting the anxieties the community produces for the purportedly homogeneous and coherent Indian nation.