Friction as China-India Literary Relation

Research Talk Series, Fall 2020

Speaker: Adhira Mangalagiri, Department of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London; Associate, Harvard University Asia Center 

Produced by the Harvard University Asia Center

Abstract: This talk discusses two Chinese literary texts – a 1907 novel and a 1927 short story – that depict the Indian policeman, tasked with enforcing British law on the streets of China’s semi-colonial treaty ports. At first glance, such texts seem only to express hostility and hatred toward the Indian who appeared as a proxy-colonizer to the Chinese subjects he policed. I propose reading such literary expression productively: not as deteriorating China-India ties, but as a form of literary friction that holds hidden intimacies and generates transformative literary energies. I suggest that engaging literarily with the Indian policeman allowed a host of relatively minor yet widely-read writers to shape China’s anti-colonial discourse. The figure of the Indian policeman articulates an unexpected intersection between China’s colonial condition and the concurrent May Fourth literary debates, instrumental to the development of modern Chinese literature. Ultimately, I propose reclaiming the concept of “friction” from the idiom of International Relations and reconceptualizing it as a literary form of transnational relation. With China-India political tensions currently on the rise, putting friction to literary use offers one way of opposing nationalist violence and its attendant discourses of parochialism.

This talk is based on a chapter recently published in the edited volume Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s (OUP, 2021). The book is available for purchase here, and a e-book version is currently available via Amazon.

Bio: Adhira Mangalagiri is a Lecturer (U.S. Assistant Professor) in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, where she has researched and taught Chinese and Hindi/Urdu literature since 2017. In 2019-2020, she was the Victor and William Fung Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Asia Center and is currently an Associate at the Asia Center. Dr. Mangalagiri received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago.