Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity / Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (PDF)

JAVED MAJEED is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at King's College, London. His previous publications include Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's 'The History of British India' and Orientalism (1992) and with Christopher Shackle Hali's Musaddas: the Flow and Ebb of Islam (1997).

'[A] unique and very important book. Its uniqueness derives from the fact that it combines three vital fields, each of great contemporary relevance, but seldom if ever put together. The first is life writing, the second travel writing, the third postcolonial studies. To bring them into one coherent argument is itself a brilliant stroke. Majeed has not only had this singular idea, but he has also carried out convincingly, and with considerable élan. Throughout the book is a riveting read. It is fluent as well as being learned, subtle without being unnecessarily abstruse...The postgraduate will find it absorbing, while the advanced undergraduate will discover in it much that is of worth. The researcher will simply revel. Compared to this, all other studies in the field are bicycle rickshaws. This is a Stretch Limousine.' - Dr Robert Fraser, Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Senior Research Fellow, The Open University.

'This excellent book will register an immediate impact in the fields of literary studies and history, but it will also appeal to a wider range of disciplines that are now concerned with topics such as the person, self-hood and the structure of narrative.' - Professor Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge

'Javed Majeed has produced an exceptional and important book which will affect our way of thinking about nationalism today. Through the most scrupulous and sensitive readings of the autobiographical writings of Ghandi, Nehru and Iqbal, he demonstrates how each of them are engaged in a complex negotiation of the innermost depths of selfhood as a means of political self-empowerment. They do this against the oppressive clichés of colonial discourse, but also in such a way as to forge a new, subtly rendered, version of political subjectivity which could serve as a model for post-colonial identity in modern times. Majeed opens up these key figures of Indian nationalism to the widest political significance. In the process, notably in