In a work of stunning archival recovery and interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi illuminates the cultural work performed by two kinds of English novels in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers and writers, empire and nation, consumption and production, In Another Country vividly explores a process by which first readers and then writers of the English novel indigenized the once imperial form and put it to their own uses. Asking what nineteenth-century Indian readers chose to read and why, Joshi shows how these readers transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. By subsequently analyzing the eventual rise of the English novel in India, she further demonstrates how Indian novelists, from Krupa Satthianadhan to Salman Rushdie, took an alien form in an alien language and used it to address local needs. Taken together in this manner, reading and writing reveal the complex ways in which culture is continually translated and transformed in a colonial and postcolonial context.
Priya Joshi is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Preface Part I: Consuming Fiction 1. The Poetical Economy of Consumption 2. The Circulation of Fiction in Indian Libraries, ca. 1835–1901 3. Readers Write Back: The Macmillan Colonial Library in India Part II: Producing Fiction 4. By Way of Transition: Bankim's Will, or Indigenizing the Novel in India 5. Reforming the Novel: Krupa Satthianadhan, the Woman who Did 6. The Exile at Home: Ahmed Ali's "Twilight in Delhi" 7. The Other Modernism, or The Family Romance in English Notes Bibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
Meenakshi Mukherjee
Combining valuable empirical research with perceptive cultural analysis, Priya Joshi opens up a new field in the study of the novel. Her meticulous collection of data on the import of British novels in colonial India and the nature of their dissemination and reception provide a background for understanding subsequent literary production in India. The book traverses the colonial and the postcolonial, using tools of historical research and literary criticism to explore areas of cultural negotiation not charted by anyone so far."
— Meenakshi Mukherjee, author of Perishable Empire
Ian Duncan
Much more than a history of the English-language novel in India, In Another Country opens up a global field of the 'English novel'well before postmodernity, with influences flowing both ways: between reception and production, between colony and metropole. All scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature will need to reckon with Priya Joshi's innovative synthesis of cultural criticism and book history, as it redraws the map of modern fiction on a world scale.
— Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Joshi's research into the colonial archives of the 'book' is extensive and meticulous. The intriguing fact that colonial Indians were such avid fans of English popular fiction is one that has certainly been remarked before but not explored, let alone explained.... Her pioneering research provides answers to many literary historical puzzles, opens up new areas of discussion, and will inspire others to follow into the terrain she has marked out.
— Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Wolfson College, Oxford University
