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  • Outside Looking In:Colonials, Immigrants, and the Pleasure of the Archive
  • Joseph Childers (bio)

When Helena Michie approached me about participating on this panel, I agreed, but with a good deal of trepidation. She had told me that she was interested in doing a "meta" panel and thought "pleasure" would be a good theme around which to organize it. Since I am usually self-indulgent, but rarely self-reflective when it comes to pleasure, of any sort, I worried about how to address this topic. The task seemed too broadly defined. I was convinced that the world, let alone Victorianists, did not need another theory of pleasure, especially one that could be delivered in a twenty-minute conference paper. The writing, and more importantly the hearing, of such a paper seemed to me to be two of the least pleasurable ways one could spend one's time. I also was concerned with the likelihood of my drawing loose, baggy conclusions about Victorian studies and the kinds of enjoyment we derive from pursuing our work. These particular pleasures are, to my mind, individual and not always generalizable. Nor is it entirely clear that our work is necessarily pleasurable, or even that we are motivated to do it simply because we enjoy it. We are Victorianists after all, and at least for myself there is always a sense of duty that shadows any pleasure I derive from my research and writing.

It occurred to me that the question of pleasure—both mine and yours—hung in the balance, and I was unwilling to sacrifice either. And although you may already be thinking that it is too late, that at least one of those has already been forfeited, I want to attempt to pull you back from the abyss of boredom—which of course has its own pleasures—by focusing on three threads in a fabric of enjoyable moments. Of course this means that the paper will be divided into three parts. The first introduces a text, and with it, a Victorian personage, or more appropriately a Victorian personality. Both text and writer have been overlooked in our study of the period, yet this person and the [End Page 297] work he wrote can help us to think about our investments in understanding some of the cultural practices that shape our conception of the Victorian period, especially the latter portions of it. Coming across this writer in the British Library and reading his work have been pleasures on their own, to be sure, but there are also the pleasures communicated in his text that accentuate his experiences and it is around these that I center section two. Finally, in the third section, I want very briefly to consider how these experiences, and this writer's representation of them, can help us to think critically not only about his place in late- Victorian England, but about our own contemporary experiences and their relation to a few brief months in 1886.

I. (Re)Discovery

The world, at least the Western world, does not remember much about T. N. Mukharji. A Bengali civil servant of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his mark on the history of empire is now only barely legible, requiring a very particular sort of knowledge even to recognize let alone to decipher. Although at least one scholar has made compelling claims about the importance of Mukharji's participation in various international exhibitions of Indian art during the 1880s, his presence is all but invisible in the holdings of the largest collections in the U.S. and Britain, where searches for his work yield only a modest list of publications.1 Most references are to his contributions to the catalogs of the Amsterdam Exhibition (1883), the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886), and the Glasgow International Exhibition (1888).2 An expert in Indian arts and manufacture who was devoted to his work, Mukharji hardly seems a likely candidate for offering future generations insight into the experience of being a colonial in London during the height of the British Empire.3 In part because of the relative celebrity of visitors like Cornelia Sorabji, Behramji Malabari, and the young Mohandas K. Gandhi, and in...

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