Abstract

The motives informing an Indian author's desire to write English sonnets are complicated by the cultural influences of British imperialism and modern globalization. This thesis considers how English Indian sonneteers negotiate questions of identity - self, nation, and culture - through the sonnet form and to what end. This study considers the possible motives through the lenses of sonnet history, colonization, and postcolonial and sonnet theory. This thesis explores how the English Indian sonneteer attempted to fuse cultural identity, nationalism and form in order to subvert the cultural inculcation of the British Raj and create a hybrid identity for emerging national self. It also explores the development of the alienated self created by colonization and modernism. This work considers colonial and postcolonial sonnets in relation to how themes of nostalgia, history, identity, and nation influenced the works of Anglo-Indian poets. Historical narratives, cultural identity and memory became sites of anxiety, self-elaboration and imagination. These concerns are worked out in the rhetorical space of Anglo-Indian sonnets in ways that simultaneously endorsed, rejected or rewrote the historical narratives that informed the speaker and created a dynamic, hybrid cultural identity