British India and Victorian Literary Culture FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 1 09/07/2015 10:57 Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Moving Images: Nineteenth- Century Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Reading and Screen Practices Literary Genres Helen Groth Saverio Tomaiuolo Jane Morris: The Burden of History Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Wendy Parkins Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions Deaglán Ó Donghaile Trish Ferguson William Morris and the Idea of Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Community: Romance, History and Disease, Race and Climate Propaganda, 1880–1914 Jessica Howell Anna Vaninskaya Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in George Eliot, Nietzsche Late Victorian Britain Henry Staten Nicholas Freeman Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Psychic Spaces Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Lizzy Welby Anglo- American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Christine Ferguson Wilde, Symons and Dowson Kostas Boyiopoulos Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban British India and Victorian Literary Multiplicity Culture Julian Wolfreys Máire ní Fhlathúin Re- Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in Anthony Trollope’s Late Style fin de siècle Literature Frederick Van Dam Robbie McLaughlan Forthcoming volumes: Roomscape: Women Readers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Her Father’s Name: Gender, Virginia Woolf Theatricality and Spiritualism in Susan David Bernstein Florence Marryat’s Fiction Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 Tatiana Kontou Anna Despotopoulou The Sculptural Body in Victorian Walter Pater: Individualism and Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Aesthetic Philosophy Patricia Pulham Kate Hext London’s Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915 Haewon Hwang Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.euppublishing.com /series /ecve Also available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth- Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys ISSN: 2044- 2416 www.eupjournals.com /vic FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 2 09/07/2015 10:57 British India and Victorian Literary Culture Máire ní Fhlathúin FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 3 09/07/2015 10:57 © Máire ní Fhlathúin, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5 /13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4068 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9969 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0776 2 (epub) The right of Máire ní Fhlathúin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 4 09/07/2015 10:57 Contents Series Editor’s Preface vi Acknowledgements viii A Note on Terms ix Introduction 1 Part I: Experiences of India 1. The Literary Marketplace of British India: 1780–1844 9 2. Exile 24 3. Consuming and Being Consumed 55 Part II: Representations of India 4. European Nationalism and British India 95 5. Romantic Heroes and Colonial Bandits 104 6. Imagining India through Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han 127 7. Transformations of India after the Indian Mutiny 154 Afterword: Reading India 185 Bibliography 190 Index 206 FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 5 09/07/2015 10:57 Series Editor’s Preface ‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assump- tion of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth- century lit- erature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal defini- tion, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unre- flective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth- century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open- minded and challeng- ing manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incor- rect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinar- ity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nine- teenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from conven- FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 6 09/07/2015 10:57 Series Editor’s Preface vii tion that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi- faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theo- retical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 7 09/07/2015 10:57 Acknowledgements Some material in Chapters 4 and 5 has previously appeared as part of ‘Transformations of Byron in the Literature of British India’, Victorian Literature and Culture 42.3 (2014): 573–93, and is published by permis- sion of Cambridge University Press. I am grateful to Patrick Brantlinger and another (anonymous) reader who both made helpful suggestions in response to my initial proposal for this book; to Nicola Royan, for her generosity with Latin transla- tions; and to Julian Wolfreys and the editors at Edinburgh University Press for their support throughout. FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 8 09/07/2015 10:57 A Note on Terms ‘British India’ is used in this book to indicate all the territory under the formal or informal control of the East India Company and later the British government, including the princely states. I have used the term ‘Indian Mutiny’ (rather than an alternative such as ‘Indian Rebellion’ or ‘Anglo- Indian War’, which would better indi- cate the extent of the conflict of 1857–8), because it accurately reflects the view of events held by those writers whose work is discussed. The term ‘Anglo- Indian’ also reflects nineteenth- century usage, referring to the British community in India. Place names in English are given in their nineteenth-century forms where these were standard and widely used (Calcutta, not Kolkata). Words transliterated from the indigenous languages of India appear in the form used by the writer in question, with current spellings supplied in parentheses if required. Where place names or personal names appear in several variants (as in the stories of Alauddin’s invasion of Chitor in pursuit of Padmini) I use current spellings outside of direct quotations. FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 9 09/07/2015 10:57 FHLATHUIN 9780748640683 PRINT.indd 10 09/07/2015 10:57 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