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Essay / As in representations of other British colonies, India was used by colonial novelists as a tool for displacing the individual and reaffirming the metropolitan whole. There are three methods to achieve this effect. The first method demonstrates a total dependence on a culture too distant to be approached other than physically: a hero or protagonist of a novel preceding the mutiny is free to flee to India in a crisis , to reorganize his life to his advantage and return to India. a happy ending and the establishment of a newly defined metropolitan life. Dobbin from Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Peter Jenkins from Gaskell's Cranford (1853) are a good example. Even the child Bitherstone in Dickens's Dombey and Son (1848) considers India his salvation. The second method demonstrates the duality of the post-mutiny era. Patrick Brantlinger tells us that the first work of fiction dealing with the mutiny was "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners", a collaboration by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in the 1857 Christmas edition of Household. The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins revolves around the theft and recovery of the Koh-i-Noor and creates a point of ambiguous antagonism between Brahmin and Englishman. The Brahmins cannot be said to be entirely right or wrong in their relationship with the stone and it is the British Ablewhite who is represented in the most one-dimensional way and who is almost like a penumbra in relation to the issues that redefine the character of the first. However, only eleven years after the mutiny, Collins' Indians remain at all times a threatening presence subject only to the most tenuous negotiations: the reader must not forget that they belong to the realm of the non-rational. Collins's Brahmins, unaware that they are being watched, participate in magical rites and his Hindus, en masse, embody romantic notions of man's ideal union with nature. As a reaffirmation, they reconfirm the relationship between the central characters. The third method again demonstrates the duality of the post-mutiny era but with a greater emphasis on reconciliation. Later novels such as Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) or E. M. Forster's Passage to India (1924) attempt to extricate either the Indian character from the confines of the preceding stereotype or the Anglo-Indian character from the confines of automatic moral superiority..
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