Book Review: Material culture in the social world

fians in order secretly to practice thuggee, and then a chapter on the significance of disguise in Kipling’s Kim. Next comes a considerable jump to the role of Vivekananda’s Irish disciple, Margaret Noble, transformed into a new kind of Hindu woman with her rebirth as Sister Nevedita. This offers the prompt for the introduction of the subject of the following chapter, Sarojini Naidu, the anglicized poet and Indian nationalist. Although the book claims to consider postcolonial identities, only the case of the film actress Nargis deals with postIndependence Indian culture, and Nargis’s career effectively ended a mere ten years after British rule. Nargis, a morally marginal Muslim woman, most famously portrayed the eternal Hindu mother in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India. Her own person life as mistress, wife and mother of Hindu men, and her ambiguous conversion to Hinduism, act as a metaphor for the problematic status of Muslims in an increasingly Hindu India. I regret that Roy grants the past 40 years such scant attention, and would have gladly traded Burton and Kim for the new, diasporically oriented Bollywood movies and the Indian novel with its eye on the Booker Prize, both serving up a view of India from the inside looking out, looking back in. There is a world of difference between the opportunism of the flesh-and-blood Burton in the temporary disguise to facilitate his exploration and the strategy of the imagined Irish boy, Kim, standing for the anguished liminality of the Indian-born British of the ‘other ranks’. There is only the most tenuous of connections between Margaret Noble, who at the height of British imperialism becomes Indian in name, religion, loyalty, diet and dress, and Sarojini Naidu, who steadfastly remains Indian but utilizes what seems serviceable in English language and culture. Roy puts her central emphasis on the constancy of mimesis as a thing in itself and interprets its different use as a function of changing insecurities in colonial and postcolonial identity; where I disagree with her is in the underlying assumption that there are secure identities to be appropriated. The frequently used phrase ‘mimic man/woman’ devalues complex relationships by implying an imagined authenticity elsewhere. One searches in vain for the self-conscious element which would have brought this study to life. Roy writes as if from outside and above, but her name indicates that she is either Indian or of Indian descent and her affiliation that she teaches English at the University of California. She must surely live the Indian traffic of her research.