“Through the Pen to Begin with”: Anticolonial Resistance in Tanika Gupta’s Adaptation of <i>Great Expectations</i>

Abstract Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in around Calcutta years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy metropolitan businessman nineteenth-century but also a particularly fragile moment British Empire: subcontinent grappling with aftermath Indian Rebellion 1857, facing early Raj. interrogates narrow understandings “Victorian” as located within Isles, explicating contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement imperialist ideologies politics. Examining play’s engagement imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments hint at destabilisation of, if revolt against, rule. juxtaposes canonised narratives undisturbed hegemony tale incessant resistance. In doing so, she challenges historiographical well fictional (neo-)Victorian texts silence sustained efforts influence anticolonial movements frame Empire terms continuity rather than rupture.