The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India

Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? The Audacious Raconteur argues that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress "audacious raconteurs": skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation. Engaging history, folklore, literary studies, and religion, the book tells the story of how Indian narrators in the late 19th century re-centered Asia—and de-centered Europe—in their cultural imaginary and remained sovereign despite being colonized. These narrators, through their vigorous orality, intrepid wit, maverick use of photography, literary ventriloquism, and bilingualism, dismantle the ideological bulwark of colonialism—colonial modernity, history, science, and native knowledge. They question the very foundations of colonial anthropology, history and science. Prasad’s research of over more than two decades discovers living descendants of three of these narrators and demonstrates that the figure of the audacious raconteur does not merely hover in an archive but suffuses everyday life. Standing against currents of power, racism, and other forms of othering, the audacious raconteur is an indomitable—and necessary—ethical and artistic figure in human experience.