Serving Their Purpose
The Indian Quarterly|July - September 2017

How Indian filmmakers depict servants is a comment on their masters.

Trisha Gupta
Serving Their Purpose

IN A 1939 ESSAY, GEORGE ORWELL accused Charles Dickens in particular and English fiction in general of not representing the working classes, except “as objects of pity or as comic relief”. In what may now be read as a rather limiting leftwing critical move, Orwell's dissatisfaction with Dickens was that his novels had too few autonomous working-class characters and too many servants.

This may well have been the case. But, as the literary historian Bruce Robbins suggests in The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below, what the novel does by focusing on domestic servants rather than independent proletarians is to “[cast] its lot with rhetoric rather than with realism”. Taking the rhetorical seriously “makes room in political discourse for 'unrealistic’ visions or fictions of shared social fate”. The servant as a literary figure, Robbins argues, exists not to provide a sense of the lived experience of domestic service, but to proffer verbal entertainment, act as [comic] instruments in complicating or resolving the action, and be a foil to or parody of the master or mistress who remains the protagonist.

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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July - September 2017 من The Indian Quarterly.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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