British India and Victorian Literary Culture by Máire ní Fhlathúin (review)

In his groundbreaking critical work Orientalism (1978) Edward Said criticizes the Western contemptuous depiction of the "Orient" as a Eurocentric vision of the "Other"—societies and peoples who inhabit Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said points out asymmetrical power relations underlying this mode of knowledge production, which lead to further entrenchment of Western hegemony, and marginalization of subaltern voices (2003: 48). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that "the subaltern cannot speak," pointing to the futility of intellectual attempts to speak for the subaltern (1988: 308). Homi Bhabha sees hybridity as a product of the repetition of imperialist discourses, implying "a form of subversion, founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention" (2004: 112). The three scholars also engage with a specific case: how Western intellectuals can give an impartial description of the sati—how they can step outside themselves to think of the Other.

Máire ní Fhlathúin's accomplished study investigates the development of colonial literature in British India from the early 19^th century to the Victorian period. Foundational ideas of Said, Bhabha, and Spivak underlie much of her analysis, especially insights into how gender, race, and literary discourses overlap to shape perceptions of the colonial relationship between Britain and India on all levels. In my opinion, her study sheds light on the above topic: how to find an alternative way, not a self-serving one, to understand the Other.

A number of critical studies over the past decades in this field focus on a limited set of individual authors, primarily Rudyard Kipling, or key issues such as British travelers' engagement with India, representations of sati, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and connections and transactions between Britain and India. The distinctiveness of ní Fhlathúin's monograph is its analysis of archival artefacts and non-canonical titles published in brochures, newspapers, and periodicals, a wide range of colonizing voices including but not limited to canonical literary works. Drawing upon multiple art forms and genres such as poetry, novels, travelogues, historical records, and journalism, her study aims to delineate both the local and transnational significance of a colonial literary culture.

Ní Fhlathúin suggests that ''these writers' project of representing India involves simultaneously exploring the constitution of the colonial self" (189). The study is divided into two parts: the perception of the English Self is primarily explored in Part 1 (Chapters 1–3), and the construction of Indian Other is mainly discussed in Part 2 (Chapters 4–7). Ní Fhlathúin begins by surveying the production, circulation, and consumption of print culture in British India throughout the first half of the 19^th century. The periodical press kept the British community in India informed about events at home, and provided a venue for writings about their personal life in India. Such intercultural communication helped them develop a sense of local and colonial identity in a territory that remained peripheral to the British center.

Chapter 2, "Exile," explores ambivalent connotations of "home" in works of exiles both as "a place of loss, death and alienation" and "a place of innocence and lost childhood" (4). Furthermore, it explores "home" as "a sense of community" (4) established by writers later in the century, such as Rudyard Kipling who transgressed and expanded the literal and figurative boundaries of home. Chapter 3, "Consuming and Being Consumed," discusses Elizabeth Inchbald's The Mogul Tale: or, The Descent of the Balloon (1788), in which British travelers are portrayed in a contradictory way as "potential consumers/predators and consumed/victims" (55). Ní Fhlathúin demonstrates British anxiety about the return of the "nabobs" of the Company, the British rulers who had close contact with India, and apprehension over food prepared by Indians. All these fears, traumas, and losses of the émigré community in British India demonstrated in Chapter 2 and 3, reveal Europeans' prejudices about India as a country of cultural backwardness and political chaos. By delving into the changing...