Post/colonial nostalgia and melancholia in Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife and Before the Rains

This chapter analyses how Dinah Jefferies' bestselling novels, The Tea Planter's Wife (2015) and Before the Rains (2017), exhibit colonial nostalgia that is intricately braided with what Paul Gilroy calls “post-colonial melancholia”. Set in Ceylon and the British Raj during the early twentieth century, these heavily intertextual novels exemplify colonial nostalgia because they reproduce the colonial discourse, themes, and conventions characteristic of travel writing and British Raj fiction, especially colonial Raj romances. They pander to the desire for nostalgic consumption by displaying the colonies as exotic, orientalised luxury goods and experiences. However, the novels also reference the colonial and post-colonial Gothic traditions. We argue that, in line with more contemporary discomfort with Britain's imperial past, Jefferies' recourse to post/colonial Gothic elements creates opportunities to challenge the racist assumptions of colonialism. This challenge is most fully articulated in her condemnation of historical British relations with the colonised, which results in her tentative engagement with anti-colonial sentiments. In so doing, her novels begin a limited work of revising and repairing the traditional colonial romance, particularly through the depiction of interracial love stories.