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The Impress of the Empress: Provincializing the Queen in the Telugu Desa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2024

Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla Open the ORCID record for Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla [Opens in a new window]
Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla*
Affiliation:
BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, India
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Abstract

In late nineteenth-century Telugu desa, “Victoria” was more than the name of the queen of Great Britain. It was, in Homi Bhabha's famous formulation, a “sign taken for wonder” the signification of which, however, remained ambivalent. As soon as she was proclaimed the empress of India, the queen's name acquired emblematic connotations that were exploited in both reform and counterreform discourses. Treating Queen Victoria not as a person but as a personification, the present essay reads some of the fetishized signs of the queen in the spatial, print, and literary cultures and notes how the colonial engines of modernity were appropriated, provincialized, and subverted in the domestic sphere.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 52 , Special Issue 1: Vernacular Victoria , Spring 2024 , pp. 84 - 103
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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