Sayan Chattopadhyay, In Conversation with Claire Chambers

Event details

Dr Sayan Chattopadhyay will be in conversation with Prof Claire Chambers about his book Being English: Indian Middle Class and the Desire for Anglicisation (2022). This book  looks set to change the way we think about Indian writing in English. It critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India. Being English looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The volume explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of India to appropriate the English

language and lay claim to an ‘English’ identity. It discusses this unique quest for ‘Englishness’ by reading the works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie.

Sayan Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He received his doctorate degree from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He served as the DAAD guest professor at the University of Heidelberg in 2022 and was the recipient of the 2010–2013 Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship. His research has been primarily in the area of Indian middle-class self-fashioning and its literary manifestations. He has published a number of articles in leading scholarly journals. He is also the author of the book Being English: Indian Middle Class and the Desire for Anglicization (2022).

All welcome, no need to book.  Enquiries to the talk's chair Prof Claire Chambers at claire.chambers@york.ac.uk.