Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She has published Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002), Stories of Women (2005), and the biography Nelson Mandela (2008). She is the author of four acclaimed novels, as well as the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). She edited Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (2004), and the anthology Empire Writing (1998), and co-edited J.M. Coetzee in Writing and Theory (2009), Terror and the Postcolonial (2009), The Indian Postcolonial (2010), and The Postcolonial Low Countries (2012). She is the General Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series.

• Introduction: Indian Arrival-Encounters between Indians and Britons, 1870-1915


• I Encounter


• II Interconnected Cultural Terrains


• III Cross-border Poetics


• IV Arrivals and Arrivants


• V The Enigma of Arrival


• VI Chapters


• 1: Passages to England: Suez, the Indian pathway


• I Ondaatje's 'fragmentary tableaux'


• II Across the Black Waters


• III The 'magnificent ditch' in its imperial context


• IV British perspectives


• V Indian passages to England: travelling in the west


• VI Forged through the medium of travel: Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu


• 2: The Spasm of the Familiar: Indians in late nineteenth-century London


• I 'EL to England to discover India'


• II Native and foreign in England


• III 'Versions of our old route': India-in-Britain


• IV City networks: 'No route back'


• V A poetics of crossing: 'that world-wide circle ... like an electric current'


• 3: Lotus Artists: Self-orientalism and Decadence


• I 'Catching the nearing echo': 1890s poetic encounters between India and Britain


• II The fantastical 1890s


• III 'Lotus-eyed' Ghose 'the Primavera poet'


• IV 'so impetuous and so sympathetic': Sarojini Naidu as self-orientalist


• V Cornelia Sorabji: 'getting England into my bones'


• 4: Edwardian Extremes and Extremists, 1901-13


• I Difference within


• II India Housed and Unhoused


• III Indian Bloomsbury


• IV On or about 1912


• 5: Coda-Indian Salients


• 6: Works Cited

Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915 examines how Indian influences and ideas were threaded through British society at the height of the empire, in spite of colonial divisions.