In Another Country : Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India

Asking what Indian readers chose to read and why, __In Another Country__ shows how readers of the English novel transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. She further demonstrates how Indian novelists writing in English, 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. 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.

Asking what Indian readers chose to read and why, In Another Country shows how readers of the English novel transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. She further demonstrates how Indian novelists writing in English, 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.

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The seething of print and textuality in India during the 1970s was one inspiration for Joshi's interest, and the other was the manner in which Indian writer claimed the English novel and produced it to their own ends once they began writing anglophone novels in the final decades of the 19th century. She examines two episodes in the making of the English novel in India: the Indian consumption of fiction during the 19th century, and the production of novels in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The study is revised from her 1995 doctoral dissertation for Columbia University. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Contents List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Preface PART 1: 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 2: Consuming 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 Priya Joshi demonstrates how a paradoxical legacy has shaped the works of Indian writers such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Ahmed Ali and Salman Rushdie, a process she calls the "indigenization" of the English novel.