An icon of British character: the Indian Mutiny and the literary imagination

Focused on the development Mutiny novel, the paper aims at offering an example of the influence of history on literary imagination, in order to explore the ideological role of memory in building national attitudes, but also in promoting their revision. The Indian Mutiny (1857) –an event whose popularity and iconic value even in recent times is demostrated by a real sample of Raj nostalgia as A Companion to the Indian Mutiny (P.J.O.Taylor, OUP India, 1996), a huge collection of information, images, anecdotes on the subject- was made a Victorian icon of the ‘British character’, conveyed by all sorts of media. In 1897, Hilda Gregg wrote from the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine that “Of all the great events of this century, as they are reflected in fiction, the Indian Mutiny has taken the firmest hold on the popular imagination.”. The novels focusing on the event developed a specific chronotope and a subgenre – the Mutiny novel- which largely contributed to shaping national identity, confirming racial and sexual stereotypes. After Indian indipendence and up to the present, the Mutiny has not ceased to be a topic for novelists, who sometimes refer corrosively to the historical episode and to its textual tradition in order to enhance a critical attitude towards British imperial past, but more often voice the Raj nostalgia through romance. Indian novelist offer different perspectives on the episode, so challenging British collective memory and foregrounding the ideological role played both by the episode and by its rhetoric in British culture.