The Audacious Raconteur
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THE AUDACIOUS RACONTEUR THE AUDACIOUS RACONTEUR SOVEREIGNTY AND STORYTELLING IN COLONIAL INDIA Leela Prasad CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Publication of this open monograph was the result of Duke University’s participation in TOME (Toward an Open Mono- graph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. TOME aims to expand the reach of long-form humanities and social sci- ence scholarship including digital scholarship. Additionally, the program looks to ensure the sustainability of university press monograph publishing by supporting the highest qual- ity scholarship and promoting a new ecology of scholarly publishing in which authors’ institutions bear the publica- tion costs. Funding from Duke University Libraries made it possible to open this publication to the world. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Copyright © 2020 by Leela Prasad The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Interna- tional License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell Uni- versity Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Prasad, Leela, author. Title: The audacious raconteur : sovereignty and storytell- ing in colonial India / Leela Prasad. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020005702 (print) | LCCN 2020005703 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501752278 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501752285 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501752292 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Literature and society—India—History— 19th century. | Literature and society—India—History— 20th century. | Storytelling—Political aspects—India. | Politics and literature—India—History—19th century. | Politics and literature—India—History—20th century. | Imperialism in literature. | India—Intellectual life—19th century. | India—Intellectual life—20th century. Classification: LCC DS428. P73 2020 (print) | LCC DS428 (ebook) | DDC 809/.8954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005702 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005703 Cover image: Raj Bhawan (adapted for print), by Bengali- Hindu, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Contents Maps vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction: “That Acre of Ground” 1 1 The Ruse of Colonial Modernity: Anna Liberata de Souza 16 2 The History of the English Empire as a Fall: P. V. Ramaswami Raju 49 3 The Subjective Scientific Method: M. N. Venkataswami 83 4 The Irony of the “Native Scholar”: S. M. Natesa Sastri 134 Conclusion: The Sovereign Self 159 Notes 167 Bibliography 185 Index 199 v Maps 1. India with presidencies, 1880 3 2. Anna and Mary’s Deccan sojourn, 1865 33 3. Nagaya’s migrations 95 4. Bobbili and Vizianagaram 109 Acknowledgments There are now many overgrown trails along the twenty-five years of the meandering research for this book, which began when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. I start by thanking the late Roger D. Abrahams, who insisted that I convert the term paper I wrote for his course into a book proposal. As will be apparent, I have many libraries and archives across continents to thank. In India, I thank the Tamil Nadu state archives, Connemara Public Library, the Theosophical Society, the Madras Literary Society, and the Roja Muthiah Library, all in Chennai; Sabarmati Ashram Library in Ahmedabad; State Central Library, City Central Library, and Osmania University’s library in Hyderabad; and the Maharashtra State Archives in Pune. In the UK, my thanks to the University of Reading’s Archive of British Publishing and Printing, the John Murray Archive (now held by the National Library of Scotland), the India Office Records at the British Library, University College London Archives and Spe- cial Collections, and the archives of the Royal Anthropological Society, the Folklore Society, and the Inner Temple. A very special thanks to the staff at the University of Witwatersrand Historical Papers Research Archive, Johan- nesburg, who scanned and sent overnight letters from Bartle Frere’s family correspondence. My gratitude to Linda Purnell of Duke University’s inter- library loans department for her tireless efforts to procure rare copies of books from elusive holdings. I thank the following institutions for supporting my research through grants and awards: the American Academy of Reli- gion, the American Philosophical Society, Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, and the North Carolina Center for South Asian Studies. Following up on nearly every personal name or location mentioned in the prefaces of the works of the scholars I discuss in this book, I visited many homes in India—often on false trails—in search of biographical details. Sometimes my searches took me to dilapidated or re-utilized former colonial buildings and sites. The chapters will evoke the ambience of these searches, the serendipities of my discoveries, and above all, the friendships with the vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS families of three of the authors. I rediscovered Pandit S. M. Natesa Sastri through his grandson Gopalakrishnan, who translated Natesa Sastri’s novel Dinadayalu for me. It was a translation that made me think, rather fundamentally, about how the semantics of translation stretches into the past, or at least into what the past offers to the present. Getting to know Mr. Gopalakrishnan over nearly twenty years brought with it the joy of spending time with his wife, Anandha, and their creative son Chandrachoodan, aka Chandru or Shyam. I thank Dr. Babu and Mr. Karan Kumar, who showed me the threads leading back to their great-grandfathers P. V. Ramaswami Raju and M. N. Venkatas- wami, respectively—and to the rich conversations with Mr. Sundaresan and Mr. Lakshman Rao that shape the understandings I propose in this book. One of the greatest sources of pleasure and surprise was the help I received from friends old and new, who threw themselves into the enigmatic searches for biographical traces, out of curiosity, love of history, and indeed, in some cases, old ties. I recount the stories and outcomes of such collaborations in individual chapters but record my thanks here to Trevor Martin and Vincent Pinto in Pune, Harshawardhan Nimkhedkar in Nagpur, and (then) army major Ravi Choudhary in Hyderabad. I am indebted to the late Mr. S. Muthaiah, who published my queries to him in his columns in the national daily The Hindu; it is because of his gesture that my book stepped out of the archives into the living spaces of the families of Pandit Natesa Sastri and P. V. Ramas- wami Raju. In the same vein, I offer my thanks to Narendra Luther, who pub- lished my query about M. N. Venkataswami in his column in the Hyderabad- based newspaper the Deccan Chronicle. At Duke, Larissa Carneiro helped translate nineteenth-century burial records in Portuguese that I got from churches in Pune, and David Morgan pointed me to Victorian postmortem photography. To both of them, my deep thanks. My students Zaid Adhami, Yael Lazar, Seth Ligo, Alex McKin- ley, Sungjin Im, Mani Rao, and Yasmine Singh provided laughter, assistance, and ideas—and love in their inimitable ways. Carter Higgins, visiting fellow at Duke, helped me at the proverbial eleventh hour. For instilling confi- dence in my belief that Anna de Souza, whose life was virtually irretrievable outside of a colonial record, could still be known alternatively through a “sense reading” of her life, my gratitude to V. Narayana Rao. I am indebted to miriam cooke, Bruce Lawrence, Ebrahim Moosa, and Mani Rao for their thorough, brilliant, and timely comments on drafts. I thank Ebrahim espe- cially for the liberty I could take in sounding out ideas and snatches of rough writing for immediate opinions; it is a rare privilege. I am grateful to Ann Grodzins Gold, Brian Hatcher, and Ajay Skaria for their transformative feed- back on the entire manuscript. In Jim Lance at Cornell University Press, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix I have the pleasure of an editor who “got it” from the get-go; to Jim and to his colleagues Amanda Heller, Clare Jones, and Mary Kate Murphy, my sincere thanks. Some of the research and ideas I articulate in chapter 2 of this book are derived in part from “Nameless in History: When the Imperial English Become the Subjects of Hindu Narrative,” in South Asian History and Culture 8, no. 4 (2018): 448–60, © Taylor & Francis, available online: www. tandfonline/com/10.1080/19472498.2017.1371504. While writing this book, I stumbled through a period of intense and sud- den personal loss, and I am enormously grateful to friends who supported me beyond measure over that time: Maya Aripirala, Marc Brettler, miriam cooke, Joyce Flueckiger, Asma Khan, Ranjana Khanna, Jyotsna Kasturi, Sumana Kasturi, Bruce Lawrence, Uma Magal, Sangeetha Motkar, Ebrahim Moosa, Kirin Narayan, Aparna Rayaprol, Karin Shapiro, Deepshikha Singh, and Kena Wani. The warm and steady support of my brother Chandramouli and my sisters- in-law Indira and Vijaya makes all my ventures possible, no less this one. To Shankar, my brother, who insightfully read every draft of every chapter, a reading that also understood, and hummed with, the loss of our father, a Shakespeare scholar and my best critic, “I can no other answer make but thanks, And thanks; and ever thanks.” To Prasad, my husband, my tenth muse, “ten times more in worth than those old nine.” Thank you, forever. I completed this book because of the daily encouragement from my mother, Srimathi, a schoolteacher with an insatiable love for reading and a great skill with languages.