Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

How does a reader learn to read an unfamiliar genre? The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal answers this question by looking at the readers of some of the first Bengali novelists, including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Moving from the world of novels, periodicals, letters, and reviews to that of colonial educational policies, this book provides a rich literary history of the reading lives of some of the earliest novel readers in colonial India. Sunayani Bhattacharya studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about reading; how they approached the thorny question of influence; and uncovers that they relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models, whose attendant traditions formed not a distant past, but coexisted, albeit contentiously, with the everyday present. Challenging dominant postcolonial scholarship, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal engages with the lived experience of colonial modernity as it traces the import of the Bengali reader’s choices on her quotidian life, and grants access to 19th-century Bengal as a space in which the past is to be found enmeshed with the present.

Moving away from scholarly accounts that associate the rise of the novel solely with nationalism, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal is a fascinating account of the history of modern Bengali and of Bengali print culture, shifting focus from individual writers to the multiple worlds of readers. Deeply researched using archival as well as literary sources, this book offers a deep dive into the practices, ideals, and misconceptions surrounding reading, identity, and class in the 19th century., This timely and innovative book charts the trajectory of the Bengali novel in colonial India by focusing on reading not as a universal experience, but as an everyday practice. The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal constitutes a vital addition to the study of South Asian writing by exploring systematically the fascinating question of how Bengalis thought about reading. It challenges the canonical role occupied by literature as a form of national affiliation, and advocates for a much-needed investigation of the practices of reading as material embodiments of religious, aesthetic, and linguistic intersections., How did the multilingual literary landscape of nineteenth-century Bengal shape the Bengali novel? Bhattacharya tells the story of the Bengali novel not through the English language experiments of its most famous practitioners like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Instead, her book explores the reading strategies of the earliest readers, who drew on their familiarity with Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, and Arabic traditions to read Chattopadhyay and Hossain’s Bengali novels. A fascinating account of how readers are made and how unfamiliar literary genres are read.

Sunayani Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California, USA. Her research areas include postcolonial studies, world literature, global Anglophone studies, and novel studies. She has published her work in the Comparative Literature journal and in several edited volumes.