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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 Chronological List Of All Texts On This Site South Asian Women Writers (1870-1930) Profiles of South Asian Women Writers, such as Sarojini Naidu, Cornelia Sorabji, Pandita Ramabai Indian Travel Writers in the West: the Colonial Period (1794-1947) Texts by Indian or South Asian Writers Who Visited England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States during the Colonial Period Fiction by Western Women in Colonial India Overview and links to Fiction by Western Women in British India Literature of the 1857 Mutiny / 1857 Rebellion Literature relating to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny Representations of Illness and Famine Literature representing various famines occurring in South Asia between 1850-1930 Writers of the Bengal Renaissance: an Overview Interracial Romance and Multi-racial Anglo-Indian Community Writings that feature cross-racial romance or mixed race people

Literature of Colonial South Asia: A Digital Archive

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This project is a collaboration between Amardeep Singh and Sana Asifriyaz.

Welcome! Here we have assembled a collection of works of literature by of Western and South Asian writers from the British colonial period. The focus of the collection is predominantly Anglophone works of literature -- fiction, poetry, and drama -- by authors between 1850 and about 1930, though there are some earlier materials (i.e. Dean Mahomet, Henry Derozio), and we may add some post-1930 materials that are out of copyright. We are also including published translations from Indian languages, especially Bengali and Marathi. Some select nonfiction works are also included, especially when they were authored by writers who also wrote works of fiction and poetry.

These works were first collected as a downloadable textual corpus in 2020 (described here), However, we came to realize a mere collection of files may be of limited utility. So we started the present Scalar project to enable access to knowledge about these works and their authors in ways that will be helpful to researchers, Hopefully the site will help readers find points of intersection between different communities of writers. Some groupings are clearly distinct and established entities (the Bengal Renaissance), while others are groupings that reflect current scholarly interest (i.e., Indian writers who traveled in the West).

Some of the groupings we have been developing are as follows:

Indian Writers in the West During the Colonial Period (1794-1947)
South Asian women writers from the colonial era
Fiction by Western Women in British India
Writers associated with the Bengal Renaissance
Writers who dealt with the 1857 Rebellion (or Sepoy Mutiny)
Wr itings dealing with interracial romance and the multiracial Anglo-Indian community
Writers who described various famines of the British Raj
Writers who described emerging social movements and anti-colonial politics
Detailed summaries of select works of fiction collected on this site.

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, and The Collected Poems of Henry Derozio.

1. What is in the Collection?

As mentioned above, British, American, and Canadian authors are included alongside South Asian writers in the present collection.

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. (For example, Dhan Gopal Mukerji, in Caste and Outcast, quotes directly from Kipling.) It's a little less clear which South Asian writers British and American writers were reading other than Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu -- and this itself might be studied. The writer English Maud Diver, who published many novels set in India, rarely engaged with Indian authors early in her career, though she opens her 1921 novel Far To Seek with epigrams from Tagore. Forster, for his part, has Aziz and his friends reciting Urdu poetry by Mirza Ghalib and Iqbal

Publishing Houses: 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. The Hogarth Press is particularly notable for publishing Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi (1941) and G.S. Dutt's biography, A Woman of India (1929). It also published Edward Thompson's critique of one-sided accounts of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in The Other Side of the Medal. Quite a number of other Indian authors who published in the West used mainstream commercial publishing houses like Macmillan and Heinemann.

Moreover, the British Raj had its own English-language publishing houses based in India itself, such as Thacker, Spink, and Company and Stanhope Press. Thacker, Spink & Co. published some early volumes of Rudyard Kipling's. There was also an array of publishing houses publishing work in Indian languages. Thacker, Spink & Co. also published an English translation of Peary Chand Mitra's The Spoilt Child in 1893.

Points of Comparison: HIstorical Events, Comparative Geography. One possible line of inquiry with this material might be to try and compare fiction, poetry and drama by British, Irish, and North American 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. Another topic of interest might be the comparative geographies of the South Asian experience for the two communities of authors. What settings or locales tend to appear most often, either within the scope of any given town or city, or with respect to the Indian subcontinent as a whole? Do Western writers in India describe a range of locations that is broader than those described by writers who were South Asian?

North American writers. There was also a fair amount of interest in colonial India in the U.S. and Canada 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. Perhaps the writer of greatest interest to scholars today might be the Canadian writer Sara Jeannette Duncan (several of her works are in our collection here).

In the metadata file, we list the nationalities of the authors. Besides the North 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.

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. See our page collecting writings by Indians who traveled in the West.

2. Translations.

We decided to include translations by South Asian writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay) and Rabindranath Tagore (Thakur) in the Corpus where we could find editions that were out of copyright. 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 the Anglicized spelling most commonly used at the time in English) 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. See our Bengal Renaissance page for more. Several of these translations are 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 Outcast 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 other quantitative textual analyses 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. The Gutenberg materials were in good shape; they've generally been proofread and formatted cleanly. The HathiTrust materials have 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.

A number of the texts on this site have also been derived from The Veranda, an excellent collection of texts by mainly Western authors who wrote about India under British colonial rule. We are grateful to the editor of that project, Janusz Buda, for permission to use his formatted and proofread versions here.

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