Life-Writing and Colonial Relations, 1794-1826 a Dissertation

Creating Indian and British Selves: Life-Writing and Colonial Relations, 1794-1826 A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Charlotte Madere IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Brian Goldberg April 2020 © Charlotte Ellen Madere, 2020 i Acknowledgements At the University of Minnesota, my advising committee has provided tremendous support to me throughout the dissertation process. I thank Brian Goldberg, my advisor, for encouraging my growth as both a scholar and a teacher. He offered detailed feedback on numerous chapter drafts, and I am so grateful for his generosity and thoughtfulness as a mentor. Andrew Elfenbein helped to shape my project by encouraging my interest in colonial philology and the study of Indian languages. Through her feedback, Amit Yahav enriched my understanding of the formal complexities of fiction and philosophical writings from the long eighteenth century. Nida Sajid’s comments spurred me to deepen my engagement with the fields of South Asian studies and postcolonial theory. I am deeply grateful to my entire committee for their engaged, rigorous guidance. Various professors at Trinity College, Dublin, nurtured my scholarly development during my undergraduate career. Anne Markey, my thesis advisor, helped me to build expertise in British and Irish writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am grateful, too, to Darryl Jones for expanding my knowledge of that era’s popular literature. I thank my advisor, Philip Coleman, for encouraging me to pursue graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. Support from the University of Minnesota’s English department enabled me to complete vital research for my dissertation. With a Graduate Research Partnership Project Fellowship, I traveled to the British Library and viewed official records from the British East India Company. The Graduate School allowed me to deepen my research with a Thesis Research Travel Grant. That opportunity permitted me to return to the British Library and to consult additional archival materials at the National Library of Scotland. I ii am truly grateful to the staffs of those libraries for facilitating my research. Furthermore, I wish to thank participants in the English department’s 18th- and 19th-Century Subfield for offering me feedback on a draft of my chapter on Eliza Fay. Research centers and workshops at the University of Minnesota have provided me with opportunities to develop and share my work. I thank Juliette Cherbuliez and J.B. Shank for awarding me a Dissertation Development Fellowship from the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World (CSPW). Through this fellowship, I received invaluable feedback not only from Dr. Cherbuliez but also from an interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students. Additionally, I am grateful to participants in CSPW’s Premodern Workshop for giving me feedback on drafts of chapters that I presented to that group. Pursuing a graduate minor in Early Modern Studies spurred my interest in interdisciplinary scholarship. I thank David Chang, Sarah Chambers, and Anna Clark for teaching classes that deepened my knowledge of various colonial contexts. Learning about those contexts catalyzed the development of my dissertation. In a different interdisciplinary environment, the Dissertation Writing Retreat (hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Writing) afforded me an uninterrupted period in which to focus on writing my dissertation. Furthermore, Katie Levin, Caty Taborda, Lauren Klaffke, and the entire staff of the Center for Writing provided exceptional academic as well as moral support throughout the retreat. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity, during my graduate career, to study Hindi and Urdu. I thank Meraj Ahmed for instructing me in those languages at the University of Minnesota. Additionally, I am grateful to Kashika Singh and Mary Gollapalli for teaching me at the South Asia Summer Language Institute (hosted by the iii University of Wisconsin, Madison). I also thank Sheba Iftikhar, Abdur Rahman, Sajid Gufran, Shahnawaz Ahmad, and Abdul Haque Kamal for their instruction at the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Summer Language Program in Lucknow, India. I would not have been able to pursue these opportunities without support from the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships program. My project has benefitted tremendously from feedback that audiences have given me when I have publicly presented sections of this dissertation. I thank the Department of Linguistics at Aligarh Muslim University for inviting me to give a talk on John Borthwick Gilchrist. That audience’s questions and suggestions helped to shape my chapter on the philologist. Additionally, I am grateful to the British Women Writers Association, the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Southeastern American Association for Eighteenth-Century Studies. These groups have strengthened my work by giving me the opportunity to present at their annual conferences. My family and friends have been an incredible support to me during the dissertation process. To my friends Amanda Alexander, Melissa Johnson, Hannah Jorgenson, and Shavera Seneviratne, thank you so much for sharing the past six years with me. Your kindness, humor, and mentorship have made graduate school an incredibly rewarding experience. My brother, Jared Madere, inspires me with his creativity and drive. I can never thank my parents, Ellen and John Madere, enough for all their love and encouragement. I am so grateful to them for always nurturing my curiosity and my appetite for reading. They instilled in me the tenacity and adventurousness that enabled me to write this dissertation. iv Abstract This dissertation examines literary self-representations by authors who occupied various roles within the Anglo-Indian relationship of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In scholarship that examines the effect of colonialism on individuals’ subjectivities, critics often argue that colonizers and the colonized alike depict themselves as experiencing a fragmentation of the self. I argue, by contrast, that the early stages of Company rule produced specific social and political dynamics that led authors from a variety of backgrounds to represent themselves not as fractured literary characters but instead as consistent though nevertheless complex ones. This circumstance enables the authors I discuss to represent themselves as achieving limited but nevertheless real opportunities for self-determination within the imperial context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this era, the British East India Company gained political power in India. The early stages of this process, under the leadership of Warren Hastings, championed knowledge production as a means for cultivating asymmetrical, mutually constitutive relations among Indians and Britons. However, British attitudes toward India became increasingly restrictive as the nineteenth century progressed. As a result of these historical circumstances, the authors I examine view life-writing as a form that grants them–to varying degrees–opportunities to exert agency. My dissertation centers on four texts that exemplify a variety of literary genres and modes. These works include Dean Mahomet’s The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India (1817), and John Borthwick Gilchrist’s The Orienti- v Occidental Tuitionary Pioneer to Literary Pursuits (1826). In putting these works in conversation with each other, I demonstrate that the creative drive to represent the self unites various literary forms. Mahomet and Fay engage with the discourse of travel, Hamilton deploys satirical techniques, and Gilchrist details his philological project for an audience of Company officials. The works I examine each depict their author’s experiences and subjectivity whether or not they announce themselves as autobiographies. In analyzing the selves that Mahomet, Hamilton, Fay, and Gilchrist present, I draw on postcolonial theory and South Asian studies. Engaging with these disciplines enables me to emphasize the distinctiveness of the selves that the authors I discuss construct within their specific colonial and historical contexts. This dissertation charts the gradual strengthening of colonial hierarchies as the nineteenth century progresses. Depicting the earliest stages of the Company’s transition from a mercantile to a governing body, Mahomet insists that his insider’s perspective on India has the potential to strengthen Anglo-Indian ties. Comparably, Hamilton believes that the field of knowledge production may produce mutual understanding among Indians and Britons. Eliza Fay, by contrast, demonstrates the emergence of high imperialist attitudes by projecting largely negative views on Indian people and culture. While Gilchrist joins Hamilton in promoting scholarship on India, he also amplifies the sense of increasing social stratification that Fay details. He promotes the study of Indian languages for the purpose of securing British dominance in India. By examining these authors together, I demonstrate that they represent the Anglo-Indian relationship as becoming more rigid and constraining between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. vi Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: “The Performance of Cultivated Genius”: The Transcultural, Strategically

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