From The Good Earth to Mother India

Esthetic circulations of peasant womanhood between India and China

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20210503
AutoresAnup Grewal (University of Toronto, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen19
Número2
Páginas283-302
Fecha de publicación2022-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1479-5914 • E-ISSN: 1479-5922
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s147959142100053x
OpenAlexW4213111483
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas32

The mid-1920s to the 1950s witnessed the uneasy imbrication of the rural, the peasantry, and women as symbols and subjects of the nation in the era of anti colonial and socialist movements in both India and China. This essay examines this rural/peasant/woman nexus within conflicting representations of the peasant woman as embodiment of the nation's past, present and future, to map a range of connected global political-aesthetic imaginations of Indian and Chinese nationhood. A close analysis of the convergence of three texts – Pearl Buck's novel, The Good Earth (1931), Katherine Mayo's polemic, Mother India (1927), and Indian director Mehboob Khan's re-staging and transformation of both in his 1957 film, Mother India – opens up to a wider set of entangled Indian and Chinese co-texts within an expanded space of global aesthetic circulation. Together, these texts reveal a contested history of representations of the rural, the peasantry, and women in projections of Indian and Chinese national becoming that, in the end, cannot be easily recuperated or consolidated within singular nation-state narratives

Art · China · Colonialism · Geography · Literature · Narrative · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Social and Economic Development in India · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · South Asian Cinema and Culture