TUE, SEP 13, 12:00-1:30 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
Please register here: https://tinyurl.com/vmw2uxf6

Divya Radhika Bhalla’s creative dissertation is a historical novel set in nineteenth-century India that explores issues of postcolonialism and feminism. In a seminal work of postcolonialism, Edward Said defines Orientalism as a “discourse” by which the West “produce[s]” representations and knowledge about the East to justify colonial rule. Bhalla’s historical novel functions as a counter discourse from an Indian perspective that interrogates and dismantles imperial discourse and wrests back agency through the act of self-representation. Moreover, rather than representing only the British administrators and Indian rulers of the time, Bhalla’s novel also attempts to construct history from below and tell the stories of ordinary women in India, thereby contributing to the feminist recovery of lost voices.