Anglo-India's regional literature was both a practical and
imaginative response to a pivotal period in the early colonialism
of South Asia. Awarded as Honorable Mention of the Louis Gottschalk
Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
(ASECS). Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize by the Center for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University, John Ben Snow Prize
by the North American Conference on British Studies, Marilyn Gaull
Book Award by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. During the
later decades of the eighteenth century, a rapid influx of
English-speaking Europeans arrived in India with an interest in
expanding the creation and distribution of anglophone literature.
At the same time, a series of military, political, and economic
successes for the British in Asia created the first global crisis
to shepherd in an international system of national ideologies. In
this study of colonial literary production, James Mulholland
proposes that the East India Company was a central actor in the
institutionalization of anglophone literary culture in India. The
EIC drew its employees from around the British Isles, bringing
together people with a wide variety of ethnic and national origins.
Its cultural infrastructure expanded from presses and newspapers to
poetry collections, letters, paper-making and selling, circulating
libraries, and amateur theaters. Recovering this rich archive of
documents and activities, Mulholland shows how regional reading and
writing reflected the knotty geopolitical situation and the
comingling of Anglo and Indian cultures at a moment when the
subcontinent's colonial future was not yet clear. He shows why
Anglo-Indian literary publics cohered during this period,
reexamining the relationship between writing in English and
imperial power in a way that moves beyond the easy correspondence
of literature as an instrument of empire. Tracing regional and
"translocal" links among Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and settlements
surrounding the Bay of Bengal, Before the Raj recovers a network of
authors, reading publics, and corporate agents to demonstrate that
anglophone literature adapted itself to geographical politics and
social circumstances, rather than being simply imitative of the
works produced in the English metropole. Mulholland introduces
readers to figures like the Calcutta-born Eyles Irwin, the first
man to sustain a literary career from India. We also meet James
Romney, an army officer who wrote poems and plays, including a
stage adaptation of Tristram Shandy. Alongside these men were
anonymous female poets, hailed as the harbingers of an
"anglo-asiatic taste," and captive adolescent Europeans who, caught
up in the conflict with southern India's last independent ruler,
Tipu Sultan, were forcibly converted to Islam, castrated, and made
to cross-dress as "dancing boys" for Tipu's entertainment.
Revealing the vibrant literary culture that existed long before the
characters of Rudyard Kipling's best-known works, Before the Raj
reveals how these writers operated within a web of colonial cities
and trading outposts that borrowed from one another and produced
vital interlinked aesthetics.
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