Adhira Mangalagiri
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature
University of Chicago
China-India Colonial Configurations and the Aesthetics of Imprisonment
Abstract:
On May 30, 1925, Chinese workers and students famously took to the streets of
Shanghai’s International Settlement in protest against imperialism. As protestors gathered
outside the Louza (Laozha 老閘) police station, Indian policemen operating under British
orders opened fire into the crowds, killing and wounding dozens. In the wake of this May
Thirtieth Incident, the image of the Indian policeman exercising violence on the Chinese
protestor soon emerged as a central symbol of the injustice and evils of foreign imperial
presence in China. National and global outrage inhered within iterations of this
provocative image.
While the May Thirtieth Incident and, more recently, the Indian branch of the
Shanghai Municipal Police have received much historiographical attention, my paper
contributes a resolutely literary approach. Focusing on the symbolic and aesthetic valence
of the encounter between the Indian policeman and his Chinese victim, I first trace the
development of this image in a collection of early-twentieth century Chinese short stories
and novels. Chinese literary depictions of this Indian figure, I suggest, articulate a shared
anti-colonial aesthetics anchored (unexpectedly) in moments of strident China-India
enmity and hatred. Next, I read the reverberations of the May Thirtieth Incident (and
resultant Movement) in the Hindi literary sphere through the poet-novelist Agyeya’s
(1911-1987) writings during his imprisonment for anti-colonial activities in the 1930s.
While Agyeya’s writings on China do not explicitly refer to May Thirtieth, I argue that
the Movement animates the core of Agyeya’s emancipatory politics, crafted through his
aesthetic engagements with China.
Ultimately, my paper demonstrates how literary approaches to the study of ChinaIndia colonial configurations reveal a field of vibrant affective intensities that have so far
remained invisible under exclusively historiographical lenses. In reading Shanghai’s
Indian policeman across transnational literary contexts, I chart new, comparative paths
for the study of China-India relations during the late colonial period.
Bio:
Adhira Mangalagiri is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at
the University of Chicago. She is currently completing her dissertation, titled “The World
Within: Reading Colonial Literary Encounters between China and India,” as a
Dissertation Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. “The World Within”
conducts theoretically-engaged readings of early twentieth-century Chinese and Hindi
texts, uncovering the generative potential and aesthetic valence of colonial violence in
crafting China-India literary dialogue. In 2015, she received the American Comparative
Literature Association’s (ACLA) Horst Frenz Prize for her paper, “Worlding Theory:
Language as a New Possibility in Literary Theory” (forthcoming in The Yearbook of
Comparative Literature). She currently serves as Graduate Student Representative on the
ACLA advisory board.