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5 Buzz, Mob, Crowd, Life: Writing the Riot in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
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Published:November 2023
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Abstract
Novels across the British Empire in the 1920s and 1930s relied on the riot and the crowd as key ‘characters’. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1936), written alongside Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1927), both feature crowds in the wake of riots. What the novels share is a global and particularly modernist discussion about modern life, especially the particularly modern social unit of the crowd. If the twentieth century was to be the ‘era of the crowd’, as Gustav Le Bon proclaimed in 1898, it makes sense that early twentieth-century literature reflected a global conversation about this new epoch. In 1918, Sir Sidney Rowlatt, a civil servant in the British Raj, published his notes to support the Rowlatt Act of 1919, which sought to criminalize ‘anarchical movements’ in British India by way of a focus on mass political gatherings. The trouble was that ‘the crowd’ was a nascent sociological concept, and largely undefined. Where does ‘the crowd’ begin and end? Do humans, upon entering into contact with it, become something less or something more than individuals? What do crowds want? While political and social theory attempted to answer these questions, literature revelled in their provocations and used the figure of the crowd for literary experimentation. This chapter draws on multiple genres of writing—literary, bureaucratic, and sociological—to explore how the riot played a central role in the imperial and anti-imperial imagination and emerges as a literary figure in the two novels.
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