Colonial representations of India in prose fiction As in representations of other British colonies, India was used by colonial novelists as an instrument of displacement of the individual and reaffirmation of metropolitan whole. There are three methods by which this effect is achieved. The first method shows an unconditional dependence on a culture too remote to be approached except physically: a hero or protagonist in a pre-Mutiny novel is free to flee to India in a time of crisis, rearrange his life to his advantage, and return to India. a happy ending and the establishment of a newly defined metropolitan life. Dobbin of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Peter Jenkins of Gaskell's Cranford (1853) exemplify this well. The child Bitherstone in Dickens's Dombey and Son (1848) also regards India as his salvation. The second method demonstrates the duality of the post-Mutiny era. Patrick Brantlinger tells us that the first work of fiction dealing with the mutiny is "The Perils of certain English Prisoners", a collaboration by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in the 1857 Christmas edition of Household. The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins revolves around the theft and recovery of the Koh-i-Noor and creates an ambiguous point of antagonism between Brahmin and English. The Brahmins cannot be said to be entirely right or wrong in their relationship with the stone and it is the British Ablewhite who is portrayed in the most one-dimensional way and who is cast almost as a penumbra to the issues that redefine the character of the former. However, only eleven years after the mutiny, Collins' Indians remain ever a menacing presence subject to only the most tenuous negotiation: the reader must not forget that they belong to the realm of the irrational. Collins' Brahmins, unaware that they are being watched, participate in magical rites and his Hindus, en masse, exemplify Romantic notions of the ideal union of man with nature. As a restatement, they reconfirm the relationship between the central characters. The third method once again demonstrates the duality of the post-mutiny era but with greater emphasis on reconciliation. Later novels such as Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) or E.M. Forster's Passage to India (1924) attempt to remove the Indian character from the confines of previous stereotype or the Anglo-Indian character from the confines of automatic moral superiority..