My introduction offers an overview of the rise and fall of Gandhian passive resistance and places it in the context of a burgeoning arts movement both in India and concerned with India. It sketches the arc of the book, from Gandhi’s 1909 pronouncement of passive resistance to the play Tagore would soon write that takes up passivity as a form of unexpected resistance, to the role of the English language in Indian arts, and ends with the modernist memorial commissioned to commemorate the victims of India’s Partition. The introduction’s main work is to define its central concept, map its complications, and locate its role within a global arts movement.

R.K. Narayan reaches across popular culture with his series of novels based in the fictional town of Malgudi. He has been celebrated and critiqued for his mild-mannered prose and his reticence about the catastrophes of empire. Narayan’s work has been faulted for its side-stepping of the brutal realities of colonial rule, yet he stages, in the dreaminess of his fictionalized township of Malgudi, the capacities of "unwriting," or of undermining the logic of language that subtend colonial rule. Emerging in Narayan’s comic episodes and in his baffled protagonists is a recognition of the importance of keeping things unsettled, in suspension, or visible only in their negation. Through a series of questions (themselves meant to underscore the prevalence of uncertainty in Narayan’s world), I show how Narayan imagines passivity as an interruption, suspension or cessation of the progressive, purposive, and productive time that defines modernity.