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Literature of Colonial South Asia: A Digital Archive Main Menu Author Profiles Profiles of authors whose works are featured on this site Literature of the 1857 Mutiny / 1857 Rebellion Literature relating to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny Representations of Indian Famines Literature representing various famines occurring in South Asia between 1850-1930 Writers of the Bengal Renaissance: an Overview Early South Asian Women Writers (1870-1930) Profiles of early South Asian Women Writers

Literature of Colonial South Asia: A Digital Archive

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As of June 2026, this is a work-in-progress. This project is a collaboration between Amardeep Singh and Sana Asifriyaz.

This collection of materials was first assembled as a text corpus in 2020 (described here), collecting works of literature by a combination of Western and South Asian writers from the latter part of the British Raj. The focus of the collection is predominantly Anglophone works of literature -- fiction, poetry, and drama -- by authors between 1850 and about 1930. Some select nonfiction works are also included, especially when they were authored by writers who also wrote works of fiction and poetry.

The goal of the present collection is to show links between various communities of writers, including writers associated with the Bengal Renaissance, writers who dealt with the 1857 Rebellion (or Sepoy Mutiny), early South Asian women writers, writers who described various famines of the British Raj, and writers who described emerging social movements and anti-colonial politics.

The Google Drive version of this collection can be found here. You'll also find a metadata spreadsheet there with publication information.
This project builds on earlier digital collections I have developed, including The Kiplings and India.

1. What is in the Collection?

British, American, and Canadian authors are included alongside South Asian writers in the Corpus.

One reason to do this is that many of the writers were clearly in dialogue with one another; South Asian writers were clearly reading people like Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Mayo. It's a little less clear which South Asian writers British and American writers were reading other than Tagore (and this itself might be studied). The publishing industries also overlapped to a considerable extent; while some South Asian writers published their works with publishers based in India, many aimed to publish with houses based in London.

One possible line of inquiry with this material might be to try and compare fiction, poetry and drama by British authors with South Asian output in English. Such inquiry could either be historical and thematic (i.e., comparing the way British and South Asian writers reacted to historical events like the Sepoy Mutiny or the Famine of 1876), or it could be connected to matters of language and style. To do that it makes sense to have writers from different backgrounds represented in the Corpus.

There was also a fair amount of interest in colonial India in the U.S. at the time -- from the appreciation of Kipling to the American feminist fascination with Pandita Ramabai. In the 1920s, a major figure might be Katherine Mayo, whose scathing book Mother India provoked a considerable outcry from Indian writers shortly after it was published. Readers may be less familiar with the pulpy Indian adventure novels by an American writer named Talbot Mundy.

In the metadata file, we list the nationalities of the authors. Besides a few Americans in the collection, I would draw readers' attention to B.M. Croker (an Irish woman who lived in India and wrote many Romance novels based in colonial India), and Sara Jeannette Duncan (a Canadian woman who also lived in India and wrote prolifically as well).

In addition to the nationality question, with South Asian writers who moved abroad there is also the question of destination. Cornelia Sorabji (who eventually moved to England) is of course pretty well known. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, who moved to the U.S. in the 1910s, is mainly known for his memoir Caste and Outcast, but he was quite a prolific literary writer, with several books of poetry and fiction that are worth looking at.

2. Translations.

We decided to include translations by South Asian writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay) and Rabindranath Tagore in the Corpus. Tagore of course needs no explanation; he was one of the few South Asian writers to break through and achieve global acclaim in the early 20th century. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (here, I'm using one of the spellings used at the time, aware of course that "Chatterjee" and "Chatterji" are colonial-era abbreviations of Chattopadhyay...) is slightly different. He is clearly historically important for Anandamath (here included in translation as Dawn Over India) and Rajmohan's Wife (thought to be the first English-language novel by an Indian author), but it seemed like it might be valuable to include some other of his Bengali novels in translation here. Several of these were available from Wikisource.

Alongside translations by South Asian writers, there are a few translations in the corpus of historical South Asians texts by British writers.

3. Fiction and Nonfiction

Right now there is a limited amount of nonfiction included in the corpus. This was a very tough decision, as there is a vast array of nonfiction colonial travel writing based in South Asia from this period. We have excluded that sort of writing for now.

However, we are including some nonfiction, mostly texts by literary authors who wrote occasional works of nonfiction (Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Caste and Outcaste is included, as is Tagore's My Reminiscences). We have also included a plain text file of Pandita Ramabai's The High-Caste Hindu Woman, mainly because it seems like an important text that might be useful for researchers in this field. Any queries specifically structured around the stylistics of fiction or the colonial novel might want to exclude these nonfiction texts.

4. Derivation; proofreading work

The texts included here have been pulled together materials from different repositories to assemble this corpus. Here, the lion's share of material comes from Project Gutenberg and HathiTrust. (Derivation is indicated in the metadata file.) The Gutenberg materials were in good shape; they've generally been proofread and formatted cleanly. The HathiTrust materials required much more work. One can extract HathiTrust texts by requesting plain text, but these OCR page scans need quite a bit of processing to make them clean enough to use. A lot of the grunt work of assembling this collection has entailed doing that processing.

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