Mobilizing Great War Literature: Rereading the English Canon through Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters

Abstract

Abstract: While Great War scholars have recently recovered colonial texts, they seldom use those texts to reassess the English Great War canon. Mulk Raj Anand's depiction of Indian experience in Across the Black Waters highlights the imperial dimensions of English texts from the Great War. The novel depicts Indian soldiers first as travelers through Europe before narrating their experiences of displacement in the horrors of the trenches. This shift calls attention to the English canon's depictions of soldiers' mobility, which similarly shift from travel in initial military mobilization to displacement in the violence of warfare. Across the Black Waters rewrites this characteristic shift to reveal its imperial significance, ultimately transforming the English Great War canon's typical disillusionment with Britain into a critique of empire. Anand's novel invites us to recenter the imperial position in Great War literature: all English narratives are narratives of empire, and Britain at war is always imperial.