Imagining India through Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han

This chapter focuses on representations of Indian agency derived from British scholarship on Indian history and mythology, with particular reference to James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. It argues that the narrative richness of Rajasthan and its colourful vision of India’s past contributed to its impact on British readers and writers, while the work also created a narrative space where Indian self-determination could be imagined with less concern for its impact on the contemporary colonial project. The chapter also discusses successive British versions of the story of the Rajput princess Kishen Kower, which becomes an exemplary vehicle for tracing the changing representation of female agency in the literature of British India, and exploring its interactions with British ideas of gender norms and femininity.

Romantic Heroes and Colonial Bandits

This chapter argues that British literary representations of Indian practices (such as banditry) criminalized by the colonial state had the effect of transforming the eighteenth-century stereotype of the ‘mild Hindoo’ into a predatory Indian masculinity formed in opposition to a weak and victimized femininity. It presents an analysis of a series of representations of India developed through the appropriation of British metropolitan forms and texts, in which the potential for threat to the British colonial state implicit in depictions of Indian agency is disabled or negated by the distancing or alienation of Indian figures from British readers. The chapter examines British Indian adaptations of the most important of these nineteenth-century metropolitan models – the works of Byron and Scott – and the ways in which their depiction of the criminal bandit / hero is appropriated and transformed in the Indian context.

The Literary Marketplace of British India: 1780–1844

This chapter discusses the material conditions for the emergence of a publishing and print culture in early British India and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It explores the demographic and economic factors affecting the development of the publishing industry. It argues that newspapers and literary titles were not simply a conduit for the distribution of the news and culture of ‘home’ across India, but also provided a forum in which the British community in India could write for (and often about) itself, thus enabling the development of a sense of local and colonial identity, related to but also set apart from the identity of the British at ‘home’.

Consuming and Being Consumed

This chapter traces the evolution of a discourse of consumption and predation throughout the Victorian period. The East India Company’s transformation from a commercial concern into a government was accompanied by intense public debate over its role in India, focusing on economic relationships of exploitation, and moral relationships of corruption. This debate crystallized around the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1795). The ‘nabobs’ of the Company were represented as exploiting India and its residents for their own material gain, and simultaneously as themselves corrupted by contact with India. Their return to Britain gave rise to a sense that their moral and financial corruption was being imported into the British body politic. While this political moment quickly passed, the debate established the terms and metaphors – greed, excess, predation, and contamination – in which British people imagined their role in India, and India’s effect on them.

Introduction

This study explores the crystallising of a colonial literary culture in early nineteenth-century British India, and its development over the course of the Victorian period. It focuses on a wide range of texts, including works of historiography, travel writing, correspondence, fiction, and poetry, produced by amateur writers as well as writers who were better known and more professionalised. Its aim is to delineate the parameters and operations of a literary culture that is both local, in that it responds to the material conditions and experiences specific to colonial British India, and transnational, in that it evolves from and in reaction to the metropolitan culture of Britain. The writers I discuss were British, and lived and worked in British India (anglophone writing by Indians falls outside the parameters of this study). They often published their work for limited circulation within the colonial marketplace, but also with an eye to the more extensive readership of ‘home’. While individual authors’ works may be inconsequential or ephemeral, and sometimes apparently derivative of metropolitan texts and genres, the corpus in total constitutes a significant body of literature with its own concerns, themes and formats....

Afterword: Reading India

The boundary between lived experience and discursive representation, inherent in the formal division of this book, is in practice neither clear-cut nor sustainable, though it serves its purpose as an organising principle. Looking at individual writers’ representations of India, what comes over time and again is the complexity of what they perceive: that is, their sensory engagement with the materiality of India is both shaped by their previously formed expectations, and overlaid with their knowledge of the responses of others. Their expression of these perceptions is equally complex, formulated as it is in negotiation with existing metropolitan, colonial and indigenous tropes and genres....

Transformations of India after the Indian Mutiny

This chapter explores British responses to the events of the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857, and to the rise of Bengal nationalism towards the end of the nineteenth century. This period is characterised by a British turning away from both ‘home’ and indigenous India and towards an insular colonial mindset. An examination of some representative texts shows that at the same time, the literature of the colony engages in a set of transformative narratives of India and the British role in India. The tropes and themes of depictions of India in the earlier pre-Mutiny period are now co-opted and turned to the depiction of British heroism and British sacrifice, in a process which also involves the incorporation of aspects of a stereotypically Indian character into an evolving ideal figure of British colonial rule, whose femininity makes it paradoxically impossible for her to be accorded a place in the male-dominated society of the colony.

European Nationalism and British India

This short chapter sketches the moment of preoccupation with emerging nationalism in India as well as in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when an incipient discourse of Indian nationalism appears in British writing, albeit in limited and evanescent form. It argues that this discourse draws on the mainstream literary tradition of Western Europe, but also on the indigenous historical, mythological and literary narratives of India, and the writers’ own lived experience of the country, and their apprehension of the particular socio-economic and political forces driving British interactions with and representations of India.

Exile

This chapter examines the ways in which the émigré community of British India conceived of their absence from ‘home’ as a kind of exile. While apparently artless, the trope of ‘home’ was not simple. The nostalgic or picturesque representation (privileging aesthetics over experience or memory) of the homeland served to reinforce affective connections between the exile and those left behind; in addition, sentimentalized images of the homeland were projected onto the Indian landscape, again effacing or limiting the value of the authentic experience of exile. Ambivalence was also at the heart of how ‘home’ was understood: it was seen, for instance, as a place of loss, death, and alienation – a place to which the exile could never return – as well as a place of innocence and lost childhood.