The Novel in Nineteenth-Century

Bengal
ii
The Novel in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal
Becoming Readers in Colonial India

Sunayani Bhattacharya
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bhattacharya, Sunayani, author.
Title: The novel in nineteenth-century Bengal : becoming readers in
colonial India / Sunayani Bhattacharya.
Other titles: Novel in 19th-century Bengal
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “Examines a history of reading practices in 19th-century
Bengal at the intersection of Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic aesthetics,
British colonial pedagogy, and the rise of Bengali novels”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022058990 (print) | LCCN 2022058991 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501398469 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501398506 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501398483 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501398476 (eBook) |
ISBN 9781501398490 (eBook other)
Subjects: LCSH: Books and reading–India–Bengal–History–19th century. |
Bengali (South Asian people)–Books and reading. | Bengali fiction–Appreciation.
Classification: LCC Z1003.5.I5 B47 2023 (print) | LCC Z1003.5.I5 (ebook) |
DDC 028/.909541409034–dc23/eng/20230123
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058990
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058991

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For the women who taught me to dream of criss-cross greens
vi
 Contents

Acknowledgmentsviii

Introduction: Establishing the Problem—Reading as Practice1

1 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers: Battala Literature,

Colonial Pedagogy, and the Idea of Education45
2 Becoming a Reader: Letters, Reviews, and Memories of Reading 87
3 Dear Reader, Good Sir: The Reader and Bankim’s Novels 115
4 Another World of Reading: Hossain and Islamic Bengali Prose 147

Conclusion: The Novelty of Reading185

Bibliography199
Index 212
 Acknowledgments

The roots of The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal lie in the bookshelves of my

childhood home, and in the many bajarer tholis next to the shelves overflowing
with paperbacks that my father had bought during his work trips. They lie in the
well-worn copies of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers from which I got the idea that
all lucky kids had midnight feasts with ham sandwiches and root beers. I tried
both much later in life—not everything you read in books is true. They lie in
the hardbound Reader’s Digest book that my grandmother owned, and which
I feared because it had a picture of a large gorilla. They lie in my grandfather’s
Collected Works of Sherlock Holmes which I had read and reread so often that
the spine barely held together. They lie in a copy of a French textbook with a red
cover whose name I cannot recall but which I will forever associate with learning
the French alphabet in Seychelles.
Somewhere amidst this collection of books, I learned that reading is a fraught
affair. It wasn’t enough to put words together, to get the grammar right, and to
understand what the marks on the page meant. I learned that there are good
books and bad books, good readers and bad, and that much as I imagined myself
alone with my books, I was a part of a much larger structure that determined
who read what and how. Even without midnight feasts in a boarding school,
I was lucky enough to have mostly unsupervised access to books far outside
the limited school curriculum. But what did these books mean to those who
knowingly and unknowingly let me read them? What did my grandmother see
in Reader’s Digest that prompted her to spend a sizeable sum on that book of
natural wonders? As it sat next to her Political Science textbooks, did she see in
it the possibilities of a world outside her quotidian life, or was it something she
bought because of the discount she got as a subscriber to the magazine? What
was her relationship to that book, and how did she read it?
These are the scenes this book conjures up as it asks: how and why do people read
the way they do? The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal explores these questions
in the context of nineteenth-century Bengal as each chapter tells the story of a
different kind of reading. I look for traces left by readers in the books they read, in
the magazines they subscribed to, in the letters they wrote, and through it, I try to
recreate that sense of wonder they might have felt as they read the opening lines of
Durgeshnandini with Jagatsingha riding across an open field into the storm.
 Acknowledgments ix

The book began as my dissertation in the Department of Comparative

Literature at the University of Oregon, and along the way I have accrued debts
of gratitude that I cannot hope to repay. I want to thank my mentors foremost
for inspiring me and for believing in ideas that, to me, seemed so unformed. To
Michael Allan, I owe so much of what is contained in this book today. I thank
him for his intellectual and personal generosity, for his extraordinary insights,
for teaching me the value of a good argument, and his friendship. I thank Sangita
Gopal for her guidance, her thoughtful engagement with literary history, and for
sparking the thought that readers could be the subject of a study. I thank Paul
Peppis for his constant support and encouragement, and for being an incredible
reader. I thank them for modeling what it means to be a scholar, for being willing
to read endless drafts, for the hours of conversations, and so much more.
I want to thank Saint Mary’s College of California for the institutional,
professional, and personal support I have received. To my colleagues, thank
you for welcoming me with open arms, and for giving my work a home. I am
grateful for the support I received from Molly Metherd and Kathryn Koo as
chairs of the English Department. Thank you Marilyn Abildskov, Elisa Findlay
Herrera, Robert Gorsch, Rosemary Graham, Brenda Hillman, Jeannine King,
Emily Klein, Hilda Ma, Lisa Manter, Meghan Sweeney, Yin Yuan, and Matthew
Zapruder. I have been fortunate enough to have been surrounded by the most
incredible students. I thank them for their collegiality and intellectual curiosity
which has helped shape this book.
I am grateful for the institutional support I have received along the way. I
thank the Provost’s Office for the Provost Research Grant which allowed me to
travel to Kolkata and Mumbai during the summer of 2019. The archival work
necessary for Chapter 4 was conducted during that trip. I was able to complete
a draft of the dissertation thanks to the Himes Memorial University of Oregon
Doctoral Research Fellowship which I received in 2015.
The book has benefited from the insights provided by the anonymous
reviewers, from questions and comments received at panels at the American
Comparative Literature Association, and from audiences at Diamond Harbour
Women’s University and Aliah University. I thank my editor, Amy Martin, at
Bloomsbury Publishing, and Hali Han for their support and professionalism
throughout this process. Excerpts from Chapter 3 first appeared as Sunayani
Bhattacharya, “How Not to Read Like a Victorian: Reimagining Bankim’s
Reader in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Novels,” in Comparative Literature 73:1
(2021), 84–109. I thank Duke University Press for permission to publish this
material here.
x Acknowledgments

I have made some incredible friends in this journey without whose

camaraderie this work would not have been possible. Thank you to all who made
Villard Hall and Eugene feel like home. Thanks especially to Elizabeth Howard,
Andrea Gilroy, Shaun Gilroy, Jenny Odintz, and Tera Reid for countless nights of
Doctor Who, Sherlock, and brownies. Thank you Arunima Bhattacharya for not
only being the “other” Bhattacharya on campus but for all the love and support.
Thank you Suhasini Sanyal Saxton, Philippe Bou Malham, Reza Motamedi, and
Aida Salketic for an international cohort that turned into lasting friendships. To
Baran Germen, Yvonne Toepfer, and Palita Chunsaengchan, thank you for being
my family in Eugene and beyond.
Thank you Vedita Cowaloosur and Akshya Saxena for thinking through
the various iterations of this project and reading innumerable drafts. Their
friendship has been invaluable as I have sought to bring this book to fruition.
I have been formed by Jadavpur University’s Department of English in
more ways than one. I thank my professors and mentors for the foundation
they provided in the discipline which gave me the confidence to travel across
disciplines. They gave me the freedom to read without the strictures of exams
or syllabi. Jadavpur also gave me lifelong friends whose love and support I am
thankful for. Thank you Srijani Ghosh, Saumava Mitra, Arundhati Ghosh, and
Azeem Hussain for being there from the start.
Thank you Swapan Chakravorty for inspiring this book, for telling me where
to go looking for obscure essays by Bankim, for teaching me how to read theory,
for showing me how it’s done.
Tayana Chatterjee and Priyanka Chowdhuri, thank you for being the kind of
best friends only sisters can be. To them I owe so much in love and friendship.
To my family—I am everything because of you. Every word in this book is a
result of years of sacrifice you chose to make, a result of the love and confidence
you have given me to pursue my dreams. Poli and Chandrima, thank you for
your unconditional support, and for believing in me when the chips were down.
Ma, Baba, this one’s for you. Ma, you are, and always will be, my first reader, my
harshest critic, my staunchest supporter. Baba, you are my rock. Thank you my
furry friends for showing me the richness of life, the beauty of pausing to throw
springs in the midst of all the practicality of this world. Zach, thank you for your
love and companionship. Without you, this book would not be. Finally, Gora,
thank you for being the best part of me.
 Introduction: Establishing the
Problem—Reading as Practice

I. The Novelty of Reading

In 2015, the Association of Publishers in India and the Federation of Indian

Publishers commissioned Nielsen, a global research firm, to study the
burgeoning publishing industry in India. The Nielsen India Book Market Report:
Understanding the India Book Market aimed at gathering information about
one of the fastest growing reading publics in the world, and at documenting
the reading preferences of the twenty-first-century Indian reader. When the
report was released at the Frankfurt Book Fair, India was found to be the second
largest consumer of English language books, and the sixth largest print book
market globally. Nielsen Book India identified over 9,000 registered publishers,
and noted the presence of thousands of unregistered publishers catering to both
English and bhasha1 readers.2 The numbers, when broken down, reveal a market
that consumes over 55 percent of English language texts, the majority of which
are school and college textbooks, and professional books. However, Indian
readers choose to read fiction in languages other than English, as more than
50 percent of the fiction sold in India are bhasha texts.3 In fact, the most sought-
after genre, after study preps and job preps, is “general and literary fiction,” as an
article in India Today notes.4 The sheer number of readers—not to mention the

1
Indian vernacular languages: the use of the word “vernacular” is contentious, primarily because
of connotations of regionality or secondariness, and while “vernacular” has been recuperated by
several scholars, I prefer using the term “bhasha,” which translates to “language” from Sanskrit.
2
https://www.nielsen.com/eu/en/press-releases/2015/the-nielsen-india-book-market-report-2015-
understanding-the-indian-book-market/.
3
Vinutha Mallya, “Nielsen Values Indian Publishing at $3.9 Billion” https://publishingperspectives.
com/2015/10/nielsen-values-indian-publishing-at-3-9-billion/, 2015.
4
https://www.indiatoday.in/pti-feed/story/indian-book-market-to-touch-739-billion-by-2020-
survey-522296-2015-12-01.
2 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

3.9 billion dollar industry—continues to make the Indian book market look very
attractive to publishers and investors alike as both are keen on understanding
not merely what the Indian reader reads, but how they read. The question of how
has become even more pertinent in the last five years as India has seen incredible
growth in access to the internet; more and more publishers are choosing online
retailers to distribute their product while simultaneously noticing the readers’
propensity for reading online, mostly on their smartphones.
What stands out in the discourse surrounding the Indian book market is the
rhetoric of newness and novelty. The Nielsen India Book Market Report is touted
to be the “first-of-its-kind,”5 an attempt to study, document, and understand
what is largely seen as an unregulated market with little to no history of formally
reporting its numbers. The sense of excitement in being able to tap into a vast,
emergent reading public is palpable in Nielsen Book India’s own summary of
the study, as well as in the response of the publishing industry and news media.
As articles in several leading Indian news magazines note, Nielsen’s endeavor
represents a turning point in the history of publishing in India; the frequent
use of words such as “potential,” “maturing,” and “growing” undergird both
the study itself and the market it examines. The book trade is seen as emerging
from an informal, chaotic past where it was held back by difficult distribution
systems, a fragmented publishing industry, long credit cycles, and rampant
piracy. A key factor in this narrative of a newly emerging industry is readers
who are seen in the same light as the book market—they are becoming more
literate, more of them are becoming literate, they are developing a taste for more
than just pragmatic professional texts and entrance exam test preps, and they
are willing to spend more time reading widely.6 Reading, one is led to believe, is
finally becoming fashionable in India as more individuals have the money and
time to spend on the act of reading. The importance of the reader is not lost
on Thomas Abraham, the managing director of Hachette India, who suggests
a need to “build readership” to complement an increase in the numbers of new
titles released, and to be attentive to readers now reading online, and reading in
new ways.7

5
https://www.nielsen.com/eu/en/press-releases/2015/the-nielsen-india-book-market-report-2015-
understanding-the-indian-book-market/.
6
Publishing Perspectives, India Today, Nielsen India Book Market Report, The Hindu, to name only a
few news outlets reporting on this issue.
7
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/cover/how-the-indian-publishing-industry-is-set-
to-evolve-in-the-coming-decade/article30469070.ece: in an interview with Anish Chandy, 2020.
 Introduction 3

Yet the remarkably new achievements of 2015 are far from new. As early as
1855, James Long undertook the first such survey of the print market in Bengal
in A Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Works Containing a Classified List of
Fourteen Hundred Bengali Books and Pamphlets, Which Have Issued from the
Press during the Last Sixty Years, with Occasional Notices of the Subjects, the Price,
and Where Printed.8 Long’s work shares startling conceptual and methodological
similarities with Nielsen’s Indian Book Market Report, as both are interested in
dividing the market into books read for pleasure and textbooks, and further into
the language of publication, cataloguing in the process a market both imagine
as burgeoning but uncharted. The Catalogue, however, takes a more generous
view of readers than Nielsen; in the Preface to the work, Long suggests that
“Popular Literature is an Index to the state of the popular mind,” thereby relying
on Bengali readers to serve as adequate barometers of the book market.9 While
Long is interested only in the Bengali publishing industry, given the centrality
of nineteenth-century Bengal in establishing and developing the Indian book
trade, both his Catalogue and the Indian Book Market Report are well matched
in their scope and ambition. My point in noting this similarity is not to identify
a certain myopia in the current Indian book market, nor to make a claim for
conflating Bengal and India. Rather, my interest lies in noticing that as early
as 1855, the reader and their practices of reading are indexical of trends in
publishing. Questions such as who reads what, how does the reader read, how
do they learn to read new genres, and how this information can be useful to all
those involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of books can
be found at one of the first sites of commercial publication in modern India—
nineteenth-century Bengal under British colonial rule.
This book argues that nineteenth-century Bengal affords a signal moment
in history when the aesthetic and political upheavals caused by British colonial
rule allow one to isolate practices of reading. As one looks closer, these practices

8
As Long himself remarks, his Catalogue is by no means the first of its kind; he acknowledges Henry
Miers Elliot’s The History of India, Friedrich von Adelung and D. A. Talboys’ A Historical Sketch of
Sanscrit Literature, Aloys Sprenger’s Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Hindustany Manuscripts,
and Joseph Garcin de Tassy’s Histoire de la littérature hindouie et hindoustanie (The History of
Literature of Hindi and Urdu), as undertaking similar projects in various Indic languages. Long is
unique in focusing on Bengal and on Bengali works.
9
Long also had a less salutary reason for documenting the book trade in detail. Following the Indian
Rebellion of 1857, the Government felt it necessary to discipline some of the vernacular presses
which were seen as publishing seditious material. Long presented his report to the Government of
India in 1859, thereby providing the latter access to a comprehensive list of printers and publishers
operating in Bengal.
4 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

can be found buried in a complex network of readers, authors, professional and

amateur reviewers, and publishers and printers. The Novel in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal tells the story of these practices of reading, now largely forgotten by
literary history, which draw on the Bengali reader’s quotidian familiarity with
Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic aesthetic paradigms to grant them access to the
newly emergent genre of the Bengali novel. As they read early Bengali novelists
such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain, they are
compelled by the disruptive forces of colonization to choose how they are to read
a genre whose originary model is in a language that is not a part of their lived
experience, and one which they can barely read or speak. This work documents
their choice to read like a Bengali living in a world in which Sanskrit, Perso-
Arabic, and their attendant traditions form not a distant past, but coexist, albeit
contentiously, with the everyday present.10
Near the end of Nabhel nāyikā (The Novel Heroine), a popular late-
nineteenth-century Bengali satire, the protagonist’s husband Haradeb warns
the general public of the perils of introducing one’s wife to novel reading. “Save
your money,” he exclaims as he leaves for work—where he will be abused by
his white master—“because buying bad novels will only turn your wife into a
cheap romance loving animal.”11 The satire brings together questions of genre,
taste, and morality in a microcosmic representation of late-nineteenth-century
anxieties surrounding the reading of novels. The conclusion is deceptively
simple—the man very publicly berates the woman for becoming influenced by
novels and neglecting her domestic duties—but it confounds literary history
since the genre is barely a couple of decades old at the time of Nabhel nāyikā’s
publication. The text’s anonymous author assumes Haradeb’s wife to be a reader
capable of (mis)reading the novel’s aesthetic and ethical codes, but how does she

10
At this juncture, I would like to note that The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal consciously moves
away from discussing English language experiments in novel writing, even though one of its central
subjects, Bankim, began his career as a novelist by writing in English. I explicitly bracket this history
for two reasons. The first—English was a language available only to a few Bengalis, and while the rate
of literacy was itself fairly low, the rate of English language literacy was even lower. Thus, to discuss
the role of English as a literary language with any degree of robustness would necessarily restrict the
book’s argument to a minority of Bengalis. What I find more attractive is to observe the presence
of English as a minor language alongside Bengali, Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, and Arabic as languages
which had a much larger readership. English was often the language of the state, and as such had
considerable cultural capital, but in the realm of literature, it was at best a secondary presence for
most Bengalis. The second reason why I wish to distance my argument from the role of English is
to ensure that this book is not merely rehearsing the well-known claim that English language and
literature definitively shaped the Bengali novel, or that the latter was predominantly a response to
the presence of the former in nineteenth-century Bengal.
11
Nabhel nāyikā, translation mine.
 Introduction 5

gain that knowledge in such a brief span of time? How does she learn to read
the novel genre, and what does her reading practice look like, given that the
emergence of any practice of reading often appears to blend seamlessly into a
culture’s practices? What are the historical and ideological forces contributing to
the formation of her reading practice?
In conversation with debates in postcolonial studies and global Anglophone
studies, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal urges one to move away from the
perception that reading is a universal faculty, capable of being transported from
one location to another, and then made to suit the socio-political conditions it
has been transposed onto. Thanks to the efforts of a number of scholars, we have
now become quite familiar with the argument that the conditions producing the
Bengali novel were unique to its site of production, and that the materiality of
the book acquired forms significantly different from those of Victorian texts.12
Yet our perceptions of the generic contours of the novel itself remain constricted
to a historically conditioned lack—the Bengali novel, coming as it did after
the Victorian form, follows in the latter’s footsteps, and is read along lines
imported from Victorian Britain.13 In what follows, I propose a different way of
conceptualizing the relationship between the Bengali reader and the novel, one
which prioritizes their experiences as participants in a thriving book market,
over narratives of external influence, comparison, and imposition. What happens
when we engage with the Bengali reader not in terms of how they are like or unlike
the Victorian reader, and, via the reader, encounter the Bengali novel as a genre
responding to local pressures rather than a desire to emulate the British model?
What happens when we take the efforts of colonial institutions such as the Fort
William College in hollowing out Bengali to replace it with Enlightenment ideals
so as to create a modern language as a precursor to conversations animating
the field of the global Anglophone?14 Ultimately, this book claims that reading
is not a universal practice, but rather highly localized, specific, and often non-
transferable, and it is only by approaching reading thusly that we can understand
what it means to read something at a particular time and place in history.

12
For example, Abhijit Gupta demonstrates how the early print versions of Annadāmangal had added
to them certificates of purity assuring the Hindu reader that the ink used to print the text was mixed
with holy water from the Ganges (“Popular Printing and Intellectual Property in Colonial Bengal”).
13
Note, for example, Ulka Anjaria’s work on realism in the modern Indian novel, and the emphasis
on realism being of a different nature in these novels, rather than these texts having a different
conceptual paradigm. I discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 3.
14
I have here in mind Akshya Saxena’s Vernacular English and her brilliant work on demonstrating the
role played by English in the Indian literary imaginary in the twentieth century.
6 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Rethinking the practice of reading also allows us to begin to undo the

narratives co-opting the Bengali novel within the project of Hindu nationalism.
The pioneering role played by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in creating the
genre in Bengali, when placed alongside his investment in imagining a Hindu
nation, and his influence over Bengali literary history, has effectively wedded
all discussions of the novel in nineteenth-century Bengal to those of nation and
citizen formation. The trope of the Bengali novel as foundational to a national
literature continues to have currency in postcolonial studies, and in the work
of scholars working on South Asian literary production. This book gestures
away from the consolidating and purifying tendencies of national literature—
and from that current within postcolonial studies—suggesting instead that the
Bengali novel in the nineteenth century is enmeshed in too diverse a fabric of
reading practices to be assimilable into any narrative of national literature. That
such a relationship between the novel and the nation appears teleologically
inevitable by the end of the nineteenth century stands witness to the hegemonic
rise of Hindu nationalism in response to colonial violence. The Novel in
Nineteenth-Century Bengal takes on the task of revealing this systematic erasure
of competing histories by reading the Bengali novel along with those readers
whose practices disappear by the turn of the century.

II. The Journey of the Printed Book

The book as an object arrived in India well before the popularity of the novel in
nineteenth-century Bengal, and the large publishing industry feeding this need
for ever-newer novels. Yet from the moment of its arrival in Goa in 1556 till
the founding of the Mission Press in Serampore in 1800, the colonial book15
circulated very little by way of trade. Most of the publication was funded by either
Christian missions or the colonial government, and even then, this activity was
restricted to coastal India.16 The conditions for commercial publication—and
here I am following the lead of book historians—became available only after
the Battle of Plassey in 1757 when the East India Company defeated Siraj ud-
Daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, and soon after established the

15
I draw this definition and history from Abhijit Gupta’s “Popular Printing and Intellectual Property in
Colonial Bengal,” as well as from Print Areas, a volume coedited by Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty.
16
Gupta, Graham Shaw in A Companion to the History of the Book, 2007.
 Introduction 7

three Presidencies or administrative centers at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.

This allowed the colonial government to consolidate its administrative power,
which led to a rapid increase in the scale of printing. As several scholars,
including Priya Joshi, Abhijit Gupta, and Graham Shaw note, by the time Long
published his 1855 Catalogue, print had gone from virtually non-existent to a
thriving industry, with over forty-six indigenous and colonial presses in Bengal
alone. Compared to the other Presidencies and Goa, the development of print
technology in Bengal received not only religious impetus, but more importantly
political momentum from the East India Company since it was the site of the
first Presidency and also of the Company’s first decisive victory over Islamic rule.
Bengal, as the Company’s first political and commercial center, saw the rise of
commercial publications at a rate not matched by other parts of the subcontinent
till the 1870s, and by the first two decades of the nineteenth century—thanks to
the efforts of indigenous and European printer-publishers—the printed book
became accessible and socially acceptable to a significant number of people in
the region. A large body of texts, both secular and religious, in Bengali, English,
Persian, and Sanskrit vied for a share of a growing book market as producers
and distributors of books saw the opportunity to create a reader who would soon
have preferences as to whether they wanted to be entertained or educated.
The story of this burgeoning print industry rests on a foundation intertwining
the development of modern Bengali and of print texts in Bengali, and as I discuss
later in this section, the consequences of this marriage of language and print are
far reaching. The argument that I counter here seeks to create an origin story for
modern Bengali that aligns it with the development of European vernaculars—
the language acquires its current form with the coming of print modernity, and
in its modern form becomes a vehicle for rational thought. Following this logic,
texts produced in modern Bengali, and readers of the same, are folded into the
world of Enlightenment reason. As you will see, this narrative is propagated by
Bengalis and British alike, and remains unchallenged by most contemporary
postcolonial scholars of the region.17 What is left behind—deliberately
obscured—are alternate histories of the Bengali language, its texts and their
readers, and it is this history that I wish to recuperate. I focus on two institutions,
Fort William College and the Mission Press, whose interpretation of Bengali as a

17
Most recently in Tapti Roy’s Print and Publishing in Colonial Bengal (2019) in which she presents a
masterful study of the print history of Vidyāsundar, an early modern Bengali text, but her argument
rests upon this very history of modern Bengali that I wish to challenge.
8 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

language extends far beyond the nineteenth century and the context of colonial
Bengal. It becomes the definitive story of modern Bengali and it naturalizes 1800
as year when Bengali is effectively severed from its premodern past and set on
the path of Anglicization.
For the first hundred odd years of British presence in the region under the
aegis of the East India Company, Bengali was seen as merely the language of the
locals with little to no administrative or literary standing. Those honors went to
Persian, the court language, and to Sanskrit, the language of Hindu philosophy
and aesthetics. Bengal had been under Islamic rule from the thirteenth century
onwards, variously governed by the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal empire, and
the Pathans, and as part of the Persianate world, Bengali elites and those with
administrative or literary aspirations were fluent in Persian, regardless of their
religious affiliations.18 Alongside this, Sanskrit served as the other significant
language, and given the number of Hindu rulers governing locally while
paying obeisance to the Islamic empires, Sanskrit maintained its position of
prominence.19 Bengali did not receive much courtly patronage, and remained
a marginal language for the ruling classes while simultaneously being the
language of daily use for the majority in the region. The rich body of work being
produced in Bengali, including ritualistic and secular texts, was mostly relegated
to the status of folk production, and given the power of Persian and Sanskrit,
it was difficult for the vernacular to be acknowledged as anything other than a
provincial language.
With the coming of the European traders and missionaries from the sixteenth
century onwards, Bengali gained more visibility, but only because these groups
realized that neither Sanskrit nor Persian gave them any purchase when it came to
trading with or proselyting the masses; to engage with the average Bengali in any
profitable way, the Europeans had to learn the Bengali language. As early as the
seventeenth century, the Portuguese had already created a Bengali grammar, and
consolidated a list of useful words and phrases, and the Portuguese missionaries
in particular had considerable success in printing books in Bengali. They printed
several Bengali books both in Bengal and in Lisbon, including pamphlets on

18
For a detailed discussion on the Hindi-Urdu, Persian-Sanskrit split see Jennifer Dubrow’s
Cosmopolitan Dreams (2018), and Francesca Orsini’s Before the Divide (2010).
19
What I document here is restricted to Bengali print history and European receptions of the language.
By the late nineteenth century, the narrative that Bengali lacked any aesthetic or political texts prior
to the mid-1800s is successfully reversed by several Bengali scholars including Ramgati Nyayratna,
Surendranath Sen, and Haraprasad Sastri, to name only a handful.
 Introduction 9

Christian doctrines and a book of catechisms.20 These efforts, however, paid little
if any attention to extant Bengali socio-literary manuscripts, and concentrated on
producing a Bengali suitable for the dissemination of Christianity, thus creating
a gap between the language as seen by the Europeans and the language as used
by the Bengalis. This process of hollowing out Bengali to fill it with European
knowledge was later perfected by the British who sought to create a Bengali
language that was Bengali in form but European in content. Yet this history of
Portuguese experimentation with Bengali is now mostly forgotten in favor of
British efforts at modernizing Bengali, and this forgetting is in no small part
a result of the systematic erasure of Portuguese presence in Bengal following
the Battle of Plassey. In 1757, the East India Company gains decisive control of
the region, reducing both the Mughals and the Portuguese to mere shadows.
In order to consolidate this power, the Company colludes with local nawabs,
uses considerable force and money, and simultaneously disavows Portuguese-
led experiments in Bengali and the singular hold of Persian over legal and
economic affairs. They focus on seemingly rescuing Bengali from the dark ages
so as to make it a vehicle fit for the Company and its affairs in the region. Bengali
for them becomes the tabula rasa on which they would leave their mark, and
through which they would establish their ascendancy in Bengal.21
This story of creating a language that could help the Company profit from
the region more effectively, and of standardizing the Bengali script inadvertently
creates the material and cultural conditions facilitating the introduction of
novels and novel reading in Bengal. I say inadvertently because the start of
this story shows no signs of this possible outcome, as indeed of any outcome
other than producing a set of British officials trained in the local languages
and customs. Richard Wellesley, the governor-general of Bengal from 1798 to
1805, founds Fort William College in Kolkata in 1800 to commemorate his
victory over Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Not coincidentally, this is the same year the
Mission Press is founded in Serampore by the Baptist preacher William Carey,
John Marshman, and William Ward. The simultaneous efforts of the College

20
The fascinating history of early print history in Bengal led by the Portuguese is well documented.
See Sajani Kanta Das’ Bānglā gadya sāhityer itihās (1946), Suniti Kumar Chatterji’s The Origin and
Development of the Bengali Language (1926), Surendranath Sen’s Prachin Bangala Patra Sankalan
(1942), and M. Siddiq Khan’s “The Early History of Bengali Printing” (1962), to name only a few.
21
This narrative is by no means unique to Bengal; evidence of similar linguistic acquisitions by
the British can be seen across the Indian subcontinent during the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries. Tamil, in the Madras Presidency, and Marathi, in the Bombay Presidency, for example,
are also marked by the Company’s desire for economic and political supremacy in these regions.
10 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

and the Press conjoin the language with its print history in such a way that it
becomes nearly impossible to tell the story of the one without the other. Both the
College and the Press are part of Wellesley’s efforts to give the Company a more
presentable, polished façade via an investment in the literatures and languages
of India, alongside Latin and Greek. The College in particular is a result of
Wellesley recognizing the need to reverse the Company’s image as purely profit-
seeking, and is one of the earliest embodiments of Britain’s civilizing mission
in colonial India. Warren Hastings, the first governor-general, had attempted
something similar through the Royal Asiatic Society (1784), but the Society’s
focus had been predominantly on Sanskrit and Hindu culture, and Bengali
didn’t really get much of an impetus at that time.22 Given the proximity to the
Battle of Plassey, Hastings had good reason to give William Jones, the founder
of the Asiatic Society, considerable freedom in studying a language and religion
that could ostensibly dent the prestige of Bengal’s Islamic heritage. By 1800,
however, Wellesley had the comfort of relative stability in the region, and the
College opened with classes in Hindi, Arabic, and Persian, with Bengali being
added in 1801.23 Carey was invited to teach Bengali to British officials, and to aid
in the creation of Bengali as a codified, standardized, and modern vernacular.
In order to accomplish the second task, Carey along with his fellow Mission
Press colleague, John Marshman, gathered manuscripts from various parts of
Bengal to get a better understanding of the language as it existed. Carey had
already been doing this for several years as a representative of the Baptist mission,
but now he was an employee of the College and had financial and administrative
support.24 What Marshman and Carey discovered dismayed them; they found
that in order to teach Bengali, they needed to first create a teachable language,
given the supposedly abject state of Bengali. Marshman captures their mood
well in his description of Bengali literacy at the turn of the nineteenth century:
If they [the Bengalis] can write at all, each character, to say nothing of orthography,
is made in so irregular and indistinct a manner, that comparatively few of them

22
The Calcutta Madrassa (1781) and the Hindu Sanskrit College in Benares (1791) also made
significant contributions toward fashioning India as a profitable subject of study.
23
The history of the College is complex and makes for interesting study in its own right. For more
on the founding of the College, its internal politics, and the role of the educator-administrator, see
Kopf.
24
Carey’s Memoir (1836) by his nephew Eustace Carey, also a Baptist missionary, documents the early
troubles Carey had in communicating with Bengalis and in finding the resources to help support the
mission. The document provides a close, if unintentionally humorous, look at Carey attempting to
speak Bengali, imagining his success, and only later realizing that his audience had not understood
a word of what he had said.
 Introduction 11

can scarcely wade through that which has been written by themselves after any
lapse of time. If they have learned to read, they can seldom read five words
together, without stopping to make out the syllable … even when the writing
is legible.25

As one of Carey’s biographers George Smith notes, Marshman was not alone in
his perception of Bengali; Carey himself undertook several trips to centers of
learning across Bengal, including Nadiya and Bhatpara, and lamented that the
whole of Bengali culture had produced a mere forty manuscripts.26 Much has
been written of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s now infamous Minute on Indian
Education, but his conclusions about the inadequacy of Indic languages appear
fairly tame when placed against those of Marshman and Carey who served
as sources informing Macaulay and his contemporaries. Dismayed but not
disheartened by his findings, Carey undertook the task of compiling a Bengali
dictionary during his tenure at Fort William College, and created several works
in Bengali and Sanskrit, most of which was printed by the Mission Press.27 These
were then adopted as textbooks at the College, and the vernacular as imagined
by the British was born at the conjunction of these two institutions. The impact
of Fort William College and the Mission Press on Bengali language and literary
history can be gauged from the plethora of presses and institutions that sprang
up following the success of this combination, and were often headed by the
College’s professors. Thus, for example, John Gilchrist, who taught Hindi at the
College, set up his Hindustani Press, charging the College for the funds required,
J. Lavandier established his press in Bow Bazaar,28 and Rammohan Roy founded
his Unitarian Press. The College also played a signal role in conceptualizing what
standard or official Bengali would look like. Under Carey’s direction, the Bengali
that was initially championed by the learned elites was the Sanskritized sādhu
bhāśā,29 but later, thanks to Ram Ram Basu’s influence, the standard form of
Bengali became ādālatī bhāśā30 which was more colloquial, less pedantic, and
Persianized.31

25
As quoted in Kopf, “Fort William College and the Origins of the Bengal Renaissance,” 298 (1961).
26
Smith, Life of William Carey (1885), 12.
27
Carrey’s A Dictionary of the Bengalee Language is published in 1825 by the Mission Press, and in
this he also builds on Nathaliel Brassey Halhed’s 1778 tome A Grammar of the Bengal Language
published in Hooghly.
28
Part of European quarters in colonial Kolkata.
29
Formal language.
30
Court language.
31
Kopf, 301; the transition is best explained by Ram Ram Basu’s training as a Persian scholar, adept at
the official uses of the language of the Mughal courts.
12 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The story we get, then, is this: in order to train the Company’s officials to be
more effective, the College instructs them in the local language, which in this
case is Bengali. However, once the College’s professors embark on this project,
they realize that there is no language that can be adequately taught; what exists
is too fragmented, too poorly formed to lend itself to teaching, and it must
be first codified into a language. In order to perform this act of collating and
standardizing, the few extant manuscripts are collected and replaced with a
modern, stable, and teachable print archive. Thus modern Bengali must first be
formed, then textbooks teaching this language be written, and then this newly
created language be taught such that the textbooks can be read more easily, and
more texts be produced. There is a vicious circularity to this narrative that not
only helps consolidate its authority but also gradually disperses other possible
histories. Both British and Bengali linguists participate in this process as the
College has in its employ not only Carey, but also scholars such as Ram Ram Basu,
Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, and later Iswarchandra Vidyasagar,32 who create some
of the earliest Bengali language textbooks. One of the most significant products
of this collaboration is Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barnaparicay (1855) which
is still in use to introduce children to Bengali.33 This narrative of constructing
Bengali from a seemingly chaotic mass of barely legible manuscripts is a
powerful one, so much so that it is largely accepted by Europeans and Bengalis
alike, and it forms the substratum of the cultural awakening—often referred to
as the Bengal Renaissance—that takes place in nineteenth-century Bengal. The
same individuals employed by the college, including Ram Ram Basu, Mrityunjay
Vidyalankar, Vidyasagar, and those like Rammohan Roy who find themselves
opposing the College while accepting the tenets of Enlightenment philosophy,
go on to be leading figures of the Bengal Renaissance, weaving this story of
modern Bengali into the fabric of literary-cultural history. Paradoxically, an
institution whose original mission was to create effective civil servants and a
press which sought to first and foremost publish texts to spread Christianity
create the conditions for the transition of Bengali from the language of semi-
literacy to that capable of producing high art.
As a product of the Enlightenment itself, the College and the Press fashion
Bengali and its early print texts in the mold of European vernaculars such as

32
The Bengalis were referred to as the munshis, a Persian word meaning writer or secretary, while the
British were the professors.
33
Vidyasagar’s association with the College is yet another aspect of this story that deserves its own
work. For more see Bhattacharya.
 Introduction 13

English; the arrival of print modernity infuses into the vernacular the ideologies
of the Enlightenment; and what lacked reason and method is now accorded with
both. Modern Bengali as taught at the College has a dictionary, a comprehensive
grammar, standardized spelling and font, and, in short, is cleansed of its past
by the application of a rational, scientific approach. Barnaparicay is a perfect
example of this Europeanization of Bengali. Even though it is published a year
after the dissolution of the College, and bears the imprints of Vidyasagar’s
training in Sanskrit, the primer is based on the pedagogical principles of George
Coombe, a prominent figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet another primer,
Akshay Kumar Dutta’s Cārupāth, published in 1853, is similarly informed by
Coombe and Scottish pedagogical practices.34 Given this provenance, it becomes
easier to understand why when the Bengali reader is later introduced to a genre
as European as the novel, they are imagined to be reading like their Victorian
counterpart, or why when Bankim writes Durgeśnandinī, he is soon after awarded
the moniker “Scott of Bengal,” asserting his likeness with the Scottish novelist,
Walter Scott. If the language and its primers and textbooks are produced under
the shadow of Enlightenment modernity, then it stands to reason that literature
written in the same language will bear more than a passing resemblance with
European genres. Thus readers who gain literacy through these textbooks and
the methods embedded in them can naturally be expected to read within this
ideological framework, or at least be more susceptible to it.35 Purged of its past,
Bengali is constructed as being born of British intervention—a lack of Mughal
patronage and an uncomfortable relationship with Sanskrit led Bengali to appear
as a product of British entrepreneurship. Nearly a century and a half later, when
scholars revisit this period as an object of study, this story of modern Bengali
leads to claims of a radical rupture between pre- and modern Bengali, and the
need to perceive Bengali authors and readers as restricted to either appropriating
or rejecting elements of European literary history, such as realism.36 Thus

34
The relationship between primers for children and Enlightenment philosophy is a profound one.
Both Barnaparicay and Cārupāth imagine early childhood education in decidedly scientific and
rational terms, and while this discussion is the subject of another work, it is worth noting the
centrality of these primers in determining the form of modern Bengali language.
35
This origin story also partly explains why cheap popular presses, also known as battalā presses, gain
such a bad reputation during the nineteenth century. These presses, operating outside the ambit
of the elite or the bhadralōk classes, are more aligned with folk aesthetic and literary traditions,
and as such do not suffer from the compulsions of Enlightenment ideals. They offer a plausible
counternarrative, and thus have to be actively rejected by both the bhadralōk and the British.
36
Here I refer to scholars such as Sudipta Kaviraj, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Ulka Anjaria. I discuss this
in greater detail with reference to Bankim in Chapter 3 of this work.
14 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

what is set in motion so as to create more effective administrators culminates

in a unidirectional trajectory of Bengali literary history toward an inevitable
comparison with mostly its British counterpart, and a sense of dreadful
secondariness.
This is a difficult history to counter, not least because it is rendered invisible
to the point where it becomes a part of the fabric of Bengali literary history. Yet
what this weaving ignores are readers who consume texts for a variety of reasons
without being mindful of mainstream narratives about a language’s provenance.
As one turns to the ephemeral act of reading, and to the relationship between
readers and texts produced in nineteenth-century Bengal, it becomes evident
that the form modern Bengali was to take was by no means predetermined by
either the Company, the Crown, or the Bengali intelligentsia, and the latter’s
efforts produced at best one among many possible ways of conceptualizing this
language. For example, there existed alongside Fort William College’s version
of Bengali, the more colloquial form of the language as used by Kaliprasanna
Singha which freely mixed Persian and Arabic words with more Sanskritized
ones. Readers of cheap battalā publications spoke and read a Bengali that was
deemed vulgar by bhadralōk Bengali, but the condemnation did little to dent the
popularity of battalā Bengali. A significant portion of these cheap presses catered
to readers of musalmānī bānglā (Islamicized Bengali) which was yet another
version of the language widely spoken by lower-class Muslims. The language of
the andarmahal (lit. inner quarters of a house, the domain of women) found its
way into prose and poetry alike, making frequent appearances in Bankim’s and
bankimī novels. As the following section shows, the language as envisioned by
the College and the Press, and as embraced by the predominantly Hindu Bengali
elite, was merely the language of a small section of the upper classes. Such a
multitude of Bengalis leads one to believe that a variety of readers existed who
paid little, if any, attention to the official linguistic efforts of the state. The vast
majority of Bengalis were used to reading different versions of the language, and
to see the former as anything more than a contender among many for the title of
modern Bengali would be historically inaccurate at best and presentist at worst.
Thus when one looks at practices of reading, modern Bengali is seen as developing
under a patchwork of rubrics. Despite the concerted efforts of the College and
the Press, neither the language nor its readers are under the singular aegis of
European Enlightenment, and how Bengali readers read print texts—or indeed
how authors produced these texts—demonstrate their allegiance to a variety of
literary and aesthetic frameworks. In what follows, I look at the battalā book
 Introduction 15

industry as one of many possible sites where these frameworks find expression
in cheap, popular publications, and examine how the mass production of print
works allows for a comfortable coexistence of reading practices that both predate
the arrival of print and are engendered by the technology.
Examining the role of battalā presses in fostering a variety of reading
practices is one way of understanding how there was no inevitable progression
toward European modernity in Bengali literary history; Bengalis across the
social spectrum read by mixing old and new genres, relying on the familiar to
make sense of the new, while using the latter to rethink their relationship to
the former.

III. Setting the Stage

It is impossible to tell the story of the Bengali reader without talking about
battalā. The vernacular presses of battalā have rightfully been the subject of
several book length studies,37 so what I present here is neither comprehensive
nor exhaustive. Rather, I wish to look briefly at some of the more popular genres
of books published by these presses to understand what the average Bengali
reader chose to consume and, through that, begin to think about how they
read at the moment of the novel’s inception and popularity. By the middle of
the nineteenth century, Bengali readers’ primary source of print material was
neither the College and the Mission Press’ affiliates, nor the various highbrow
presses run by the Bengali intelligentsia.38 Instead, we find ourselves deep in
the heart of Kolkata’s native town, in the area colloquially known as battalā
in the Chitpur-Ahiritolla neighborhood. In 1857, the majority of the forty-six
vernacular presses mentioned in Long’s Returns are battalā presses, with this

37
Goutam Bhadra’s Nyarā battalāye jāye k’bār (2011), Sukumar Sen’s Battalār chāpā o chabi (1984),
Sripantha’s Battalā (1997), Anindita Ghosh’s Power in Print (2006), and Adrish Biswas and Anil
Acharya’s Bāngālir battalā (2013), to name only a few.
38
Here I am thinking of presses such as Tatwabōdhinī founded by Debendranath Tagore, serving
as the mouthpiece of the Tatwabōdhinī Sabhā, or Jogendrachandra Basu’s Bangabāsī press which
aimed at publishing conservative Hindu ideas, or the Sanskrit Press which was set up by Vidyasagar
which printed popular children’s texts such as Barnaparicay by Vidyasagar himself, and Madan
Mohan Tarkalankar’s Śiśu śikshā (1849). These presses sought to reform both the Bengali reader
and the language by cultivating more refined religious, aesthetic, and political tastes through
their publications. The products of these presses were journals such as Bankim’s Bangadarśan and
Reazuddin Ahmad’s Islām Pracārak which positioned themselves as clear antagonists of the battalā
publications, and indeed sought to rescue the Bengali reader from what they perceived to be the ill
influences of cheap mass publishing.
16 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

number going up to over seventy by the time we come to the 1875 Bengal Library
Quarterly Report.39 Battalā printer-publishers40 like Ashutosh Ghosal running
the Victoria Press or Gopalchandra De of Puran Prakash Press published plays,
medical treatises, mythological stories, society scandals, and books in musalmānī
bānglā, copies of which they sold in the thousands.41
While the presses themselves were concentrated in Kolkata’s northern
reaches, the book trade extended to all over Bengal as publishers established
well-developed networks to both spread word of and distribute their wares.
There were few formal shops at this time as most battalā publishers ran their
business out of their homes. They printed their address, along with the name
of the press, on the book’s cover or title page, thus informing readers where to
go if they wish to buy a copy. Readers living far from the city could also rely on
the itinerant bookseller who ferried books from the city to the various muffasils,
allowing rural Bengal regular access to print texts.42 Following the Postal Act of
1854 which introduced uniform postal rates in most parts of British India such
that postage was determined by the weight of the package alone, regardless of
the distance the package had to travel, these readers could also order books via
mail. Battalā booksellers were some of the first to take advantage of these postal
reforms when they included postal rates alongside advertisements for available
titles in the texts they publish. The books themselves were priced such that
Bengalis across social strata could afford to buy them.43 Some of these books,
notably editions of “Vidyāsundar,” were produced as collector’s items with full
page lithographic illustrations, however more often than not, as in the case of
satires, battalā publications tended to be cheaply produced on poor-quality
paper, intended to be read rather than displayed.

39
The Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867 required that a copy of every print title published in
British India be submitted to the India Office. Every quarter, local newspapers published a list of all
titles from the region, which came to be known as the Quarterly Lists. One such list compiled by the
Bengal Library—and published in the Calcutta Gazette—covers the quarter ending in March 1875,
and this is referred to as the Bengal Library Quarterly Report.
40
The two roles frequently merge from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.
41
Quarterly Reports, 6.
42
There prevalence was such that they even find special mention in Bankim’s essay “A Popular
Literature for Bengal,” in which he ascribes to them the task of waking the Bengali reader from his
[sic] somnolence.
43
For comparison, 1 rupee could buy 31.65 seer (one seer is approximately equal to three pounds or
one and a half kilos) of rice in Bengal in 1861, and the average income of the lower and middle
classes (including agricultural and non-agricultural laborers, professionals, and artisans) ranged
between Rs. 69.92 and 109.68 per annum in 1873 (Kabir, “Wages and Cost,” 22). Battalā books,
when the publisher retained the copyright, usually cost 1 or 2 annas on average (Long, Descriptive
Catalogue, Returns). While a few annas were a substantial amount, it was well within the budget of
the average Bengali.
 Introduction 17

The battalā industry, although dominated by, was not exclusively Hindu;
there were a number of Muslim presses whose numbers increased as the century
progressed. Of these, ones that regularly published in Bengali were Mohammad
Derasulla’s Mohammadi Press and Rahmani Press (the latter catalogued by
Long).44 Alongside them, Hindu presses also published musalmānī bānglā,
Arabic, Persian, and occasionally Urdu texts. The majority of the works,
however, were published in Bengali, although the form of the language ranged
from the colloquial (satires, sketches) to the highly Sanskritized (the Hindu
epics), and musalmāni bānglā as an amalgamation of Bengali, Persian, Arabic,
and Urdu. Both Hindu and Muslim presses followed in the footsteps of early-
nineteenth-century print-entrepreneurs such as Gangakishore Bhattacharya and
Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, as they capitalized on pre-print tastes while also
catering to the novelty of print.45 Thus, for example, the consistent popularity
of almanacs in both Long’s Returns and the Quarterly Reports attests to the ease
with which this pre-print genre was appropriated by the new medium. Bengalis,
already accustomed to handwritten almanacs in the form of punthis, now had
the opportunity of buying a copy for themselves for as little as one and a half
annas, and in far more compact and portable a form.46 These almanacs often
functioned as nineteenth-century versions of yellow pages—they contained lists
of auspicious dates, names, and addresses of government officials, share prices,
and shipping lists, to name only a few things. Alongside almanacs, battalā also
made brisk trade in versions of Ramāyana and Mahābhārat, various śāstras,
paurānik kāhinī,47 and mangal kābyas48 such as Bharatchandra’s Annadāmangal
(1752–3). Varied as they were, what these genres had in common was the
reader’s familiarity with them in the manuscript or punthi form, and a desire
to see the recognizable recast in the more affordable, and novel, print medium.
Annadāmangal, and in particular the section titled “Vidyāsundar,” was the first to
transition from the handwritten punthi into print when Gangakishore published

44
Sen, Battalār chāpā o chabi, 62. Battalā had its counterpart in Dhaka’s ketāb patti (book market) in
the Chakbazar neighborhood, and like the Kolkata-based publishers, ketāb patti too specialized in
musalmānī punthis. Sripantha’s brief but illuminating section on ketāb patti in his book Battalā is a
good starting place for scholars of nineteenth-century Dhaka’s book industry.
45
See Chapter 1 for a detailed discussion of Gangakishore and Bhabanicharan, and their role in
socializing the print book.
46
Medium of currency, with 16 annas making up 1 rupee. Even almanacs that cost double, such as
Sideshwur Ghose’s Almanac sold 9,000 copies in 1855 (Descriptive Catalogue, 62).
47
Tales from the puranas.
48
Early modern Bengali religious poems celebrating the indigenous deities of rural Bengal, such as
Manasa, Chandi, and Dharmathakur, and their assimilation into Vedic mythology.
18 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

a version of the text in 1816. From here on, “Vidyāsundar” remained one of the
most profitable text published by battalā presses till the end of the nineteenth
century, documenting how both producers and consumers of Bengali print
literature relied on texts and practices of reading that existed long before print
modernity.49 During the second half of the nineteenth century, Islamic legends,
advice manuals, and tales of the Prophet were just as popular as the Hindu texts.
The qissās and dāstāns of the Perso-Arabic tradition made their way into print
as battalā presses published multiple versions of Yusuf-Zuleikhā, Dāstān-e-āmir
Hāmzāh, or the Adventures of Amir Hamzah, Qissā-e Gul-e bakavali, and Qissā-e
Hātim Tāi. Alongside this, we find tales from the Battle of Karbala printed in
both prose and verse forms.50 Unlike the Hindu texts, the majority of the Islamic
works retained the form of the punthi in print till the end of the nineteenth
century. In this they were unique among battalā texts as the print medium
merely swapped the handwritten for the machine printed without altering the
physical form of these texts.51
While quasi-religious texts with a porous boundary between print and
manuscript were the mainstay of the battalā book industry, works that were
exclusive to print also did good business. The most popular of these were
satires or prahaśan which became an outlet for the working classes to condemn
what they saw as the moral laxity of the more respectable bhadralōk or middle
class.52 So popular were these satires that in the twenty years between Long’s
Returns and the Quarterly Report, the genre goes from being non-existent to
having between 1,000 and 2,000 copies published every quarter.53 Produced on
cheap, flimsy paper bound in yellow or pink covers, these satires appealed to

49
Sukumar Sen captures the popularity of Bharatchandra’s work in Battalār chapa o chobi, noting
how “Vidyāsundar” is the first illustrated text published by the battalā presses, and it continues to
accumulate more illustrations through the course of the nineteenth century (30–5).
50
These texts are discussed in detail in chapter where I look at them in light of the first Islamic Bengali
novel, Mir Mosharraf Hossain’s Biśād Sindhu.
51
For an account of punthis in Islamic literature see Abdul Khaer Shaik’s “Musalmani” Punthi Sāhitya
(2016); Epsita Halder’s “Reading the ‘Cheapness’ of Cheap Prints: Karbala Narrative in the Early
Print Culture” (2015) provides a compelling discussion of the relationship between a rise in Islamic
socio-religious reform and the prevalence of Islamic religious texts during the second half of the
nineteenth century.
52
As Anindita Ghosh and Tithi Bhattacharya rightly point out, however, class here functions not as an
economic category but rather a moral one—what the satires attack is the very foundation of gentility
from which bhadralōk such as Bankim and Michael Madhusudan Dutt criticize the common as
obscene. The villain in these satires is the gentleman or woman who is invested in sensual pleasures
beneath the veneer of respectability, and it is the genre’s task to unmask the elite and punish them for
their moral and physical debauchery. I discuss this both later in the Introduction and in Chapter 1.
53
Ghosh, Power in Print, 119.
 Introduction 19

the urban and rural reader alike in their easy-to-read, portable form. As books,
their production value stood in contrast to that of collectibles such as a copy
of Krittibas’ Rāmāyana or an illustrated edition of “Vidyāsundar”; the satires
were akin to ephemera, meant to be read and not preserved. As in form so also
in content, most prahaśan had no literary pretensions. They were formulaic,
usually telling the story of simple folk unmasking the moral and physical
debauchery of the bhadralōk or genteel class with the latter getting justly
punished and the former receiving praise for their virtuous conduct. Authors,
named and anonymous, paid little attention to language, choosing provocation
and sensationalism over grammar and polish. Their frequent use of vulgarity
and insults not only sent the message that the morally virtuous masses were
always watching their betters, but just as importantly, used Bengali outside the
confines of elite- and middle-class respectability. The popularity enjoyed by
battalā satires elicited condemnation from both colonial and Bengali elites alike
who saw these texts as a sign of the lower class’s vulgar tastes and an impediment
in Bengali literature’s development, but this disapproval did little to dent the rate
at which the genre was produced and consumed.54
A rung below satires were the pathapustak or the hetochorā, literally translated
as “street books” and “low rhymes,” respectively. As their names suggest, these
were products aimed at entertaining the workaday reader who lacked the
pedigree of elite- or even middle-class tastes. These readers, accustomed to a diet
of mostly oral folk genres, and often newly urbanized in search of a livelihood,
sought in the pathapustak a representation of their points of view. Titles such as
“Ekei bale pole” (“Now that’s what I call a bridge,” referring to a floating bridge
in Howrah, 1874), “Bāhabā cōddō āiyin” (“Kudos to the fourteen laws,” referring
to the 1867 Contagious Diseases Act which aimed at curbing prostitution), or
“Drain-er pāncālī” (“Song of the drain,” 1874) reveal the concerns of the common
person navigating the streets of Kolkata. Like the satires, pathapustaks, too, found
a ready market not only because issues spoke to topical concerns, but also because
publishers managed to keep prices competitive, often by compromising on the
quality of paper and ink, and by paying compositors the lowest possible wages.55

54
In this, the elites call to mind Wilkie Collins’ essay “The Unknown Public” (1858) in which Collins
bemoans the popularity of the penny dreadfuls in corrupting readerly tastes. The relationship of
these satires to print is similar to that shared by the penny dreadfuls in that they are both designed
for mass consumption, cheaply produced, and perceived to be vulgar in content. However, battalā
satires are far more concentrated in their subject matter, and mostly stick to social commentary.
55
Sripantha’s resource-rich and lyrical books, Battalā (1997) and Jakhan chāpākhānā elō (1977) give us
an insight into the varied registers of print in nineteenth-century Bengal.
20 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The success of these satires and of the pre-print religious texts is a testament
to the Bengali reader’s ability—and desire—to read under the rubric of various
reading practices. Merely glancing at the number of copies published and the
extensive list of titles would suggest a far greater rate of literacy in nineteenth-
century Bengal than was the reality. If one is to reconcile contemporary data
about the low rates of literacy56 with the flourishing battalā book market,
one has to take into account the variety of way in which Bengalis read, and
how the act of reading cannot be imagined solely as the individual silently
consuming a printed book. Thus, while a genre exclusive to print, such as
the satire, does roaring business, so does a genre such as the pāncālī which
depends largely on a single reader performing the text out loud to a group of
listeners. Often, a text is positioned within conflicting practices of reading, as
in the case of a satire such as “Nobhel nāyikā” in which the anonymous satirist
depicts the heroine Rukmini as both reading a novel silently and reading it
collectively with her friends as they perform songs from their favorite novels.
Battalā texts are collectively able to satisfy the demands of print and oral
literate readers, and also serve as a bridge between the two groups. Thus, for
example, readers new to print literacy can recognize in the conversational
nature of the satires clear references to folk forms such as kabi performances
and jātrā,57 and their appreciation of the jokes is enhanced by the colloquial
language. Minimal plots would also be attractive for those readers who would
approach print in much the same way they did pre-print manuscripts—as
texts to be read out loud to a community of listeners.58 For others, the act of
reading would be secondary to the actual ownership of a book, and for them
battalā had beautifully illustrated copies of sacred and secular texts.59 Those
wishing to fully embrace print modernity could read silently, cramming in a
newly released satire during a busy workday or reading Vidya and Sundar’s

56
Bankim’s essay “Bānglār pāthak parānō brata” (1880), for example, estimates 5 percent Bengalis to
be literate (434). The 1881 Census records 48 out of 1,000 to be literate, and further breaks down the
number as 90 literate males for every 1,000, and 4 literate females for every 1,000. The 1891 Census
records a marginal rise at 56 literate individuals for every 1,000, with 104 literate males and 5 literate
females for every 1,000 of each category. Bearing in mind that these are British India-wide numbers,
and that the Bengal Presidency was likely to have a higher literacy rate given that it included the
capital, Kolkata, still leaves us with a literacy rate of between 4.8 and 5.6 percent (Census of India
1881, IOR/V/15/18-32, British Library, General Report on the Census of India 1891, chapter 6).
57
A form of popular folk theater from Bengal.
58
For more on this form of reading see my discussion of Rassundari in the Conclusion.
59
Bhabanicharan Bhattacharya’s Kalikātā kamalālay (1823) satirizes this very species of urban babu.
See Chapter 1.
 Introduction 21

love story in the privacy of her/his home.60 Add to this the various available
registers of Bengali, and what emerges is a network of reading practices whose
nodal point is the battalā book market.

IV. The Pitfalls of Reading

If the battalā helped democratize reading by bringing texts to the everyday

Bengali reader, it also made visible the consequences of such access. As the largest
book market in the region, battalā provides us with a window into what the
nineteenth-century Bengali reader was reading, and into some of the practices
of reading performed by this reader. However, it also highlights the moral
consequences of bringing print to the masses, and the social cost of reading
novels. The market puts into relief the following questions—what happens when
everyday individuals are not only taught to read, but also given the ability to
buy and consume texts? If we take the sale of Bengali language textbooks and
primers as our index, it becomes apparent that in terms of supply and demand,
battalā presses emphatically said yes to teaching the masses how to read. The
material realities of this market—an abundance of textbooks, Bengali language
primers, easy-to-read stories, and moral stories for children—demonstrate that
both adult and children started to learn Bengali formally from the middle of
the nineteenth century onwards. For example, while there was only one primer
published between 1835 and 1840,61 over 120 new and 100 reprinted textbooks
and primers were published between 1870 and 1880. During this golden age of
primers, 1880 was especially productive with fifty new and reprinted textbooks
being published in that year alone.62 Even though most of these books were
originally published either by the Calcutta School Book Society63 sponsored
by the Government, or by highbrow vernacular presses such as Vidyasagar’s

60
The prevalence of this becomes apparent against the backdrop of the Bengali intelligentsia’s crusade
against obscene literature. Bankim takes the lead in lambasting the Bengali reader for her/his
love for vulgar literature, and Bharatchandra and Iswar Gupta are presented as metonymic of this
tendency. Others such as Chandranath Basu and Akshay Dutta echo Bankim in calling for a purging
of Bengali literature of its fascination with the obscene.
61
Banga barnamālā published in 1835 from Tamohar Press in Serampore for 1 anna.
62
Ashish Khastagir, Bānglā primer sangraha (1816–1855), 14, 16–17 (2000).
63
Of the numerous textbooks and primers published by the Calcutta School Book Society, the notable
Bengali language one is titled Barnamālā, published in two volumes between 1853 and 1854.
22 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Sanskrit Press64 and the Tatwaboōdhinī Press,65 the battalā presses also did quick
business by bringing out newer editions of existing titles.66 As with most other
battalā wares, textbooks, too, were priced such that they were an attractive option
for various classes of buyers. The ninety-page Śiśubōdhak, published in Ahiritola
by N.L. Shil’s press, for example, cost one anna and two pais,67 and its popularity
meant that at least two editions were printed annually.68 It contained, like many
other primers of the period, an amalgamation of introduction to the Bengali and
English alphabets, grammar rules, spelling, letter and receipt writing manuals,
and basic mathematics. Similarly, Bhubanchandra Basak’s Gyanratnākar Press
republished two volumes of Śiśusebadhi Barnamālā in 1855, building on the
success of the primer which is originally designed to be a series of primers and
readers for children enrolled in Hindu College’s pāthśālā.69
Embedded in these numbers is a sense of social aspiration. With the English
Education Act of 1835, Persian was permanently replaced by English as the
language of commerce, administration, and social mobility. However, the
Act’s requirement that government funds be directed away from vernacular
education was challenged by both colonial and Bengali education reformers.
As a practical response to the Education Act, more schools were established in
Bengal to teach the language, and textbooks and primers were written to aid
such a pedagogical approach.70 At a more abstract level, this shift toward Bengali
caused a surge in the number of people who now wanted to, or found it socially
or professionally advantageous to, learn Bengali. Thanks to the print market’s
investment in textbooks—while their titles usually contain a reference to śiśu
or child, they were used in children and adult education alike—Bengalis from
various walks of life could now afford to formally learn the language. This not
only provides us with an important caveat to the claim that the battalā presses
mostly produced lowbrow and vulgar texts, but more importantly creates a more

64
Barnaparicay is published from this press in 1855.
65
This press brings out two volumes of a primer also named Barnamālā, the first in 1840 and the
second in 1844. Akshaykumar Dutt was instrumental in composing both volumes.
66
Occasionally this meant flouting the copyright Act of 1857 which provided protection to books
published in British India.
67
One pai being a quarter of an anna.
68
Sripantha, Battalā, 21–2.
69
Ashish Khastagir, Bānglā primer sangraha (1816–1855), 14.
70
I provide here only the briefest of sketches of a complex problem as I take up the question at length
in Chapter 1. There, I approach the problem of vernacular education to create what I call a reading
map of Bengal, identifying the various stakeholders in debates around reading and the process of
democratizing the act.
 Introduction 23

complete image of the world into which the Bengali novel makes an entrance.71
People who traditionally had little to no means of becoming literate owing to
their caste, financial position, gender, or age now potentially had access to at
least basic literacy with the help of battalā publications.
This access, however, had moral ramifications. Most social commentators,
from the elite and the working classes alike, agreed that with the expansion of
the print market, there were now fewer means of controlling who had access to
what kinds of texts. The novel in particular drew the ire of these conversations
as it was perceived to be one of the most visible threats to the moral purity of
Bengali women. With calls for women’s education gaining ground, the reality
that there were literate women choosing to read novels for pleasure created a
moral panic among Bengalis. As I discuss elsewhere in this book, prose was
a relative newcomer to the history of Bengali literature, with some of the first
prose length narratives being written only at the start of the nineteenth century.72
The early days of Bengali prose saw experiments in genres such as the charit or
life narratives with Ramram Basu’s Pratāpādityacaritra (1801) chronicling the
life of Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore, and Rajiblochan Mukhopadhyay’s Mahārāj
Kriśnacandra Rāyasya Caritram (The Life of Maharaja Krishnachandra Ray,
1805). Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Caritābali (Collection of Lives, 1856) redirected
carit as a tool for children’s education, while Nilmani Basak’s Nabanāri nay nārir
jīban carit (Lives of Nine Women, 1852) historicized the lives of nine exemplary
women, including Sita, Draupadi, and Ahalyabai. Hagiographic texts such as
Caitanya bhagabat (The Life of Chaitanya, 1535) reenter circulation via the
print medium, adding to the growing body of Bengali prose writing.73 Bankim
himself composes one of the more famous hagiographic texts of the nineteenth

71
This argument is so much a part of the discourse surrounding Bengali literature and the print
industry that to list all its proponents would create several book length studies. Bankim and his
coterie of litterateurs, for example, positioned their work, both implicitly and explicitly, against such
an understanding of the divide between battalā and “good” literature.
72
What follows in this brief paragraph is meant to provide only the briefest of glimpses into the history
and lineage of modern Bengali prose. For more on this see Sukumar Sen’s chapter on Bengali prose
in his masterful Bānglā sāhityer itihās (The History of Bengali Literature, 1965), Sripantha’s Battalā,
Priya Joshi’s In Another Country, Tithi Bhattacharya’s Sentinels of Culture (2005), Supriya Chaudhuri’s
“Beginnings: Rajmohan’s Wife and the Novel in India” (2015), and Chandrani Chatterjee’s Translation
Reconsidered (2010). Where possible, I have also indicated further titles to consider with reference to
particular generic and social concerns. I have not included references to proto-novelistic texts such
as Peary Chand Mitra’s Ālāler gharer dulāl (The Spoilt Son, 1857), or later historical fiction such as
historical tales such as Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s Swapnalabdha bhāratbarśer itihās (The History of
India as Received in a Dream, 1895) since I examine them elsewhere in this book.
73
This text and the role it plays in how women read are the subject of the Conclusion. There I look at
Caitanya bhagabat against the backdrop of Rassundari Debi’s autobiography.
24 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

century—Kriśna caritra (The Life of Krishna, 1886)—seeking to historicize

Krishna so as to blur the division between myth and reality in Hinduism.74
The didactic impetus of the carit is accentuated in the various advice manuals
that become increasingly popular throughout the nineteenth century. Ramram
Basu’s Līpimālā (Collection of Letters, 1802), Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat-al-arus
(The Mirror of the Bride, 1869), Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s Bihisti zewar (Heavenly
Ornaments, 1905), Benimadhav Shil’s “grihinir guide” in his panjikās or almanacs
all instructed nineteenth-century Bengali readers on different aspects of their
lives from letter writing, to running a home, to being pious.75 The parodic, too,
added to the development of Bengali prose in the form of the naksās. Naksās or
sketches became popular as Kolkata developed a pronounced urban identity,
and the genre became a ready tool for articulating social critique in a comic
or parodic manner. Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay inaugurates the genre with
Kalikātā kamalālay (1823), followed by Nababābu bilās (1825), Duti bilās (1825),
and finally Nababibi bilās (1831). In each of these, he pokes fun at the bābu and
bibi—the newly urbanized gentleman and woman—and their extravagant and
capricious lifestyle. Hutom pyancār naksā (Sketches by Hutom the Owl) by
Kaliprasanna Singha documents life in the city and its strange quirks, and is the
next important milestone in the history of naksās. While neither Bhabanicharan
nor Kaliprasanna are battalā authors, the popularity of their books prompts
an array of naksās for the masses. Sripantha notes that even though most of
these titles have not been discovered by scholars, we still know of works such
as Kshetramohan Ghosh’s Kākbhuśundir kāhinī (1865) and Narayan Chattaraj
Gunanidhi’s Kalikutuhal (1856) that captured readers’ imaginations as battalā
took the lead in publishing naksās.76
For a variety of reasons, none of these genres elicited the same cautionary
response as the novel. If women were encouraged to read, they were generally
guided toward the hagiographic and didactic as a means of bettering themselves,
while satires and naksās were generally thought to be too lowbrow for women
to consume with any consistency.77 The image of the woman reading novels in

74
For more on the carit, see Nandini Bhattacharya’s “Ecce Homo—Behold the Human! Reading Life
Narratives in Times of Colonial Modernity” (2020) and Ipsita Chanda’s Tracing Charit as a Genre:
An Exploration in Comparative Literature Methodology (2003).
75
For more on Nazir Ahmad and al Thanawi, see Chapter 4.
76
Sripantha, Battalā, 25.
77
Sumanta Banerjee’s The Parlour and the Streets (2018) and Anindita Ghosh’s Power in Print provide
an insightful reading of the presence of the lowbrow and the vulgar in intimate domestic spaces.
 Introduction 25

the seclusion of her own room, however, became a staple of caricatures and
condemnations for battalā and bhadralōk publications. Radhabinod Halder’s
“Pās karā māg” (“Educated Woman,” 1902), for example, narrates the tragedy of
Kironshoshi who destroys her life after reading too many novels and desiring a
novelized life. In a slightly different take, Bireshwar Pare’s Adbhut swapna bā strī
purusher dwanda (A Strange Dream or a Battle between the Sexes, 1888) positions
the female reader as gullible enough to take everything she reads too literally thus
causing her to lose her sense of marital, and by induction social, propriety. The
novel’s popularity even leads to the establishment of anti-novels as a category by
themselves in which the author uses the form of the novel to critique the act of
reading them. Anti-novels such as Jogindrachandra Basu’s Model bhaginī (Model
Sister, 1886–7) and Cinibās caritāmrita (1886) and Indranath Bandopadhyay’s
Kalpataru (1874) all set their sights on the educated Bramho woman, parodying
her for her liberal values and depraved tastes in literature. In each of these cases,
the reader is assumed to read in a multitude of ways—literally, metaphorically,
closely, and broadly—but always, badly, either because they read things that are
not meant for them, or the things they read are in themselves flawed.

V. Reading Practice or How to Read a Novel

Few readers in nineteenth-century Bengal actively record their own reading

practices, leaving the scholar with the unenviable task of culling such records
from policy documents, letters, reviews, subscription lists of periodicals, and
the occasional memoir, to complement the evidence to be found in the novels
themselves. What emerges are traces left by our dramatis personae—the novelists,
their readers, publishers, and reviewers—as they utilize available structural and
aesthetic frameworks to comprehend what the Bengali novel is at its moment
of inception. Spanning the first four decades of this genre’s life, from the 1860s
to the 1890s, this book theorizes this complex network as reading practice. In
discussions from the period, reading is seen as the relationship between the author
and the reader, with the latter being either malleable and open to ideological
instruction from the former,78 or as possessing radical agency in choosing how

78
This is a fairly common position in nineteenth-century Bengal espoused by Bankim and a number
of his most influential reviewers, including Purnachandra Chattopadhyay and Chandranath Basu,
all of whom wish to educate the reader into correct ways of reading novels; when reading the plays
of Harachandra Ghosh such as Bhānumati Cittabilās (1853) and Cārumukhcittaharā (1864), one
26 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

they read.79 Contemporary scholarship on nineteenth-century readers and on

book history—both in the context of Bengal and Britain—accords the reader
a more participatory role, suggesting that they read in ways hardly expected by
authors and reviewers. However, even here reading is largely construed as the
relationship between the author and the reader, with the former establishing
expectations which are followed, disregarded, and otherwise engaged with by
the latter.80 My point here is not to suggest ideological or theoretical similarities
between theorists of reading from the nineteenth century, and those theorizing
reading in the nineteenth century from the vantage point of late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the persistence
of the idea that reading as an act consists of either the reader being told how to
read, or the reader exerting agency in choosing how they read, or a combination
of these two positions.
Against this, I contend that in nineteenth-century Bengal reading as a
practice is the holding in tension both these possibilities in a constellation of
readers, authors, reviewers, printers, publishers, distributors, policymakers, and

notices a similar impulse as the playwright Indianizes Shakespeare in an effort to inculcate in the
reader a love for Shakespeare, and good literature, even if they do not know English. Examples
of individuals adopting the same position in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain are
too numerous to cite in full, but notable among them are Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s
discussions around the need to cultivate readerly taste, William Makepeace Thackeray’s depiction of
bad readers, and George Eliot’s polemics on “silly novels.”
79
This is frequently presented in terms of bad readers willfully ignoring authorial dictates. Discussions
of readers choosing to read how they will against the better judgment of the author abound in
both Bengal and Britain, and more often than not, these conversations are to be found in the same
works as mentioned in the previous footnote. Bankim, for example, laments the presence of bad
readers who fail to appreciate good literature because they read good work expecting it to provide
the same pleasure as vulgar or obscene literature. Similarly, Wilkie Collins berates the unknown
reading public for not only preferring the vulgar penny dreadfuls, but worse still, for bringing those
same standards into their reading of good literature.
80
Here I refer to recent scholarship on literary publics in South Asia, and in particular in India, such as
Jennifer Dubrow’s Cosmopolitan Dreams and Maryam Wasif Khan’s Who Is a Muslim (2021). While
both Dubrow and Khan examine Urdu literary culture and the making of a Muslim identity, their
work is applicable to print culture in India as a whole in understanding reading as participatory. As
Dubrow in particular discusses, the exchange of letters between authors and readers demonstrates a
level of intimacy and responsiveness on the part of both parties. The reality of readerly participation
in shaping literary genres is equally well documented in the field of book history. For example,
Anindita Ghosh’s Power in Print is a masterful study of battalā presses soliciting readers’ interest in
deciding which texts are made more visible, while Print Areas (2004), one of the first volumes on
book history in South Asia, edited by Abhijit Gupta and Swapan K. Chakravorty, documents how
readers’ desires dictate the trajectory of novels in India during the nineteenth century. Nicholas
Dames’ The Physiology of the Novel (2007) and Leah Price’s What We Talk about When We Talk
about Books (2019) both underline just how prevalent physiological and distracted reading is in
nineteenth-century Britain. Regardless of gender, class, or social aspirations, Victorian readers read
in ways that baffled the arbiters of taste and culture, and they frequently displayed the tendency to
read not just bad literature but to read all literature badly.
 Introduction 27

available literary and aesthetic structures. Each position limits the other such
that reading occurs in the flux between them, and this reading practice is, at its
core, a pragmatic approach to a newly emerging genre. As a practice, it is not
determined by any one or two players in the book market81; its contours become
visible only when it is seen as both shaping and being shaped by the market as a
whole. The presence of a book and a reader implies an interpretive community
and, in the instance of the Bengali novel, included in this community are the
readers, authors, reviewers, publishers, distributors, and all those involved in the
book trade in nineteenth-century Bengal, across social, religious, and linguistic
strata. The novel encounters these individuals and institutions, and each of these
encounters separately and collectively creates what it means to read the genre.
The Bengali novel is, after all, something entirely new, and everyone involved in
reading it uses what tools they have to hand, and by looking at which tools are
chosen and which not, one can get a sense of the practice of reading novels.
However, the concept of reading being a practice in which the reader and
all those around them have to choose aesthetic tools is absent in all scholarship
surrounding the early Bengali novel reader, be that nineteenth-century or
contemporary discussions. This is caused in great part by the logic of comparison
whereby novel or literary reading is seen as a transmittable act, capable of
being learned and performed by any reader. While Bengali novelists are seen as
experimenting with form to suit the genre to their particular context, their readers
are assumed to be reading much like their Victorian counterparts. The act of
reading novels is never under discussion because reading is seen as simply a method
of decoding the language on the page; thus for most interested parties, what one
reads comes to be of far more importance than how one reads. Addressing this
omission is not merely quibbling with academic literary history. It is an attempt at
restoring those alternate ways of reading and the life worlds associated with them
which are displaced by the assumption that reading has a singular definition.
This definition grounds reading in Enlightenment rationality; it presupposes this
practice to be the practice of reading. By reorienting ourselves to the possibility
that there exist multiple, often competing and mutually unintelligible, practices
of reading at any given moment in history, we can approach readers and their

81
I refer to the practice of reading as occurring within a book market or a trade to include all aspects
of book production, consumption, and distribution. The idea of a market also highlights the nature
of the book as a commodity with exchange and use values, generating actual monetary profits, and
this itself is a reason why every entity involved in the book industry is simultaneously involved in
producing the practice of reading novels in nineteenth-century Bengal.
28 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

practices on their own terms, without necessarily wishing to confine them within
the bounds of a practice that foregrounds critical thinking.
In thus taking reading as the site of investigation, I draw on work of scholars
such as Michael Allan and Sarah Brouillette for whom the act of reading
in particular ways is indexical of the literary and its material and cultural
conditions of production. Brouillette, for example, asks what kind of a reader
scholars of world literature have in mind when they assert literature’s power to
counter world-hegemonic forces, thereby shifting the optic from the literary
as a seemingly transparent category to practices of reading that challenge such
claims to transparency. Even though her subject is the status of the literary as
reflected in the relationship between the UNESCO and world literature in the
second half of the twentieth century, her approach allows us to give a more
robust shape to the concept of reading practice. Referring particularly to the
work of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) and to Pheng Cheah’s What Is
a World (2016), Brouillette notes that for both—and they are clearly emblematic
of a larger group in her argument—a celebration “of a critical world-literary
mode impl[ies] that literature reaches a substantial audience of uninitiated
readers who need to learn what writers want to teach them.”82 Literature’s
power, for WReC and Cheah,83 relies on literary reading as an unquestionable
good and as a skill that can be learned and practiced by all so as to successfully
challenge the power of global capital. I ask along with Brouillette, “To whom is
literature’s countering force relevant? To what audience of literary readers does
it speak?”84, as I marvel at the longevity of the assumption that literary reading,
as a universally humanizing act, is available to and performed by all in the same
fashion, regardless of context. That the assumptions about literary reading are
located in the contemporary Global South furthers my claim that readers from
vast swathes of the world were and continue to be seen as imitators of reading
practices originating in the Global North. Despite the celebration of texts
featuring “multiple narrative temporalities, disjunctive and dueling worldviews,
and irrealisms,”85 practices of reading native to where these texts come from
continue to be almost wholly ignored by academics and market forces alike.

82
Brouillette, UNESCO, 3 (2019).
83
While WReC and Cheah would not see themselves as belonging to the same camp, Brouillette’s
argument nonetheless is effective because she critiques both as exemplifying the tendency in
scholars of world literature to see literature as a political force in and of itself.
84
Brouillette, UNESCO, 3.
85
Brouillette, UNESCO, 3.
 Introduction 29

If Brouillette’s work affords one way to resist invisibilizing readers and their
practices by looking at the intimate relationship between changes in the UNESCO’s
policy and global economic trends, then Allan invites us to investigate colonial
Egypt as another instance where the specificity of the act of reading is replaced by
the universalizing tendencies of literary reading. Continuing to work within the
frame of world literature, Allan asks what kind of reading practice is “necessary
for a text to be recognized as an object of literary analysis” in a context where
memorization gives way to analysis, and the former “ceases to be understood
as literacy.”86 He uses a range of texts, including the Rosetta Stone, Arabic
literary history, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire (1957), to demonstrate
the encroachment of a practice of reading founded on Enlightenment reason
in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egypt. To learn to read comes to
mean learning to read critically, and this act further implies that the reader has
cultivated a particular rational sensibility. What this means in the context of
colonial Egypt—and I would argue in the context of colonial Bengal as well—is
a rejection of existing reading practices; these can now be conveniently indexed
as backward, ignorant, and premodern because they are not founded on critical
thinking. The reader thus educated in identifying and consuming the literary
thus becomes a confidant participant in modernizing their own culture and
aesthetic traditions. I echo Allan’s concern that institutionalizing literary or
critical reading blots out alternative, preexisting forms of reading leading to the
false—but deeply entrenched—perception that reading is the neutral medium
that any reader can and should learn so that everyone has the same access to
texts, regardless of their particular form of situatedness.
In order to counter the hegemony of literary reading, I turn to the reader
sitting with the novel, and ask of this scene, what are the elements that have
gone into its production? Who is sitting alongside the reader? In what linguistic
and aesthetic traditions is the latter literate? How do those traditions construe
meaning, and how did the reader come by this literacy? Who wrote the book,
and which press printed in? How did this book reach the reader, and how
does the reader come to know of its existence? It is only when one explodes
reading through a plethora of questions about production, consumption, and
distribution that the concept of a reading practice begins to emerge. This fairly
simple scene conceals within it all the above questions whose responses may not

86
Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature, 7 (2016).
30 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

always be in agreement with each other, and no single individual or institution is

at the heart of this practice. What emerges as reading practice, then, is relational,
with no singular key that can unlock its meaning, and the task of the scholar is
to engage with these relationships on their own terms. The process is necessarily
messy and jagged, too specific in places while tending toward generalizations
in others, but it is only when one grapples with this that the abstract nature of
reading practice becomes concrete.
The questions animating this theory of reading rest on the assumption that
the practice of reading cannot be affixed to any one of the various poles offered
by existing discussions of reading and the reader; neither is the text the focal
point, resisting or urging readers to particular readings either at its surface or
its depth, nor is the reader entirely free to decide how they will derive meaning
from the book they read, nor is the author the invisible hand orchestrating the
act of reading. One has to take seriously the presence of the book market as a
whole, which means one must consider all the players involved in this market
as existing within interdependent relationships, and the practice of reading as
existing within this constellation. Thus the practice of reading exists as much in
the transaction between the rural landlord and the itinerant bookseller taking his
wares from the city to the muffasil,87 as much as it does in the intellectual circle
of which the author is a part. The former limits who has access to which texts,
and is motivated by the printer/publisher’s desire for a profit and the bookseller’s
desire to maintain a steady customer base. The latter frequently decides what
origin stories will be affixed to texts depending on various affiliations shared
by members of the intelligentsia who often double up as reviewers, and in both
situations, the act of reading is conditional to the participation of different
members of the book market.
That this practice of reading exists by holding in tension a number of
possibilities and positions becomes evident even in a brief review piece. Mir
Mosharraf Hossain’s Ratnabati, published in 1869, elicits a great deal of interest
not only because it is the first Bengali novel by an Islamic author, but also
because of the Sanskritic nature of its prose. The reviewer in Grāmbārtāprakāśikā
comments on Mosharraf Hossain’s use of Bengali as confounding the reader
who would normally not expect such “bimugdha bāngālā” or pure Bengali from
an Islamic author.88 The reviewer concludes the twelve-line review by informing

87
Broadly translated as suburban and rural.
88
Grāmbārtāprakāśikā, October 1869.
 Introduction 31

readers of where to buy the novel, the kind of press it is printed on, and of its
cost. The reviewer saves most of the compliments for the language and its ability
to appear in the mold of standard Bengali rather than being inflected with
musalmānī bānglā. On the surface of it, the review might appear to be reading
the novel from the point of view of the Hindu intelligentsia who saw Bengali as
predominantly a Sanskritic language, and to be addressing a Hindu reader who
would be suitably surprised, or a Muslim reader who would rejoice at Mosharraf
Hossain filling in a lack on behalf of the community.
Yet several other elements are present which the twenty-first-century reader
might not have immediate access to, and which form the various points within
which the reviewer is reading the novel. The first two of these are the venue,
Grāmbārtāprakāśikā, and the identity of the reviewer,89 Harinath Majumdar,
popularly known as Kangal Harinath, founded Grāmbārtāprakāśikā in 1863,
first in Kolkata before moving to Kushtia in what is today Bangladesh, to expose
the inhumane treatment of indigo farmers. As the periodical’s name suggests,
Harinath wished to reveal (“prakāś”) the news of the villages (“grāmbārtā”), and
as a former employee of an indigo factory, he had first-hand experience of how
British and the landlords exploited the peasantry. Grāmbārtāprakāśikā, then,
would have had a mixed audience, both rural and urban, spread across the social
classes, often sharing conflicting religious and linguistic affiliations. Harinath
was also a disciple of Lalon Fakir,90 and followed a syncretic religion that was
neither Muslim nor Hindu but rather one founded on a rejection of violence
and a belief in the transformative power of music.91 To bracket this aspect of
Harinath’s identity would be to misread the review as coming from mainstream
Hindu beliefs. The third point in this constellation of elements is the inclusion
of the information about where the novel is printed. This was a standard part of
most reviews and it told readers not only where they might buy the text from,
but also of the quality of print and paper they could expect. Bengali print fonts
were far from stable even in the mid-nineteenth century, and which press the
text was printed on told the reader how reliable or consistent the actual marks
on the page would be. Given that a significant part of Grāmbārtāprakāśikā’s
target audience would have lived far from Kolkata, knowing the address of the

89
While the review itself is not signed, knowing what we do of how nineteenth-century periodicals
functioned, it is fairly certain that the founder would be the chief editor, and would review received
books.
90
A prominent nineteenth-century Baul mystic and social reformer.
91
For a detailed discussion of this, see Chapter 4.
32 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

press meant that they could either order it directly from the press or know which
itinerant bookseller to ask, if they wanted to buy the novel advertised in the
periodical. All of this might seem incidental to those of us who have access
to texts in a multitude of ways, and for whom very little of this is new. But for
the nineteenth-century reader, each of these elements would have contributed
to how they read the text, not to mention how they accessed it. Neither the
reviewer, nor the publisher, nor the author, nor the reader can take the lead
in dictating how the novel is to be read; they each function simultaneously,
limiting and being limited by the others, and it is this relational network that I
call reading practice.
The practice of reading iterated above is unique neither to nineteenth-century
Bengal nor to the novel, but is indispensable to understanding how the Bengali
novel becomes such a popular genre almost overnight. To see what I mean,
let us turn to another example and take a closer look at three moments in the
early life of the first Bengali novel, Bankim’s Durgeśnandinī (1865), all located
within Bengali commercial theater performers, popular presses, and, broadly
speaking, within the world of mass entertainment. Each moment manifests
this reading practice as it constantly moves between different participants,
demonstrating this practice as existing in a flux within the book trade. The
first moment looks at Girishchandra Ghosh, playwright, actor, director, and a
signal figure in the history of modern commercial Bengali theater, reading and
dramatizing the novel; the second focuses on his protégée, Binodini Dasi and
fellow actors participating in reading and performing the novel; and finally the
third moment describes Durgadas De, a late-nineteenth-century satirist, poking
fun at Binodini, Bankim, and the novel through the figure of Miss Bino Bibi.
Following the publication of Durgeśnandinī, the Bengali literary response
is divided into two camps: the Sanskritists and the Anglicists. These camps,
consisting of Sanskrit pundits, public intellectuals, government officials, and
authors, become self-appointed adjudicators of generic origins, producing
considerable written material to create a non-novelistic discourse surrounding
Durgeśnandinī.92 Alongside these debates, the novel acquires a certain kind
of popularity never before achieved by a Bengali language text, and it is read
by individuals who are creators in their own right. One of these readers,
Girishchandra, first comes into prominence writing songs for Michael

92
This is the story I take up in Chapter 2.
 Introduction 33

Madhusudan Dutt’s first play Śarmiśthā (1858). By the time Girishchandra

dramatizes Durgeśnandinī in 1873, he is bringing to his version of the novel his
expertise in devotional plays, in particular, plays based on pōurānik93 plots to an
audience that would have been familiar with religious plays or dhārmic nātak.
The technique Girishchandra relies on in staging religious plays is the audience’s
familiarity with the plot,94 which then allows him to focus on producing
in the audience the necessary bhāb or the emotional essence of the piece, a
technique central to the classical Sanskrit treatise on performance, Nātyaśāstra
by Bharata. Yet, this is not merely a regurgitation of the Nātyaśāstra given that
Girishchandra is equally invested in modernizing Bengali theater along the lines
of the commercial stage in Victorian England. Note now the list of novels by
Bankim which he stages, Durgeśnandinī, Kapalkundalā, Mrinālinī, Biśabriksha;
all bestsellers95 whose plots at least the audience would have known. Thus
Girishchandra as the reader of Bankim’s novel is drawing on both his reading of
the text, along with his audience’s identity as readers who have either read the
novels or know of the plot second hand, to ensure that the audience is adequately
moved by the play’s bhāb while simultaneously appreciating the nuances of
proscenium theater. The success of the play version of Durgeśnandinī relies not
so much on the text of the novel but rather a shared knowledge of the plot as it
circulates via reading and telling.
Girishchandra’s leading heroine, and one of the first women on the Bengali
stage, Binodini Dasi provides us with yet another element in this practice of
reading in her autobiography Āmār kathā. Her description of learning to
perform under Girishchandra’s tutelage is of particular interest here, and I quote
from her at length:
Girish-babu [Girishchandra] taught me with great care the performance of
parts. His teaching method was wonderful. First he explained the essence [bhāb]
of the part. The he would ask us to memorise it. Then when he had the time he
would sit in our house, with Amrit Mitra, Amrit-babu (Bhuni-babu) and others,
and narrate to us as stories the writings of several British actresses, of great
British poets such as Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Pope. Sometimes he would

93
Stories based on Hindu purans or myths.
94
Rimli Bhattacharya notes this in her 1998 translation of Binodini Dasi’s autobiography Āmār kathā
(My Story and My Life as an Actress).
95
Jogeshchandra Bagal provides the following information in his preface to the collected novels of
Bankim: Biśabriksh had eight editions during the author’s lifetime, Mrinālinī had at least three,
Kapalkundalā had four editions, while Durgeśnandinī had thirteen editions (Samgra upanyas, 31–6).
34 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

read and explain from their books. He would teach various moves and gestures
[hāb-bhaāb] one by one. Because of his care, I began to learn the work of acting
using my knowledge and intelligence.96

Note here the amalgamation of Sanskrit bhāva (bhāb in Bengali) with

British literary aesthetics, as Binodini transitions from rote memorization to
understanding the text she is meant to perform. She does not position herself as
the reader, but rather as an actor learning her craft through her teacher reading
to her. This act of reading performed by Girishchandra is substantiated by the
verb “explain” which allows Binodini to appreciate the meaning of the text rather
than its words. Reading, here, appears to mimic the older oral tradition of the
guru (teacher) and the shishya (disciple), but Binodini is at pains to note the
presence of the text in this interaction. Binodini’s learning is conditional upon
Girishchandra explaining his reading of the novel, and her understanding of
his reading.
Later in the text, she continues:
I liked only the stories of famous British actors and actresses that Girish-babu
narrated, those books that he read aloud. When Mrs. Sidnis [Siddons] left theatre
work, and then returned to the stage after spending ten years in the married
state, then where in her acting which critic found what flaws, which parts were
excellent, which lacking etc., he would read and explain from books. Which
actress in Britain practiced her voice alongside the sound of birds in forests, that
too he told me. How Elenterry [Ellen Terry] dressed, how Bandman dressed
as Hamlet, which outfit of flowers Ophelia wore, Bankim’s ‘Durgeśnandinī’ was
written in the shadow of which book, ‘Rajanī’ was inspired by the bhāb of which
English book, so many things of this nature; thanks to the loving care of Girish-
babu and other affectionate friends, I cannot recount the number of stories of
great English, Greek, French, German etc. authors I heard. I not only listened,
but collected the bhāb from them, ceaselessly thinking about the same.97

Binodini continues her self-presentation as the apprentice, but in this she also
allows us access to the practice of reading prevalent within the theater community
in nineteenth-century Bengal. This reading is imbued with bhab or essence, both
as an aesthetic concept, and, more importantly, from a pragmatic point of view.
To understand this bhāb, to reflect upon it, while simultaneously being aware
of the latest acting techniques coming out of Britain, is to ensure one’s success

96
Binodini, Āmār kathā, 29, translation mine.
97
Binodini, 31, translation mine.
 Introduction 35

as a heroine in a cutthroat competitive world. Thus Binodini and members of

her company learn the hāb-bha[āb] of acting and the bhāb of these texts so as to
better embody these characters, and in turn give sold-out performances. The act
of reading is central to her bildung, as is the book as an object; she takes her cues
from a reader she trusts, Girishchandra, and ruminates upon the text in order to
learn her craft, and be more cultivated so as to earn respect.
Binodini and her performance of Girishchandra’s plays based on Bankim’s
novels inspire a range of popular satires later in the nineteenth century that led
us to yet another moment in this network within which I situate the practice of
reading. Durgadas De’s satire Miss Bino Bibi. B.A. Honour in a Course narrates
the story of its eponymous protagonist, Bino, as it puns on her reluctance to
marry an ordinary man (B.A. stands for the qualifications Bino desires in her
potential groom, but is also a phonic representation of the Bengali word for
marriage, biye). Bino’s behavior is pitched at high melodrama, a mode made
famous by her namesake, Binodini, as she recounts the uselessness of all men
who are not like heroes such as Bankim’s Jagatsingha. Here, then, we see yet
another iteration of the reading of Bengali novels, this time routed through their
stage performances. The satire’s content is about the morally devastating effects
of women reading bankimī novels, while its form is based on Girishchandra’s
and Binodini’s reading of these texts. Miss Bino Bibi draws on a complex system
of textual distribution in which each individual entity—Bankim, Girishchandra,
Binodini, reviewers of all three, Bengali readers, and theater-goers—reads with,
against, and tangential to each other.
It is this system within which Girishchandra, Binodini, and Durgadas read,
and within which Mosharraf Hossain’s Ratnābati is reviewed that I term reading
practice. During the first three decades of the Bengali novel’s life, the newness of
the genre requires readers, publishers, and distributors to bring to the text their
knowledge of other kinds of texts, be they printed, handwritten, or oral. They
carry as well their own religious, aesthetic, and linguistic allegiances, creating
an intricate network of reference points. The authors desiring popularity and
literary fame both introduce their own frames of meaning and adapt these
frames depending on the response of the readers. The text itself is a dynamic
object, shaped by the material realities of quality of paper, stability of font,
and the provenance of the ink. Finally, where the text is located and how the
reader accesses it—whether they own it, or borrow it from an acquaintance, or a
library or a book society—each of these become elements of this constellation of
individuals and institutions. Taken together, this is a fluid network, with entities
36 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

frequently changing places,98 falling in and out of favor,99 and in general being
buoyed by a sense of possibility when it comes to the novel as a genre. What I
propose as reading practice is not a mere celebration of difference or multiplicity
that further exoticizes the inscrutable orient, but rather one that acknowledges
the lived reality of the book trade, and of readers as existing within that trade.
Reading practice occurs not in a teleological or developmental manner whereby
a set of readers experiment, and that is passed on to another set who build
on the previous group’s efforts; neither is it Darwinian in that authors and
publishers gauge what sells well and jettison the rest in favor of that which is
popular. Rather, to comprehend this practice of reading, one must take seriously
the fleeting nature of reading, catch glimpses of it at various available sites, and
map these moments into an interrelated network. An image appears of those
involved in the book market engaged in a practice of reading that is organic to
nineteenth-century Bengal, with each entity making possible the others’ reading
while simultaneously limiting that reading.

VI. An Overview

In examining reading practice, I situate my arguments at the juncture of Sanskrit

and Perso-Arabic aesthetics, British colonial pedagogy, and the production and
distribution system sustaining the growth in the Bengali novel’s popularity. The
following four chapters navigate a path through the network created by the
interaction of the above elements in an attempt to understand both the nature
of these interactions and the contours of the network itself. I draw on debates
in comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and global Anglophone studies
on the one hand, and on recent scholarship on reading and book history on the
other, to reimagine reading as a dynamic practice. The overarching argument of
this book posits that there did not exist in nineteenth-century Bengal a singular
normative method of reading novels as mandated by any authority position, be
they British or Bengali. Neither was there a certain inevitability of imitation on
the part of Bengali novelists or their readers. We have grown accustomed to
approaching the postcolonial novel and its readers in terms of a secondariness

98
For example, when a reviewer becomes the author’s patron, as in Harinath and Mosharraf Hossain’s
relationship.
99
As is the case with Binodini’s rise to fame and then fall from it.
 Introduction 37

born of a historically conditioned lack, and in tracing this hierarchy to the rise
of print culture and a subsequent mushrooming of Indian versions of genres
imported from Europe. Yet as these chapters demonstrate, in Bengal alone the
novel reader had before them at least three available practices of reading—
Sanskritist (deriving from the Hindu-oriented texts), Perso-Arabic (deriving
from Islamic-oriented texts), and Anglicist (deriving from Western/Victorian-
inspired texts). Of these, the Sanskritist practice of reading dominated novel
production and consumption during the nineteenth century, while the Perso-
Arabic practice of reading formed a secondary alternative. The Anglicist reading
practice was merely a possible third option and overshadowed the others only at
the start of the twentieth century.
As I began thinking about this book, I was struck by the narrative of radical
rupture surrounding nineteenth-century India in general, and Bengal in
particular. The scholarly consensus in postcolonial studies, comparative literature,
and Anglophone literature was that the gradual decline of Sanskrit and Persian as
languages of power100 coupled with the expansion of British colonial presence led
to a massive epistemological shift in the nineteenth century.101 Coming out in the
early 2000s, this body of work built on the first wave of postcolonial scholarship
as it sought to provide a more rigorous material and cultural explanation for
what had been earlier posited as multiplicity or difference. This cognitive change
rested on a linguistic one—Sanskrit and the Persianate languages gave way to
English as the language of power which led to a conceptual reordering of the
world.102 The argument that sometime during the first half of the nineteenth
century there occurred in Bengal a move toward English, and consequently
toward the epistemology of the Enlightenment, was a compelling one for me. It
was what I had been trained in during my undergraduate and graduate career,
and there appeared to be ample evidence suggesting that post the introduction
of print modernity and colonial pedagogy, the past became irrevocably severed
from the present. Following this line, I was inclined to claim that the “tangled

100
See Sheldon Pollock’s “The Death of Sanskrit” (2001) and The Language of the Gods in the World
of Men (2006) for Sanskrit, and Jennifer Dubrow’s Cosmopolitan Dreams and Pramod K. Nayar’s
Colonial Education in India 1781–1945 (2020) for Persian.
101
The list here can be endless, but of note are Sudipta Kaviraj’s “The Sudden Death of Sanskrit
Knowledge” (2005), Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization
(2013), Anindita Ghosh’s Power in Print, Priya Joshi’s In Another Country (2002), Tithi Bhattacharya’s
Sentinels of Culture (2005), and Ulka Anjaria’s Realism in the Twentieth Century Indian Novel (2012).
102
I am indebted to Kaviraj’s formulation here.
38 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

genealogy”103 of the postcolonial novel in India revealed aesthetic experiments

with the form but was ultimately secondary to the material conditions of its
production and consumption. I wanted to see nineteenth-century Bengali
novelists and their readers as radically removed from their past because of the
insertion of this wedge of Enlightenment epistemology.
However, this argument, despite all its nuances, assumes a total dissemination
of a singular knowledge system, percolating down to every segment of
nineteenth-century Bengali society. It posits a conceptual change that affects
everyone, regardless of their proximity to the English language and the worldview
associated with it, and a simultaneous dislocation of existing structures of
knowing. A question naturally arises—could this, or was this, truly be the case,
and would it be more productive to think of this radical rupture as a potentiality
rather than an actuality, albeit a potential that comes to fruition by the end of the
nineteenth century? Two elements provoked this question for me during the early
stages of research, and both are related to Bankim and Durgeśnandinī. The first
of these is the sheer popularity of this novel—Durgeśnandinī ran into thirteen
editions during Bankim’s lifetime alone104—suggestive of a number of readers
across social and gender categories, not all of whom would have had access to
this cognitive shift. The second, related to the first, is the popularity of bankimī
Bengali which is heavily inflected by Sanskrit not merely in content but also in
grammatical structure. These readers demanding so many editions must have
been comfortable reading a form of Bengali that was about as far removed from
the Anglicized world as was possible. Even such a superficial glance at readers
and their practices of reading, then, suggests the need to revise this history of
radical rupture, and take seriously the possibility that during the better part of
the nineteenth century the past and the present existed in a continuum stable
enough to resist the pressures of this epistemological shift.
As these chapters demonstrate, theorizing reading poses challenges peculiar
to itself, not least because despite the long-sustained interest in novels and
the history of the book, the act of reading remains under-theorized. Existent
scholarship on reading, in the context of nineteenth-century Bengal, approaches
reading primarily via book history, and the impact of the printed book in
making visible colonial readers in Bengal cannot be overemphasized. However,
because this conversation takes as its point of departure the book rather than its

103
I draw this phrasing from Meenakshi Mukherjee’s 2006 essay, “Epic and Novel in India.”
104
Jogeshchandra Bagal, Bankim Racanābalī, preface, 31.
 Introduction 39

readers, the latter is discussed mostly as a necessary consequence of the arrival

of print modernity to colonial India.105 A more recent body of work on reading
publics and the development of a literary cosmopolis identifies reading as an
ideological tool, but here too, the act of reading, when examined, is in the service
of answering a set of questions not related to reading.106 If one turns to Victorian
Britain, there emerges more sustained discussions of reading as an act in and of
itself, whether one is considering contemporary readers consuming nineteenth-
century texts,107 or physiological108 and distracted readings109 performed by
Victorian themselves. Yet even here, the paucity of scholarship is noticeable,
suggesting that there exists a major lacuna when it comes to studying reading
practice, whether in colonial Bengal or its British counterpart. Even if one
leaves behind the nineteenth century, reading practice remains oddly invisible
in the world of theoretical interventions into the literary.110 Take, for instance,
world literature and the close engagement with the postcolonial text as a site for
reimagining both the text and its relationship to the reader, in which, despite the

105
Given that this is a dominant strain in scholarship on book history in South Asia, it would be
beyond the scope of a single note to account for all the works. The reader is almost always present
in these studies, and frequently as an active participant in the forming of the physical, conceptual,
and cultural aspects of the book trade. The practice of reading, however, is never accorded the same
attention, and reading is discussed as either a way of socializing the text (e.g., Abhijit Gupta’s 2012
essay “Popular Printing and Intellectual Property in Colonial Bengal”) or in terms of developing
high and low literary cultures (e.g., Priya Joshi’s In Another Country and Anindita Ghosh’s Power in
Print).
106
Discussions of literary publics marked the start of the 2010s, and have predominantly focused on
Islamic literary cultures in South Asia, as seen in works by Ronit Ricci, Jennifer Dubrow, Maryam
Wasif Khan, and Francesca Orsini. The scholarship here is particularly useful in understanding the
split between Urdu and Hindi—and the concomitant divide between Muslim and Hindu reading
publics—as a product of mid- to late-nineteenth-century India, and the role played by readers in
imagining national polities.
107
I am thinking particularly of Sharon Marcus’ Between Women (2007) in which outlines the seminal
theory of just reading as a method of comprehending the centrality of female friendships in
producing and sustaining heterosexual marriages in Victorian novels. Marcus deftly navigates the
novelistic text as one of the repositories of subversive gender practices, but her discussion of reading
these texts is firmly rooted in the twenty-first century; Marcus is interested in the contemporary
reader and her practices, not in the Victorian reader.
108
Nicholas Dames’ Physiology of the Novel is a pivotal text in this instance. His theory of physiological
reading is one of the first, and till date one of the only, sustained engagement with the question
of how Victorians actually read. By looking at novels, reviews, and journals for discussions of
good and bad reading, Dames is one of the first to suggest what an archive for a scholar of reading
practice might look like.
109
Leah Price’s most recent work, What We Talk about When We Talk about Books, suggests that
contrary to scholarly and popular belief, Victorians readers were not a disciplined lot. They read
much like us, distracted by their environment, losing their place in the book, and defying chapter
chronology when it suited them.
110
Even though one finds it recurring in the world of neuroscience which is interested in how the
human brain cognitively processes words. For more, see the work of Nadine Gabb at Harvard
Medical School, or David Dodell-Feder’s work on reading fiction and empathy.
40 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

attention to textual difference, the reader and their practices remain remarkably
consistent.111 Paradoxically, symptomatic reading has continued to fall out of
fashion over the last two decades, despite being perhaps the most-theorized
reading practice in the Anglo-American world today. Its emphasis on unmasking
the text’s ideological aspirations has come under scrutiny in the form of paranoid
reading,112 close reading,113 just reading,114 and critical reading,115 to name only
four, all of which resist the surface-depth model espoused by symptomatic
reading. Yet in all their nuances of thought, these conversations around reading
remain restricted to the West, and more frequently, to the Anglo-American
academia. They, like the other approaches mentioned in this section, have
little, if anything, to say about how those readers in nineteenth-century Bengal
encountering a new genre for the first time actually read. Thus in the chapters
that follow, I place these above discussions in the background, looking instead
for a theory of reading practice attentive to the particular context of production,
distribution, and consumption of novels in nineteenth-century Bengal.
To that end, each chapter in this work examines parts of this network of
producers, consumers, distributors, and reviewers. Thus the narrative arc of
this book begins with authors and colonial policymakers establishing literacy
and determining taste, before looking at the ways in which authors and readers
create three distinct practices of reading at the moment of the Bengali novel’s
inception. I move then to examining the dominant reading practice, Sanskritist,
and the twice marginalized one, Perso-Arabic, before concluding by briefly
looking at the ever-fleeting female reader.
It is important to note here that these three practices of reading that I examine
are not intended to segregate readers along a neat overlap between linguistic
affinities and socio-religious categories. As the above sections demonstrate,
languages such as English, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and Urdu were not read
exclusively by insulated communities; rather, it was the porous boundaries
between these languages and identity categories of their readers that allowed

111
Pheng Cheah takes world literature to task for not adequately theorizing the reader—note, his focus
is the reader, rather than reading, but in this he is consistent with a significant number of scholars on
reading—in What Is a World?, but the only theory of reading Cheah provides is eerily reminiscent
of the good, interpretive close reading practiced in the Anglo-American graduate classroom.
112
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You
Probably Think This Essay Is about You” (1997).
113
Heather Love, “Close Reading, Thin Description” (2013).
114
Marcus and Best.
115
Warner, “Uncritical Reading” (2004).
 Introduction 41

for the plurality of reading practices. In other words, my argument is not that
only Bengali Hindus followed the Sanskritist practice, or that only Muslims the
Perso-Arabic. Rather, I contend that these were two of the many available modes
of reading which the Bengali reader had before her/him. Which they chose to
practice depended on their social, religious, cultural, and linguistic communities,
and to read the relationship between readers and the kinds of readings they
practiced as deterministic would be to miss the plurality of their socio-historical
contexts. Of these practices, I restrict myself to three—Sanskritist, Anglicist, and
Perso-Arabic—for both the practical question of scope and their ability to gesture
toward other practices of reading. Thus, for example, pulling on the threads of
the Sanskritist practice reveals that the majority of the readers of Durgeśnandinī
would have had a quotidian familiarity with, rather than a scholarly knowledge
of, Sanskrit literary aesthetics. As they read the novel, they would have noticed
echoes of other genres and languages—such as the mangal kābya,116 the Bengali
of domestic spaces,117 or the Vaishnava poems of Vidyāpati—through which
Sanskrit had become a part of their lived reality. Each of these signals a different
mode of reading, and while examining all of them is beyond the scope of any
single work, it is their presence that creates the varied landscape of reading that
is nineteenth-century Bengal.
The first chapter takes up the narrative created both by Bengali intellectuals
such as Bankim and Mosharraf Hossain and by the colonial government, and
asks why, despite the volume of texts produced and consumed in Bengali
during roughly the second half of the nineteenth century, do all parties perceive
a critical lack of sophisticated readers? In this chapter I examine the debates
over print literacy in colonial Bengal to create a reading map identifying the
primary stakeholders in these debates. I provide a historical overview of each of
the three reading practices, the Sanskritist, the Anglicist, and the Perso-Arabic,
and document their articulations of the relationship between the individual and
the text, such that the individual can be deemed a competent reader. I look at
colonial education documents such as William Adam’s Reports on the State of
Education in Bengal and Behar, published between 1835 and 1838, and James
Long’s commentary on the same, to chart the failure of trickle-down educational
policies, and answer the chapter’s opening question from the perspective of

116
Early modern Bengali religious poems celebrating the indigenous deities of rural Bengal, such as
Manasa, Chandi, and Dharmathakur, and their assimilation into Vedic mythology.
117
In the conversations between Bimala and Diggaj Pandit in particular.
42 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

the British government. However, the contentious history of Persian slowly

losing ground as a language of prestige, and the concomitant rise of a Hindu
intelligentsia demonstrates that there exists in Bengal a far more complex
relationship between readers and literature than can be explained either by a
top-down model of literacy, or by an analysis of the burgeoning book market.
They both present only a part of the picture, which is completed by this chapter
when it introduces into this network the conjoined problems of basic literacy
and reading competency vis-à-vis the common Bengali reader.
One of the most vocal critics of trickle-down literacy, Bankim, is the subject
of Chapter 2 which begins with an examination of the non-novelistic discourse
surrounding his novels, with a particular focus on Durgeśnandinī. The chapter’s
argument crystalizes around an anecdotal moment in Bengali literary history; in
1864, a few months before the publication of Durgeśnandinī, Bankim performs a
reading of the novel’s manuscript version before a select audience—an act which
he never repeats for his other sixteen novels—in an effort to indicate both an
absence of and a desire to inaugurate a practice of reading novels. Reviews and
personal essays published by readers respond by performing either a Sanskritist
or an Anglicist reading of the novel, thus creating a trend of reading Bankim’s
novels as guided by either Sanskrit aesthetic, grammatical, and literary frames,
or the Enlightenment principles of British and European novels. The narrow
focus on Durgeśnandinī, and reviews and essays related to this novel in particular
allows me to both pinpoint the start of the Anglicist/Sanskritist debate and
demonstrate the effect Durgeśnandinī has on practices of novel reading till the
end of the nineteenth century. The non-novelistic texts are of further significance
because they reveal the stakes of this divide—each reading practice strives to
become the definitive practice of reading for the modern Bengali reader.
If the previous chapter charts the emergence and importance both the
Anglicist and the Sanskritist reading practices, then this chapter documents
the brief but powerful life of the latter. While the Sanskritist practice of reading
definitively disappears with the rise of Rabindranath Tagore’s prose experiments
at the turn of the twentieth century, the primacy of this reading practice during
Bankim’s lifetime is indisputable. This chapter, then, examines the novels of
Bankim in light of classical Sanskrit literature and the rasa theory, and argues
that practices of Sanskrit kāvya literature are as dominant in the structural and
aesthetic elements of the Bengali novel as Western forms of novel production.
The arguments are located in the reader to suggest that Bankim’s novels train
her to read the Sanskrit past as encoded in the text, and coexisting with the
 Introduction 43

westernized colonial present, albeit in a difficult relationship. The chapter pays

particular attention to the novelist’s adaptation of two forms of Sanskrit prose,
the kathā and the ākhyāyikā, and his exploration of the śṛngāra (erotic) rasa. I
read three novels—Durgeśnandinī (1865), Biśabriksha (1873), and Ānandamath
(1882)—from three different moments in Bankim’s career as a novelist, and show
not only his, but also his readers’ sustained investment in the Sanskritist reading
practice. The chapter reinforces this book’s core argument that while the Bengali
novel emerges after the introduction of its Victorian counterpart, the former is a
product of engagement with tensions foreign to the British novel. Exploring this
alternative reading practice provides an opportunity to understand how Bengali
and Sanskrit—in terms of literature and culture—are part of the lived experience
of both Bankim and his nineteenth-century reader, and the aesthetic and ethical
foundation of the early Bengali novel.
The fourth and final chapter moves away from the Hindu Bengali novels to
study texts written by the first Muslim Bengali author, Mir Mosharraf Hossain,
focusing in particular on his second novel Biśād Sindhu published between 1885
and 1891. The novel is an instantiation of the Perso-Arabic reading practice
which relies simultaneously on the Islamic ethico-aesthetic concept of adab, and
on a folk performance unique to Bengal, jārigān. The performative nature of this
reading practice becomes central to the Bengali Muslim reader’s experience of
the novel genre. The chapter highlights the twin pressures of the global and the
local faced by nineteenth-century Bengali Muslims, as they are marginalized
both by the loss of the Mughal empire and by the predominance of Hindus in
Bengal’s social, political, and literary life. Through the arguments of this chapter,
The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal effectively dismantles the image of
nineteenth-century Bengal as parochial and inward looking. As one delineates
the Perso-Arabic reading practice, one discovers that section of nineteenth-
century Bengali novel readers who claim allegiance to an extra-national, global
community through the shared performance of adab, while never losing touch
with intensely local aesthetic forms such as jārigān. In telling the story of the
Perso-Arabic reading practice, the chapter also demonstrates its deliberate
alienation by both the Sanskritist and the Anglicist camps. The sheer paucity of
mainstream Islamic authors writing in Bengali, and of literary publications in
Islamic Bengali suggests the dual erasure of the Perso-Arabic reading practice by
the Hindus and the British. This chapter takes on the task of excavating this rich
practice of reading, and revealing the extent of its viability during the second
half of the nineteenth century.
44 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

While in the rest of the book I leave the reader largely ungendered, I take
up the question—and the problem—of women readers in the conclusion.
This chapter is neither corrective in its relation to the other chapters, nor is it
exhaustive in terms of documenting women who read in the nineteenth century.
Rather, I stage two sites of reading using Rassundari Debi’s autobiography Āmār
jīban and Nawab Faizunnesa’s narrative text Rupjālāl, both published in 1876, to
demonstrate the private and intimate nature of reading practiced by these two
authors. Both texts are temporally located within the literary world of Bankim
and Mosharraf Hossain, and yet they are curiously removed from the public
nature of that world. Neither Rassundari nor Faizunnesa is concerned with
becoming the modern reader, or even with reading novels; for them, the act of
reading is itself novel and one that can be performed within the private space of
the home. The idea of reading for the sake of reading is foundational here, as is
the practice of women transmitting texts by reading them to their community.
My claim in this chapter is that the colonial book market should be understood in
relation to the domestic sphere within which women read, cook, and share with
their confidantes stories of heartbreak. The act of reading enters this space via
stolen pages and supernatural experiences because they alone can give women
the opportunity to read, albeit in a limited fashion within a patriarchal context.
At stake in the conclusion—and in The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal as
a whole—is the desire to comprehend the aspirational nature of these practices
of reading. Whether the reader performing the Sanskritist, Perso-Arabic, or
the Anglicist practice views their particular approach as the definitive one, or
women readers view their practice as the only one available to them, Bengali
readers seek to transmit their practice of reading to future readers. They aim to
define the contours of the Bengali reading public which they, rightly, perceives
as being in flux during the second half of the nineteenth century. There is no
inevitability in the shape the Bengali novel and its readers will assume in the
twentieth and twenty-first century, and the great possibilities of the nineteenth
century are revealed in the struggle over defining what reading practice means
to each entity within the life of the Bengali book. That the Anglicist practice
emerges victorious at the cost of making obsolete the Sanskritist and making
alien the Perso-Arabic stands testimony to the enduring power of colonial
violence, but as this book demonstrates, the second half of the century presents
a brief but creative window to a world in which all three practices are viable, and
actively imagining their futures.
 1

Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers:

Battala Literature, Colonial Pedagogy, and
the Idea of Education

I. Mapping the Terrain: Debates over

Literacy and Reading

In 1823, Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay published Kalikātā kamalālay, a work

satirizing the habits of the urban bābu.1 The text is in the form of a dialogue
between a naïve villager who asks a person living in Kolkata a series of questions
in the hopes of trying to understand the latter’s ways, and eventually be a
competent urbanite himself. The villager is suitably awed by the wealth he has
seen in the city, but he also knows that in order to make it in the city, he must
grasp the nature of both wealth and learning. He remarks to the city dweller,
“Sir, here in Kolkata, there are some people from my country [village] who are
employed in the homes of some well to do people. I have learned from them
that wonderful books of various kinds in Persian, English, Arabic are bought
and beautifully displayed in glass fronted almirahs.”2 But the babu, he continues,
cannot even imagine that these books would ever be touched, let alone read. This
confuses him to no end—he knows he is merely a simple villager, but even in his
village, he has seen punthis or manuscripts be read rather than displayed. The
villager wonders if books are like idols in a temple, meant only to be displayed
and worshipped rather than actually touched. The babu is visibly annoyed by
this question, and berates the villager for failing to understand why books are
produced. A wealthy man, the babu says, takes care of all his possessions but
doesn’t always use every one of these objects. He has already paid good money to
buy these books, so why should he be obliged to read them? Since his livelihood

1
An urban or urbanized gentleman.
2
Bandopadhyay, sixty-seven, translation mine.
46 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

doesn’t depend on using books, he feels no desire to use these objects. After all,
what one does with books is not written in stone.
This fluid and indeterminate relationship with the print text is one that
Bhabanicharan knows well, and uses to his advantage. As one of the first Bengali
print entrepreneurs and print authors, he bases the satire on his knowledge of the
emergent book market in Bengal, and in his conscious choice to associate books
with the verb byabahār or “to use” rather than parā or “to read” he draws attention
to the value books have in this market as objects rather than as reading material.
For some, these objects are to be revered, for others, a symbol of wealth, and for
yet others, objects to be deciphered through reading. As a bookseller catering to
both the urban and the rural audience, Bhabanicharan is well placed to represent
the villager’s seemingly innocuous question, and to thus poke fun at the urban
“reader” who is usually deemed educated enough if he knows how to maintain
his own accounts.3 Reading, as the babu suggests, is something that is workaday,
and only someone who needs to make a living from books needs to read. For the
babu, the printed book is a collectible indicating social status, a curiosity, and far
from being a marker of literacy. The distinction between using and reading books
is an important one to note; one can use a book in various ways, and frequently
this use is to display one’s ability to buy a book, to make an investment in the
book, and thereby constrain Lakshmi or the goddess of wealth to remain at one’s
home.4 Unlike Bhabanicharan’s babu, the khudra nabab or the little nawab of the
anonymously composed Young Bengal Khudra Nabab does read books, but as the
narrator remarks, even he doesn’t really know how to read. Published forty years
after Kalikātā kamalālay, Young Bengal satirizes the upstart, Anglicized Bengali
man who despises everything Bengali just to be seen as cultured and civilized.
The narrative voice tells us that the khudra nabab is a fool for rejecting his Bengali
heritage in exchange for the worn hand me downs given to him by the British, and
he learns a smattering of English in his efforts to fashion himself as an Anglophile.
He cares little for the “nasty Bengali language” or for Bengali books, all of which
are utter rubbish.5 However, for all his posturing, the little nawab doesn’t actually
know how to read the books of his masters; for him, reading is limited to mindless
aping which is not founded on any understanding. He knows the stock phrases

3
Bhabanicharan, p. 66.
4
The idea here is that wealth is representative of not just Lakshmi’s blessings, but a manifestation of
the goddess herself. So the more expensive objects one can store in one’s home, the more the goddess
is compelled to remain, bound as she is to these objects.
5
Young Bengal Khudra Nabab, 299 (in Bat talār boi Part 1), translation mine.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 47

when it comes to denigrating Bengali books and newspapers, and celebrating

those written in English, but his education stops at memorizing commonplaces.
What he calls reading is him identifying these stock phrases in the pages of the
print text, and even that is possible because he has memorized these phrases.
Nineteenth-century Bengali literature is full of such scenes of comically bad
readers misreading texts and failing to understand what books mean. As scholars
of book history suggest, this is a result of the gradual process of socializing the
book,6 but this explanation fails to account for texts such as Young Bengal Khudra
Nabab or Kerāni purān published well into the nineteenth century, by which time
the book is a familiar object. What I argue in this chapter is that these instances
of bad reading, rather than revealing a society becoming accustomed to print
culture, suggest instead the lack of a singular, stable definition of the relationship
between books and readers. These are not examples of readers not knowing how
to read but something more fundamental—for these readers, what it means to
read a print text is far from a given. The relationship between the reader and
the text is a fluid one given not just the novelty of the print medium, but also its
inaccessibility for the vast majority of Bengalis. What does one do with the book
as an object, and how does one approach it? What does it mean to read a book,
and who is the authority deciding the meaning of this verb “to read”? These are
questions occupying not just the babu and the villager in Kalikātā kamalālay in
the 1820s, but also the Hindu intelligentsia in the 1860s, the Muslim intelligentsia
a few years later, and the lower-class satirists, both Hindu and Muslim, in the
1880s. Running parallel to this is the colonial government’s engagement with
the same problem—how might reading be best defined and disseminated such
that first the Company and then the Crown derive the most benefit? Through
the course of the nineteenth century—and certainly during the first half of the
century—those involved in the book market and in knowledge production
identify reading as the ground they need to control so as to capitalize on what is
an increasingly lucrative industry. Thus indigenous booksellers and publishers
such as Bhabanicharan and Gangakishore Bhattacharya encourage their readers
to think of reading print versions of sacred texts as no different than reading
traditional punthi or manuscript versions,7 while Baptist missionaries promote

6
Abhijit Gupta for example discusses this at length in “Popular Printing and Intellectual Property in
Colonial Bengal” (2012).
7
Gangakishore advertises that copies of the Bhagavad Gita published by him are printed using ink
mixed with the holy water of the Ganges, and that the texts are blessed by Hindu priests, thereby
ensuring that the printed version of the Gita is as ritually pure as the handwritten manuscript.
48 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

the book as an object worth possessing as much for itself as for the knowledge
it contains. Both Indian and English social reformists gauge the extent to which
what is done in indigenous schools can be properly called reading, and at the
same time, Hindu parents resist sending their children to Missionary schools
for fear that they would be ensnared by the printed book and converted upon
learning to read the word Jesus in print.8 Each of these entities seeks to define
reading so as to stabilize the relationship between books and readers, and in the
process make available multiple practices of reading. That reading is a practice
that is far from being stably defined in the nineteenth century is the foundational
argument of this book, and as the next three chapters demonstrate, there are at
the very least three dominant practices in circulation with respect to the Bengali
novel alone—the Sanskritist, the Anglicist, and the Perso-Arabic.
In this first chapter I create a reading map of Bengal, identifying the primary
stake holders in the book market and their various, often conflicting, motives.
What connects each of these entities is the common desire to first demarcate
reading as an unchartered and unclaimed territory, and then provide a
normative definition of reading so as to definitively occupy this space. This
chapter outlines the elements of the three reading practices mentioned above,
and provides an aerial view of the ways in which they congeal. These, then, are
our dramatis personae—the British education reformers, members of the Hindu
and Muslim intelligentsia, and the authors and publishers of the popular battalā
presses—and as we examine their articulations of what reading should mean,
it becomes obvious that they are all trying to define a particular relationship
between the individual and the text such that it positions this individual as a
competent reader. What competency consists of, of course, is the substance of
these discussions. This relationship between the text and the Bengali is in turn
made dependent on the language, content, and quality of the text, all of which
make authors, policymakers, civil servants, publishers, and book sellers a part of
the act of reading, thus creating what I have been calling a practice of reading.
As one turns from the debates over reading staged by the Hindu intelligentsia
and British reformers, it becomes increasingly evident that the Muslim
community is by and large marginalized by both of the other two groups. The
history of this marginalization can be traced back to the Battle of Plassey when
the British defeat Siraj ud Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, and gain monopoly
over trade in the region. As I discuss at length in the introduction to this

8
Long, preface to Adam’s Report, 4 (1868).
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 49

work, part of the process of consolidating power in Bengal assumes the form
of systematically dismantling the primacy of Persian as the administrative
language, and of favoring upper- and middle-class Hindus over their Muslim
compatriots. From 1829 onwards, the policy of the colonial government begins
to gradually phase out Persian as the administrative language of the region. The
English Education Act of 1835 formalizes this transition, permanently replacing
Persian with English as first the language of colonial education, and then as the
official language. English goes from being the language of the foreign rulers to a
necessary tool required for getting any government job, and Persian falls out of
favor, both officially and socially, thus entering a phase of decline from which it
never recovers in India. As a result of British educational and linguistic policies,
Bengal of the 1830s comes to be a very different place compared to a century
prior when even a major Bengali Hindu poet like Bharatchandra Ray (1712–60)
was chastised by his family for choosing to learn Sanskrit over Persian. He had to
learn Persian to ensure that he could get a job or any form of official recognition
in the Mughal state. To add to the primacy of English, the efforts of Fort William
College and the Mission Press had crafted Bengali as the vernacular of the
region, leaving no room for the development of Persian or Arabic.9 This effected
the language of textbooks and school curricula, both of which favored either
English or Bengali.
This transition to English and Bengali suited aspirational Hindus more than
Muslims as for the former the move away from Persian is an easier one for
two reasons. The first was that the attention paid toward developing Bengali
meant that they could learn English while still having Bengali as a cultural and
domestic language. The second reason lay in the nature of their allegiance to
Persian or English—neither of these two languages defined their social, religious,
or cultural identity. The educated Hindu of the early nineteenth century was
literate in Persian because that was the social norm, but for the educated Muslim,
the picture was considerably different. Persian and Arabic were not merely
administrative or classical languages for the Muslim, but were intrinsically tied
to being a Muslim. In Bengal Arabic was never the language of communication;
it was the language of the sacred Qur’an, the language of prayer, and the language
connecting the Muslim community to the larger Islamic ummā.10 Knowing

9
However, interestingly, the College had begun by teaching Persian and Arabic, and Bengali was a
later inclusion. For more, see the Introduction to this work.
10
From the Arabic ummāt-al-Islam or the Islamic community superseding local, national, or
geographical allegiances.
50 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Persian, however, was necessary to be a socially, culturally, and professionally

successful Muslim. Thus by removing Persian from the administrative sphere,
the British effected the destruction of a significant aspect of Bengali Muslim
identity, leaving the latter to negotiate not just the loss of a language, but that of
a way of being in the world.
A consequence of this intimate relationship with Persian, and a deliberate
undermining of the privilege granted to Muslims by the Mughal rule meant that
even for upper- and middle-class Muslims making the transition to this new
Bengal of English and Bengali was considerably difficult. While English was
taught at several madrasās,11 including Calcutta Madrasa (established in 1781
by Warren Hastings), Nizamat College in Murshidabad, and Mohsin College
in Hooghly, few students could afford to attend these classes.12 With the Act of
1835, the government withdrew financial support from schools of traditional
learning to encourage an English language curriculum, and while this move was
later challenged and altered by subsequent colonial administrators, madrasās,
maktabs13 never received much funding after this moment, and depended
substantially on private donations. Most Muslim students were forced to drop
out as they found either their educational institutions closing down because
of a lack of funds, or because the curriculum adopted by English and Bengali
language school left no room for learning what their family would have
considered fundamental. The question of money is an acute one at this point
since as a community, the Muslims had struggled to gain financial security
following the Permanent Settlement of Bengal (1793). The Settlement was an
agreement between the East India Company and Bengali landlords which forced
the latter to hand over the bulk of the revenue generated by taxing the peasants,
and the amount to be given to the Company kept increasing. This affected both
Hindu and Muslim landlords, most of whom declared bankruptcy within a few
years. However, Muslim landlords were hit disproportionately hard because
under Mughal rule, most of the profitable land in Bengal—though by no means
all—was owned by Muslims. Those Hindus who lost their land, or lost their
jobs as a result of the landowner losing their land, saw in the Company new
job opportunities and trained themselves in English to secure these positions.

11
A school of Islamic learning, training students in Islamic law, the Qur’an, Arabic, and Persian.
12
As Anisujjaman notes, the perception that most Muslims refused to engage with an English
education owing to religious fundamentalism or a deep resentment toward those who had defeated
the Mughals has little historical basis till at least the 1880s (Muslim-manas o bangla sahitya, 2012).
13
Islamic primary schools.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 51

The Muslims, having lost their social status, were faced with the realization that
they no longer had any claim to ruling the region. Their process of recovery and
reinstatement in Bengali social life was slow, and, for most, impossible, given the
predominance of Hindu presence in Bengal.
What this historical detour reveals is that looking for the views of the Muslim
intelligentsia on reading or writing texts in Bengali resembles an archeological
dig, requiring the scholar to brush away layers of Bengali Hindu texts before
revealing a slim body of work. By the time one has discovered this body, one
is already into the 1870s, and even here the majority of the discussion revolves
around works written in imitation of Sanskritic Bengali.14 However what this
limited archive should not suggest is that the Muslims were not producing or
consuming literature through the course of the nineteenth century; judging by
subscription data on Bengali periodicals, they were certainly reading in Bengali.
As the work of scholars such as Jennifer Dubrow and Maryam Wasif Khan
suggests, Muslim Bengalis were part of a vibrant pan-Indian community writing
and reading in Urdu, and occasionally in Persian. When it comes to writing in
Bengali, the Muslim intelligentsia appears to share some of the same concerns as
its Hindu counterpart—this writing should be attentive to the social and moral
needs of the Muslim reader. There is, however, a communal aspect that colors
most available discussions of reading within this community. That the reader
needs morally sound texts is undeniable, but that these texts should be produced
by Muslims as they are the ones who know the reader’s needs best is equally
evident. Thus this practice of reading still uses the same markers as the Hindu
texts—quality of paper and font, location of press, and literary respectability—
but these are now filtered through the lens of Islam, and more importantly, the
text’s identity as part of a Bengali Muslim literary culture. What is also worth
noting here is that despite this reader’s proficiency in Urdu and Persian, and in
literary traditions expanding outside Bengal, most discussions still present as

14
Part of the reason why the 1860s and 1870s are significant in making visible Muslim thought in
colonial Bengal has to do with calls for a systematic reform of Islam in the region. Reformist leaders
such as Titu Mir, those of the Tariqa-e-Muhammadiya, and of the Faraidis seek to purge Islam
of its non-Islamic elements, which these leaders feel have seeped into the religion via the close
relationship between Islam, Hinduism, and a number of syncretist folk beliefs. Reformers sought
social, religious, and linguistic change, combatting colonial power on the one hand, and Sufi pirs on
the other. They focused particularly on ameliorating the conditions of the Muslim peasantry whom
they identified as suffering from the combined pressures of the colonial state and religious confusion.
This reformist push led to an increased need felt by Bengali Muslims to articulate their identity as
either Bengali or Muslim, given the Hindu undertones associated with the Bengali regional identity.
Rafiuddin Ahmad’s The Bengal Muslims and Anisujjaman’s Muslim-manas o bangla sahitya examine
at length the peculiar position of Bengali Muslims during the second half of the nineteenth century.
52 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

fluid the reader’s relationship with Bengali works. The awareness that Bengali as
a language is near exclusively a Hindu one permeates the Muslim imagination,
and it leads to a need to educate the Bengali Muslim in reading Bengali in ways
devised by those in their community, rather than accepting the relationship
between the text and the reader as agreed upon by Hindus or the British.
In what follows, I divide the debates over reading and education into three
sections. The first investigates colonial pedagogical policies with particular
reference to William Adam’s Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and
Bihar and the material appended to this text by James Long. Here it becomes
apparent that first the East India Company and then the British government
prioritize utility over taste when it comes to educating the masses, and that
their primary concern was not providing Indians with an English language
education but rather a transmission of English ideals through suitably bolstered
vernaculars. The debate over languages of instruction is as detailed as that over
curricula, and juxtaposing these two lines of thought—what language to use and
what material to teach—creates an intriguing literacy map of colonial Bengal.
The idea of trickle-down education is dismissed by most British educators and
civil servants owing to the cost of implementing the method, and the colonial
policymakers are far more concerned with giving the masses basic literacy
than with creating a “class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English
in tastes.”15 The masses, or the shādhāran (average) Bengali, is also the subject
of much discussion within the Hindu intelligentsia invested in cultivating a
literary market. It is worth noting here that while a number of these discussions
do not directly discuss Bengal or are experiments in reading conducted far
outside the region in places such as the Agra Prison and the north-western
provinces,16 they all have an impact on the ways in which reading is imagined
and taught by colonial and colonial-adjacent schools. The discussion curated
here demonstrates the various axes along which reading was being imagined
and implemented in the curricula by the British in colonial India. The second
section of this chapter looks at the Hindu intelligentsia—largely, though not
exclusively, identified as the bhadralōk (gentleman)—and their efforts to secure
the allegiance of the shādhāran reader, and define the idea of the literate reader.
The dominant rhetoric in this conversation is that of obscenity or vulgarity, and

15
Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education” (1835).
16
An administrative region in British India, covering the area of what is today northern India,
including Delhi, Punjab, and later Uttar Pradesh.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 53

of the need to rid Bengali of its unsightly appetite for popular or low literature.
The final section turns to the debate over reading within Muslim readers, and
here one notes that the real threat comes from the predominance of Hindu
writers and readers, and from a book market that all but invisibilizes the Muslim
community.

II. Bad Readers and the Debate over Education

In the Preface to the first issue of Bangadarśan, one of the most important
literary periodicals of its time, the editor remarks on the shortcomings of the
“filter down” policy of education. The editor, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay,
questions why those at the top of the social ladder should be the first to receive
comprehensive schooling, given that this system appears to benefit only the
colonial government and places the burden of educating the vast majority of
Bengalis on the colonized elite. Bankim’s seemingly facetious description of the
policy conceals within it a deep distrust of the British pedagogical approach:
Currently, there is talk of the “filter down” of education. What this means is that
it is enough to educate the upper classes, without feeling the need to separately
educate those belonging to the lower classes; they will become educated by the
by. Like a sponge requires moisture only on the upper surface for its lowest strata
to become wet, the educational waters can moisten the commonest classes of
the sponge that is the Bengali race, by being applied only to the topmost layer.17

The elaborate metaphor speaks to the colonial administration’s inability to

comprehend social realities—Bengal is far from being a singular, uniform
sponge with each stratum in some form of contact with the others—and the
sheer amount of time it would take such a process of knowledge transfer to
occur, were it even a possibility. For Bankim, the fallacy of this plan is evident
in the distance between educated natives and the impoverished masses, and in
the presence of the huge population of bad readers who remain morally and
intellectually untouched by the waters of education.
Bankim is far from alone in questioning the efficacy of trickle-down
education. William Adam, a missionary and education reformist tasked with
examining existing schooling systems in Bengal, argues elaborately against what

17
Bankim, “Preface,” Bangadarśan, vol. 1, 1872, 3, translation mine.
54 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

he terms “descending” education.18 In 1835, Adam is employed by the General

Committee on Public Instruction (formed in 1823) on the recommendation
of William Cavendish Bentinck, the governor general of Bengal, to conduct
a census of Bengal and Bihar’s schools, teachers, and pupils, and he submits
three reports in 1835, 1836, and 1838. In these reports—formally titled Report
on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Bihar—Adam argues for measures
which would provide some form of state-supervised vernacular education to
the masses. Adam notes that to expect education to merely descend would
be a fallacy on the General Committee’s part since it fails to account for two
significant elements—simply educating the upper classes in urban centers will
not ensure that students are attracted to the rural schools to form the mass to
whom education can then descend to, and neither will this method be cost
effective since it will not be able to take advantage of preexisting infrastructure
and have to start every school from scratch. Instead, Adam suggests basing
education on “native institutions” and on improving the vernacular languages
to create a large body of students possessing basic literacy, some of whom can
then be given further training in an English education. In his Report, he notes
that though most districts in Bengal and Bihar have native schools, these are
ill-equipped, riddled with caste and religious prejudice, and while Bengalis are
becoming more open to the idea of attending or sending their children to the
Vernacular and Normal schools established by the British Raj, attendance is
still fairly low.
The practice of reading Adam recommends is based on the principle of
utility—the masses should be taught to read such that they possess basic useful
knowledge, and they should be taught in vernacular languages rather than
English because that will be the most efficient method of communication. In
order to extend the benefits of European knowledge to the greatest number of
people possible, Adam proposes to begin teaching rudimentary reading and
writing skills at the village level rather than creating a more elaborate curriculum
for the elite few. The emphasis on practical knowledge is framed so as to rectify
a “mechanical effect upon the intellect of their [the ignorant teachers] pupils
which is worked upon and chiseled out, and that in a very rough style, but which
remains nearly passive in their hands, and is seldom taught or encouraged to
put forth its self-acting and self-judging capacities.”19 This particular remark is

18
Adam, Report, 257–8 (“The fallacy of education merely descending”).
19
Adam, Report, 94.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 55

based on Adam’s observation of Bengali Hindu schools or pāthśālās in Natore20

but its sentiments are echoed throughout the report; the education provided in
native schools is mechanically transmitted (presumably referring to the Sanskrit
practice of śruti or aurality), and even if students learn anything, that knowledge
does not inspire the intellect. Even when Adam investigates madrasās21 he appears
to find a very similar situation wherein the maulvi or teacher is as inept as the
pandit or the guru mahāśay.22 If anything, he finds the Muslim population to be
far less amenable to education owing primarily to their poverty and marginal
status in what he notes are predominantly Hindu areas. The Report also suggests
that the little education that is imparted to these students—be they Hindu or
Muslim—fails to be of any practical use because the instructors lack both a sense
of vocation and, in most cases, any familiarity with the printed book. Thus both
parties are compelled to be at the mercy of whatever little knowledge possessed
by the teacher, and on the unreliable punthis, manuscripts, almanacs, and the
“stray missionary tract.”23
The absence of print texts brings Adam to one of his most significant
recommendations—the need to disseminate standardized textbooks. Adam
believes that for knowledge to be useful it must be based in texts that are
consistent and verifiable. To that end, he dedicates a considerable portion of
his Report to determining the nature and number of books available to native
teachers and students, and he finds them to be virtually absent. The Report notes
that barring the very young who merely repeat sounds without understanding
their meaning, “native school-boys learn every thing that they do learn not
merely by reading but by writing it.”24 And yet, it is only when by looking closely
at the material that they are reading can Adam understand why, despite the
seeming investment in reading and writing, the “native school-boy” emerges as
abysmally undereducated. To his dismay, he discovers that what these students
call reading is restricted to texts such as “Saraswati Bandana, or salutation to
the Goddess of Leaning” whose samples he compares to find that “they are quite
different from each other […] and both are doggerels of the lowest description
even among Bengali compositions.”25 Not only, then, is the scant reading

20
A district now in northern Bangladesh.
21
Islamic schools.
22
Teachers in pāthśālās.
23
Report 97.
24
Ibid., 100.
25
Ibid., 97.
56 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

material poor in quality and inconsistent, but the students aren’t even engaged
in actually reading them. Adam continues in the same vein as he describes what
he calls the “four different stages in a course of Bengali [Hindu] instruction”26;
to write means to make marks on the ground and then on palm leaves (neither
of which he finds suitable surfaces), and to read means to recite by memorizing
in some capacity.
Having surveyed the length and breadth of Bengal, and even parts of Bihar,
Adam returns to his recommendation—Bengalis must be introduced to real,
useful learning, and if using the existing social infrastructure means that they
will be gradually wooed into the English system of education rather than
rejecting outright a foreign imposition, then that must be adopted as the most
efficient course. He proposes a four-part series of vernacular school books for
this improved method of instruction so as to negate the possibility of native
school teachers having the freedom to define essential skills such as reading
according to barbaric principles. As one reads through the detailed description
of what will be covered by each book in the series, it becomes evident the kind
of reading he wishes to implement. The first book of the series, meant to allay
the fears of those natives apprehensive of European encroachment into religion
and culture, will present in print form the methods of reading and writing in
use in native schools. Thus this book will give teachers and students “instruction
in writing on the ground, on the palm-leaf, on the plantain or sal-leaf, and
on paper; in reading both written and printed composition.”27 Adam suggests
teaching students not only how to read print and write on paper, but he wishes
to commit to print the ephemeral and the intangible, and to reintroduce to the
Bengali material that is already familiar to them but through the defamiliarized
form of print text books. Through learning to read this first textbook, the Bengali
student can learn to read known practices, but this time from the perspective of
the outsiders who has deemed it necessary that these be seen as the first step
toward acquiring real, practical knowledge. Adam also recommends translating
Sanskrit into Bengali for this textbook, and uses it to teach the student how to
read all of the basic elements of the entire course of education taught at Hindu
schools. The descriptions of the rest of these books make for fascinating study,
but suffice it to say that each book in the series moves from one area of practical
knowledge to another—starting with agriculture, to law and civic science, to a

26
Ibid., 98.
27
Report, 271.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 57

working knowledge of geography and astronomy. Given Adam’s insistence that

both teachers and pupils be regularly tested and pitted in friendly competition
against each other to see which school is doing the best, it becomes apparent
that reading in his world is the process of imbibing information and repeating
it when required. One is reminded of his own critique of native schools for
being too mechanical, but this new system, for Adam, is one that employs the
“reading, memorizing, repeating” formula to provide the Bengali the benefits of
a practical education.
Despite all his efforts, Adam’s textbooks never come to fruition as the General
Committee rejects his proposal deeming it impractical and, ironically, too
expensive. The rejection, however, has less to do with the recommendations
themselves and more to do with the internal disputes between the Orientalists
and the Occidentalists, with the former wanting colonial education to include
texts in classical Indian languages such as Sanskrit and Arabic, and the latter
urging for a curricula based exclusively in English. The intricacies of this debate
over education are not this work’s focus and have been discussed at length by
scholars such as Gauri Viswanathan,28 Pramod Nayar,29 and Parimala Rao.30
What is of interest to me here is the popularity of Adam’s suggestions among
education reformers in colonial India, and the extent to which that interest is tied
to the medium of instruction which, paradoxically, is one of the main reasons
behind the Report’s dismissal. Adam provides one of the strongest arguments
in favor of promoting European education using vernacular medium, and it is
because of his emphasis on using languages known to the masses that he can
successfully articulate a pedagogical system that begins at the village school level
and moves up to urban schools and ultimately to the level of the university. In
his Report, he is able to sidestep the Orientalist/Occidentalist debate entirely
by presenting the vernacular as the linguistic medium that can be developed to
convey English thought while being simultaneously imbued with the literary
merits of Sanskrit or Arabic. The language of instruction as envisioned by
Adam would thus encourage the colonized Indian to read texts in a familiar
language with a seemingly natural affinity for literary productions in classical
Indian languages, but in reality be a means for introducing this reader to the true
knowledge contained within English.

28
Masks of Conquest (1989).
29
Colonial Education and India (2020).
30
Beyond Macaulay: Education in India (2020).
58 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

He frames this linguistic approach in terms of how textbooks might avoid

inciting religious controversy, but if one takes a closer look at the section of
the Report, the larger implications of such a move become apparent. It is worth
quoting at length here:
Perhaps, the best way in which this [religious neutrality] might be effected
would be, without employing any direct forms of religious inculcation, to cause
the spirit of religion—its philanthropic principles and devotional feelings—
to pervade the whole body of instruction on other subjects. On these other
subjects, physical science, moral truths, and the arts and philosophy of civil and
social life, the aim should be, not to translate European works into the words and
idioms of the native languages, nor to adopt native works without the infusion of
European knowledge, but so to combine the substance of European knowledge
with native forms of thought and sentiment, and with the precepts, examples,
maxims, and illustrations of native literature as shall render the school-books
both useful and attractive. For this purpose the union of European and Native
agency would be necessary, European agency aided by the best works that have
been framed in Europe and America for the use of schools, and Native agency of
a higher order of qualification to command readily the resources and appliances
of native learning.31

Adam eschews both the translation of European works into vernacular languages,
and the adoption of unfiltered Indian texts in his method. His focus instead
is on combining and creating a union between European thought and Indian
languages such that what is produced is Indian in form and European in spirit.
This practice, which I have called a hollowing out of the vernacular elsewhere in
this work, relies on retaining enough of “native forms of thought and sentiment”
to draw the native speaker of the vernacular into believing that what is being
communicated is known and familiar. Having worked as first a Baptist and then
a Unitarian missionary, Adam has first-hand knowledge of the barrier posed to
communicating foreign thought in a foreign language. Similarly, as an associate
of Baptist missionaries such as William Carey and John Clark Marshman,
Adam knows that translating European knowledge into vernacular languages
such as Bengali and Hindi produces at best incomprehension on the part of the
colonized, and at worst, laughter and derision.32 The alternative he proposes

31
Report, 272.
32
Carey’s nephew, Eustace Carey, notes in his Memoir of William Carey (1836) the numerous
sessions Carey had with Indians when he believed he had successfully communicated teachings
from the Bible in Bengali only to be flabbergasted on realizing that his Bengali sermon was all but
unintelligible to his audience.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 59

is thus born of practical experience with the inhabitants of rural Bengal, and
he argues for using the vernacular to provide the explanatory mechanisms—
such as examples, illustrations, and maxims—needed to transmit the spirit of
European thought. In this section, we see as a reliance on native informants
who, having received the benefits of an Anglicized education, now possesses the
higher qualifications necessary to recast tried and tested schoolbooks into the
mold of “native learning.”
This bringing together of Indians teaching each other with the idea of
an improved vernacular finds numerous takers across nineteenth-century
colonial India, and in places as far afield as the north-western provinces and
its capital Agra, and Manipur, we see Adam’s suggestions being implemented in
teaching Indians the basic tenets of literacy. For example, James Thomason, the
lieutenant-governor of the north-western provinces from 1843 till his death in
1853, established a system of village schools to promote popular education, and
strongly advocated for this education to be in the vernaculars of the region. In
Thomason’s promulgations we see the continued emphasis on training Indians
to teach themselves while being “aided by the distribution of books” written in
an improved vernacular.33 He sent to his Collectors statistics drawn up by Adam
to encourage them to implement this pedagogical structure, and this notice to
the Collectors also delineates the curriculum to be followed. Thomason includes
with the notice six “Indigenous Books on spelling, arithmetic, mensuration” to
impart “to the peasantry certain plain practical everyday knowledge.”34 That the
rural population is the specific target of Thomason’s efforts becomes evident from
his desire to educate “the peasantry” as he finds institutions of higher education
teaching in classical Indian languages, already in existence in urban centers,
supported both ideologically, and more importantly, financially, by wealthy
Indians themselves.35 For the masses, Thomason devices a pedagogical policy
that crucially equates vernacular with elementary education. As his biographer,
Richard Temple notes, Thomason’s educational efforts stemmed from the latter’s
interest in reforming land and property rights in northern India. According to
Temple, “[Thomason] thought, that unless the peasant proprietors should learn
to read the entries regarding their own lands, they could never be fully sure that

33
As quoted in vol. 63 of The Calcutta Review (1876), 129.
34
As quoted in Long’s Preface to Adam’s Report.
35
Thomason terms this the “Hulkabandi system of education,” referring to teaching clusters of hulqs
or groups of villages. Parimala Rao’s Beyond Macaulay: Education in India, 1780–1860 explores
Thomason’s work at length.
60 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

the record, with the changes occurring from year to year, was fully kept up.”36
Reading, then, was to be taught as an essential skill to ensure regularity in record
keeping, which helps us further understand the nature of a practically useful
education. The reason behind the reading material provided to these soon-
to-be educated students in the six “Indigenous Books” becomes apparent—
mensuration to ensure that the peasant farmer knows how to measure their land
and its produce, and spelling and arithmetic to guarantee that this same farmer
can then keep an accurate, updated record. Adam’s four-part textbook series
may not have seen the light of day, but in Thomason’s six books, written in the
vernacular, they find an articulation.
I want to conclude this section with one other example of colonial Indians
being taught to read as means of acquiring practical knowledge. One of the most
notable instances of the same is Dr. Walker’s experiments, first conducted in
the Manipur Jail, and then more successfully in the Agra Prison in 1851. The
superintendent of the Agra Prison, Dr. Walker, introduced a system whereby
prisoners were taught basic vernacular alphabets and arithmetic, and they
in turn instructed other inmates. The method was seen as so successful that
Frederic J. Mouat, secretary to the Calcutta Council of Education, commended
its ability to turn the prisoners themselves into “chief agents in their own
amelioration.”37 A number of Walker’s recommendations are interesting for the
way they echo the prevailing attitudes in favor of mass vernacular education,
and both Walker and Mouat receive the full support of the Governor-General
of India, Lord Dalhousie. A glance at Walker’s prescribed syllabus helps explain
why it is so desirable for the colonial government, and why it is partially at the
root of Bankim’s lament that the Bengali individual is improperly educated:
“Before a prisoner can pass the first examination, he must be able—
I.—To read the Surajpur kahani, (a Village Tale).
II.—To repeat the Multiplication Table up to 16×16.
III.—To repeat the Multiplication of Fractions up to 6 1/2×25.”38

The following examinations required prisoners to repeat the first examination,

and be tested on additional texts such as Patra Mālikā (Letter Writer), The Kisām
Opdesh (A Brief Explanation of the Revenue System and Village Accounts), The
Shudhi-Darpan (A Popular Treatise on Hygiene), The Gyān Cālish Biburn (Forty

36
Temple, 171 (1893).
37
As quoted in Long’s Adam’s Report, 16.
38
Ibid., 15.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 61

Moral Maxims In Verse with Explanations and Deductions), alongside subjects

such as simple and compound arithmetic, and geography.39 With the exception
of The Gyān Cālish Biburn, the concept of critically explaining a text does not
feature in this syllabus, and even with this work, the focus is on memorizing
the maxims. The idea of learning by rote or repetition is deeply engrained in
this system of education—a practice which continues to inform much of school
and higher education pedagogy in India even today—and academic success is
gauged by the student’s ability to retain information, rather than analyze the
same. In valuing repetition over analysis, Walker and his contemporaries are
merely following the most innovative pedagogical techniques of their day, which
encouraged the memorization of facts, and following the teacher or the class
leader in repeating phrases or multiplication tables. The other point to note in
this syllabus is the attention it pays to the needs of the agricultural community;
the Kisām Opdesh is supplemented by information pertaining to land revenue,
measurement of agricultural land, and the basics of bookkeeping. However, the
most telling factor of this syllabus, and of the system of education it represents,
is the impetus on vernacular languages as the medium of instruction. As the
Education Despatches of 1854 and 1859 reveal, there is a growing demand for
educating the colonized in their own languages so as to ensure maximum reach
of ideas at minimum cost to the government.
The success of Walker’s method along with the successes in the north-
western provinces under Thomason create a strong case for the reintroduction
of ascending vernacular education in Bengal, despite the initial rejection of the
plan. Following Thomason’s death, Lord Dalhousie issues a Minute in October
1853, urging the Court of Directors of the East India Company to continue to
implement Thomason’s Vernacular Education scheme in Bengal, despite its initial
failure, because it is “the plan best suited for the mass of the people of Bengal and
Behar.”40 Dalhousie’s Minute, Thomason’s Vernacular Education plan, and later
Charles Wood’s Despatches of 1863 and 1864 ensure that the Bengali masses are
seen as fit subjects to be educated according to syllabi closely matching Walker’s
experimental Agra Prison syllabus. The notion of trickle-down education is
emphatically rejected, with Wood going so far as to suggest that the government
sponsor only the education of the general populace, and ask those belonging to
the upper classes to pay for their own education. The argument Wood and his

39
Ibid.
40
Lord Dalhousie’s “Minutes on Vernacular Education,” as quoted in Long’s Adam’s Report, 17.
62 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

colleagues propose is that following the establishment of the universities in the

Presidency towns, the government will have done as much as possible to place
the benefits of Western education before the elite classes.
As this overview of the British pedagogical policies in colonial India
demonstrates, the Bengali individual educated by this system would have learned
to approach reading as an entirely practical skill. Such a reader would possess
basic literacy, and even as they made their way through the system, the primacy
of useful knowledge in a hollowed-out Bengali language would have been
reiterated at each level. Reading thus defined—through the lens of Thomason’s
“Indigenous Books,” Adam’s introductory textbooks, and Walker’s prison
curriculum—would appear to be pragmatic, use-driven, and with little literary
or aesthetic aspirations. Those Bengalis lucky enough to attend an institution
of higher education such as Hindu College or Sanskrit College would certainly
have had a very different approach to reading, but as the statistics in each of these
educational Despatches show, they would have formed a near invisible minority.
However, these very Bengalis, belonging as they did to the upper classes, sought
to challenge the British stranglehold on skills such as reading, and their efforts to
define the practice of reading is what I take up in the next section.

III. The Hindu Intelligentsia’s Critique—Consequences of

Basic Literacy and the Obscenity Debate

When James Long conducts the first wide-scale census of the Bengali print
market between 1851 and 1860, he discovers there are at least forty-six native-
and British-run presses in operation in Kolkata alone.41 Long is able to catalogue
over 1,400 titles in Bengali, English, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Assamese, Sanskrit,
and Burmese, 19 Bengali newspapers and periodicals, as well as list the names
of 515 “Persons Connected with Bengali Literature, Either as Authors or
Translators of Printed Works.”42 Using the Returns and his Descriptive Catalogue
of Bengali Works, one is able to form a fairly detailed picture of what the Bengali

41
Long performs three separate censuses between 1851 and 1860, with the 1833–4 year showing the
sharpest rise in the number of presses. For a detailed analysis of Long’s census, and for a more
complete list of presses operating in Bengal for the period 1801–67, see Abhijit Gupta’s Bengali
bibliography system and location register of Bengali books 1801–67. Available at: www.compcon-
asso.in/projects/biblio/welcome.php?redirect¼/projects/biblio/index.php.
42
Long, Returns Relating to Native Printing Presses and Publications in Bengal, 89.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 63

reader would have been reading during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The range of print texts available to this reader is impressive—from books on
arithmetic and geometry, to Hindu myths and Muslim folk tales, to translations
of English plays and novels, to the origin stories of cities in Bengal such as
Burdwan, to sketches of popular life. There is even a cookbook, Pākrājeśwar, a
Bengali translation of recipes in Sanskrit approved by the śāstras, published by
the Bhaskar press which sold over 400 copies. This suggests that readers read
widely, whether to entertain themselves or reacquaint their household with the
correct way of preparing meals. Long includes as part of his Returns the location
of these presses, and that reveals that a number of them are battalā (lit. under a
banyan tree) or cheap presses catering to the average Bengali reader by pricing
their books and pamphlets for one or two annas each.43 The battalā forms its own
book industry—often consciously setting itself apart from books and periodicals
produced by the upper classes and the intelligentsia—providing Bengalis with
farces, folktales, pāncālīs,44 scandalous tales, and true crime reports. While
Long’s surveys only record the printed matter produced in Kolkata, we can
gather from other sources such as memoirs and letters that a significant portion
of these texts make their way into the mufassil or the rural hinterland. Added to
this are major centers of print production in cities such as Dhaka, Medinipur,
Rajshahi, Burdwan, and Nadia, to name only a handful. That the printed book
is able to overcome entrenched barriers of caste and religion is largely the
effort of print entrepreneurs such as Bhabanicharan and Gangakishore, but the
readers, too, display considerable interest in consuming these texts in a variety
of ways. As Long’s catalogue of titles and the number of copies sold demonstrate,
nineteenth-century Bengal had readers with pronounced tastes, and they were
curious and sophisticated, reading for both entertainment and information.
However, this vibrant scene all but disappears when seen from the point of view
of the Bengali bhadralōk or the upper and middle class, predominantly Hindu,
Bengali. These are individuals who identify themselves as urban, and while they
take Kolkata as their intellectual center, they know rural and semi-urban Bengal
as spaces they have left behind in search of culture and development. Led by
literary celebrities such as Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and Bankim, the Bengali
bhadralōk imagines the vast majority of his compatriots to be constrained within

43
A currency unit used in British India. One anna equaled 1/16th of 1 rupee.
44
Ballads, often narrating the folk version of Hindu myths, and origin stories of gods and goddesses
along with the method of worshipping them.
64 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

a world where reading means a memorized sing song oration of Hindu epics
such as the Mahabharat and the Ramayana translated into Bengali, or the barely
literate pāthśālā pundit dispersing what little education he has to his inattentive
pupils. That the rural, agricultural, poor, or working-class Bengali is caricatured
as backward in strikingly similar ways by the Hindu intelligentsia and the British
is no coincidence. The Hindu intelligentsia as a class is trained in British-inspired
institutions of higher education such as the Hindu College and the Sanskrit
College, and they play a signal role in shaping British educational policy. This
group is thus not only familiar with the debates over reading as espoused by
Adam, Thomason, and Trevelyan, but is also vocal in articulating its opinions
vis-à-vis language, content, and method of educating the Bengali people.45 While
the bhadralōk class is far from unanimous in how it thinks the masses should be
taught to read, there is remarkable homogeneity in their condemnation of how—
if at all—the vast majority of Bengalis read. The bhadralōks have spirited debates
over whether or not Bengalis should be taught in English, or whether the lower
classes should receive as much state-sponsored attention as the upper classes,
but they agree that the Bengali individual must be taught to read properly. They
echo British assertions that the vast majority of Bengalis do not know how to
read, and existing practices of reading reveal merely an ingrained apathy toward
literary merit. Despite the volume of texts produced and consumed, the Hindu
elites see the Bengali masses as somnolent, often possessing no more than basic
literacy. If anything, this unchecked quantity of texts is blamed for having an ill-
effect on these rudimentary readers by glutting them with reading material that
is at best of questionable quality and at worst, vulgar and obscene.
However, unlike their colonial masters, the intelligentsia’s need to create a
reading practice is not mercantile but ideological; it is rooted in a desire to rid
Bengal of its common, vulgar past and replace it with an urbane, eloquent, and
developed version of culture. As a leading social commentator, Bankim provides
us with some of the most articulate explorations of the relationship between
reading and culture, and in his essays, we find distilled the approach adopted
by the Hindu intelligentsia in constructing what they hope will be the reading

45
As it is not the intention of this book to engage substantially with the educational debates, I will keep
my remarks brief, but even a cursory look at the speeches and letters of the Bengali intelligentsia
reveals the extent to which it was involved in both advocating for and resisting British educational
policies. They took sides on the question of English or vernacular as the medium of instruction, on
the question of ascending or descending educational systems, and on grant-in-aid or taxes as the
method of actually paying for this education. For more on this see the rich body of work produced
by Gauri Viswanathan, Poromesh Acharya, and Nandini Bhattacharya.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 65

practice for Bengal. On the one hand, popular Bengali literature is branded as
obscene, and thus underdeveloped, which creates the illusion that there is a
need for more refined texts written in a Sanskritized version of Bengali, and on
the other, there is an increased attention paid to crafting this particular kind
of Bengali. What emerges is frequently referred to as the Bengal Renaissance,
and is marked as a period of incredible literary productivity which goes a long
way toward fashioning Bengal’s identity as a site of cultural progress. That this
is also the moment when the Bengali reader receives the most attention, both
within the texts they read and in the discourse surrounding these texts, is very
rarely commented on46 as the focus remains on either literary and linguistic
innovations,47 the shape of the print market,48 or the political implications of
this period. By conceptualizing the efforts of the Bengali bhadralōk in terms of
a reading practice—which involves a complex interplay of high and lowbrow
presses, allegiance to old and new Bengali literature, and the process of the
periodical becoming a quotidian object—reveals the extent to which this class
is invested in defining the relationship between the ordinary Bengali and the
printed text as good or proper reading. Seen from this perspective, the question
of inculcating readerly taste is not merely a matter of teaching the reader how to
read, but of ensuring that how the reader reads is circumscribed by what texts
they have access to, by the kind of Bengali that text is written in, and by the
aspirations this reader should have while reading the text.
We turn to Akshaychandra Sarkar’s autobiography “Pitā-putra” (“Father-
Son”) for one of the many articulations of this process of circumscribing. As
an editor of well-known literary periodicals such as Sādhāranī (1874) and
Nabaīiban (1884–9), and as a close associate of Bankim, Akshaychandra was
a familiar face in Bengali literary circles. He positioned himself as a champion
of the Bengali language, and I examine his reviews of Bankim’s novel in the
second chapter of this book. Here, however, I am more interested in how
he narrativizes the act of reading in his autobiography which is styled as a
bildungsroman, charting Akshaychandra’s growth as an author and an editor.
As Gautam Bhadra notes in his essay “Bāngāli pāthak ō tār bānglā boi parā,” the

46
One notable exception is Gautam Bhadra whose work on the battalā presses provides a detailed
commentary on the centrality of the reader and how they read, but this is a text known exclusively
to scholars who read Bengali as it has not been translated.
47
The work of postcolonial scholars such as Tanika Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh
Chakraborty, Gayatri Spivak, Rosinka Chaudhuri, to name only a few, is noteworthy here.
48
This has been the particular domain of scholarship on book history in South Asia.
66 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

autobiography reads as a manual for reading Bengali books in the nineteenth

century. Akshaychandra starts not with himself but with his father, Gangacharan
Sarkar Bahadur’s childhood, so the narrative takes us to the Chinsurah of the
1830s when Gangacharan begins to attend the pāthśālā, and the author notes
that this is also when Adam is conducting his survey of schools in Bengal.49
The text makes evident the conflict between Bengali and English that follows on
the heels of colonial reformists, suggesting that Bengali initially suffered because
it lacked both mature prose and printed versions of the same. Akshaychandra
then marshals the curriculum his father studied at the “College of Mahammad
Mashin”50 to demonstrate how authors such as Mrityunjay Tarkalankar rose to
the challenge of providing Bengali with good prose in the form of “Prabadh
candrikā” and “Puruś parikkhā.”51 Using his father’s biography as a narrative
pretext, Akshaychandra proceeds to insert a brief history of Bengali prose to
remind his reader of the remarkable growth experienced by Bengali literature
during the first part of the nineteenth century.
Having thus established his allegiance to Bengali, Akshaychandra describes
the literary atmosphere within which he grew up:
In this peaceful gathering [at his paternal home] special emphasis was placed
on discussions of Bengali literature alongside that of pure music. That was
when [Iswarchandra] Vidyasagar’s Betāl pachisi, Jībancarit was published. He
published Bharatchandra’s Annadāmangal “based on the original Krishnanagar
manuscript.” Tarashankar’s Kādambari was published. All these books and other
books of the time—printed in good font, good editions, as they were published,
father would buy a volume; and in these evening gatherings, they would be
read, discussed, cause a fervor (āndōlita). From that revolution, a fountain of
joy would run.52

I draw your attention here to the texts being celebrated, causing a “literary
revolution”—each of these texts represent a watershed moment in Bengali
literary history. The Sanskrit Press, run by Vidyasagar, brought out an edition
of Bharatchandra’s Annadāmangal (1853) which was the first to identify a
manuscript version as the original, spend considerable time and effort collecting
the manuscript from the Krishnanagar Palace, and then base the print version on

49
“Pitā-putra,” 470 (1904).
50
Hooghly Mohsin College.
51
The latter was translated from Sanskrit.
52
“Pitā-putra,” 482.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 67

this original. Bharatchandra Ray wrote Annadāmangal in 1752–3, but there were
several manuscripts of this work, and while Gangakishore had published the first
print version of Annadāmangal in 1816. However, Vidyasagar’s version of the
text, along with Betāl pachisi, was able to make a claim for authenticity because it
emphasized the originality of the manuscript on which it was based, and because
Vidyasagar was able to add his considerable literary fame to the edition.53 For
someone like Akshyachandra or Gangacharan, this editorial history was what set
apart Vidyasagar’s Annadāmangal from other available versions, and by reading
it as monumental achievements, they became willing participants in creating
a new literary history for Bengal. This history, as Akshaychandra is at pains to
emphasize, placed modern Bengal in a continuum with its past, but cleansed
the past of what was deemed vulgar and obscene. Thus “Pitā-putra” does not
mention here how popular a section of Annadāmangal was, and continued to
be, independent of Vidyasagar’s editorial interventions. This segment, which
formed the second part of the three-part Annadāmangal, is popularly referred to
as Vidyāsundar or Kālikāmangal and narrates the love story of Vidya and Sundar,
but it was deemed by the Bengali bhadralōk to be far too erotic to be decent.
We will return to this charge of indecency with Bankim, but what is interesting
here is that by adding a small detail—Bharatchandra’s Annadāmangal “based
on the original Krishnanagar manuscript”—Akshaychandra is able to show
that the good or correct reading takes into account only that version of the text
that has been editorially sanitized, and which bears the markers of refinement.
Tarashankar Tarkaratna’s Kādambari, published in 1849, was the first Bengali
translation of the seventh-century poet Banabhatta’s Sanskrit prose text of the
same name. Including this reference allows Akshaychandra to demonstrate that
modern Bengali remained in close touch with its Sanskrit past, and even in that
past, we can find a form as modern as the romantic prose novel.54
But the texts are not the only way that Akshaychandra circumscribes the world
of reading. Even in the brief section quoted above, we see the significance of the
book as a material object, and to the relationship being established between this
object and the individual. These books are prized possession—reminding us of

53
Vidyasagar taught briefly at Fort William College, working alongside others such as Madanmohan
Tarkalankar and William Carey, and he derived his notions of originality and the sanctity of
the manuscript from there. I discuss the role of the College in shaping Bengali at length in the
introduction.
54
It is also interesting to note that Bankim uses Kādambari as one of his literary inspirations in his first
novel, Durgeśnandinī. For more on this see Chapter 3 of this work.
68 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Bhabanicharan’s babu and his collection of books—and the good reader must
make note of the font, paper, and edition. The object’s provenance is almost as
important as the content, which is why Akshaychandra is able to seamlessly
incorporate the editorial information about Annadāmangal. It is that particular
edition that his father Gangacharan buys and makes available to the young
Akshaychandra. It is that particular edition that causes a fervor among its
readers as it is being read and celebrated. On the topic of celebrating literature,
Akshaychandra has much to say. He vehemently rejects the modern fad55 of
bringing out the “critical knife”56 the moment one has read a few lines of a text.
That, he says, is a bad way to read a text because the entire focus is on dissecting
it for the purposes of writing a critical commentary or a review. Good reading
should instead assume a worshipful stance toward the text such that “reading
Kādambari is almost like worshipping Varanasi’s Viśweśwar.”57,58 This is an act of
reading that is reverential, sacred, and embodied. The reader is no mere critic,
scanning the text for intellectual purchase alone, but a bhakt or a devotee who
is overcome with joy when reading a book of high literary merit. The fountain
of joy returns as a motif in several parts of the autobiography to describe the
sensation of reading, and to establish reading as an act of worshipping literature.
The reader is thus able to experience literature as an “object of pleasure” and
as an “object of worship.”59 Akshaychandra is able to effect this melding of
pleasure and worship because at every moment in his text, he has taken care
to demonstrate how this reader is given both physical and emotional access to
the printed word. Good reading, as he describes it, can only happen when both
forms of access are controlled and guided, and that guidance is precisely what
his autobiography is offering the reader.
Akshaychandra’s autobiography can, and should, be the subject of an entire
work, but guided as we are by reading, we move now to another, less personal,
discussion of what constitutes good reading. Bankim, one of Akshaychandra’s
literary mentors, was a passionate advocate for encouraging Bengalis to read,
but he was also equally influential in crafting the image of the average Bengali
as a lazy and bad reader who was lulled into somnolence by bad literature. For

55
The narrative has moved forward in time by this section. He is addressing here the late-nineteenth-
to early-twentieth-century reader, and contrasting this reader with those of his youth.
56
“Pitā-putra,” 483.
57
Another name for Shiva here referred to as the form worshipped in the ancient Hindu city of
Benaras or Varanasi.
58
“Pitā-putra,” 483.
59
Ibid.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 69

most social commentators in the nineteenth century, the existence of basic

literacy among a significant portion of the Bengali population is an accepted
fact. Bankim, writing in 1880 in the Māgh issue of Bangadarśan,60 suggests that
despite obstacles such as the tortures of a pāthśālā, a considerable number of
people in Bengal are literate enough to count as rudimentary readers:
How many of the nearly two crore inhabitants of Bengal can read? Twenty lakhs?
Or fewer? […] If forty percent of the boys [in a village] attend the pathsala,
twenty percent leave before learning the alphabet. Of the remaining twenty
percent, ten percent learn the bare minimum, growing up to be able to read
printed punthis such as the Ramayan with some difficulty. The remaining ten
percent receive a comparatively better education. If one counts only this final ten
percent, there are about twenty lakh people in Bengal who can read […] Even if
someone argues that the number of readers in Bengal cannot be this high, I have
no disagreement; I am ready to slash twenty lakh readers to ten lakhs. There can
be no doubt that five percent of the population can read.61

Bankim here creates a distinction between merely literate individuals and those
who “receive a comparatively better education” and are by implication on the
path to being trained in literary aesthetics. Most of the readers, however, are
those who are merely literate; they can read the printed text, but beyond this basic
capacity to read, they lack any form of aesthetic training. Another distinction
becomes apparent at this point, that between the supposedly true printed text,
one that is designed exclusively for the medium, and the palm-leaf manuscript
or punthi masquerading in print. The latter, given its origins in a non-literate—
in terms of formal Western education—culture inculcate in its reader the same
forms of unthinking rote memorization which the recitation of punthis is
associated with. These ten lakh readers, though literate, cannot distinguish good
literature from bad, and lacking proper guidance are thus guilty of consuming
all forms of low-quality texts. The problem, Bankim implies, stems from the
mistaken assumption that equates literacy with the ability to identify literary
merit, and the consequence is a proliferation of substandard works of literature.
Bankim addresses the same problem in the essay “A Popular Literature
for Bengal,” which he begins by further breaking down the broad category of
Bengali readers into their social classes and distance from the metropolitan

60
A Bengali literary periodical founded and edited by Bankim, published from 1872 onwards.
61
“Bānglār pāthak parana brata” (“The Vow to Teach the Readers of Bengal”), Bangadarshan, vol. 7,
no. 82, 433–4, translation mine.
70 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

center.62 The “purely Bengali” reader is here identified as belonging mostly to the
lower and the lower-middle class, often living in rural Bengal—in the village or the
moffusil. The “really well-educated classes,” belonging to the urban professional
upper-middle class or the aristocracy, form one end of the spectrum, and are
not a subject of discussion here. Presumably, the really well-educated individual,
like Bankim himself, is a trained reader, fluent in both English and Bengali,
and, by means of their exposure to the West and to the best of Indic literatures,
capable of both appreciating and creating good literature. The common Bengali
reader, mostly from the rural parts of the region however, falls far short of this
mark and reads indiscriminately, often favoring the entertainment provided
by poor-quality literature for the effort required to appreciate good texts. The
entertainment is identified by Bankim to be provided in large part by obscene
and vulgar literature, popularized in Bengal by eighteenth-century authors such
as Bharatchandra and Iswarchandra Gupta,63 or the early modern erotic poetry
from the Vaishnava64 tradition. As with Akshaychandra, Bankim, too, is keen
on creating a distance between the vulgar and the popular on the one hand,
and the refined and the literary on the other. If the popular and the quotidian
religious can be conflated to appear vulgar and uninspiring, then the readers of
the same, often in reality possessing considerable readerly sophistication, can
also be jettisoned as the barely literate.
Bankim asserts that the average Bengali reader living in the villages of
nineteenth-century Bengal is only capable of basic literacy since they are the
primary consumer of obscene literature. The logic supporting this claim is
that only a reader lacking aesthetic training would be drawn to obscenity
repeatedly. To substantiate this claim, Bankim draws attention to Iswar
Gupta, editor of the periodical Sambad Prabhākar and a popular Bengali
author during the first half of the nineteenth century.65 Bankim’s relationship
with Iswar Gupta is worth noting in this instance—the latter was one of his
literary mentors, and some of Bankim’s earliest work was published in Sambad
Prabhākar. However, it is Iswar Gupta’s poetry that Bankim refers to when
discussing the problem of obscene literature in the essay “Bengali Literature.”

62
Bankim, Bankim Racanāvali, 97.
63
Popularly known as Iswar Gupta.
64
Belonging to the Hindu religious sect devoted to the worship of Vishnu.
65
For a detailed discussion of the role of Iswar Gupta in the formation of modern Bengali poetry,
and the problem of obscenity, see Rosinka Chaudhuri’s “Cutlets or Fish Curry?: Debating Indian
Authenticity in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal.”
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 71

The latter’s popularity becomes metonymic for the Bengali readers’ lack
of taste and the perpetuation of Bengali books that are too obscene to be
read in their entirety. While at first glance it may appear that Bankim is
objecting to the moral depravity of the reader who popularizes Iswar Gupta, a
juxtaposition of the two essays, “A Popular Literature for Bengal” and “Bengali
Literature,” reveals a very different argument. The Bengali reader, having
grown up on a diet of popular Bengali poetry narrating Vaishnavite plots such
as the extramarital love of Rādhā and Kṛshna, and the crude kabi66 songs of
Ram Basu and Haru Thakur, does not know how to read the elevated moral
sentiments expressed in a better class of literature. If such a reader prefers
the crass poetry of Bharatchandra or Iswar Gupta, it is because their literacy
is limited to following a narrative plot, and does not encompass the training
one requires to appreciate aesthetic—and by induction, moral—finesse.67 It
would also be incorrect to assume that this reader’s growth is stunted owing
to popular Bengali literature’s predilection for poetry; popular prose writers
simultaneously reinforce the lack of aesthetic development. Bankim applauds
authors such as Tekchand Thakur—the nom de plume of Pearychand Mitra—
and Kaliprasanna Singha, or Hutam, for bringing Bengali prose to the modern
age, but laments that they, too, have failed to adequately train the reader. Both
Tekchand Thakur, best known perhaps for his parable-esque novel Ālāler
Gharer Dulāl (The Pampered Brat), and Hutam, made popular by his Hutam
Pyāncār Nakśā (Sketches by Hutam, the Owl), are ineffectual owing to their use
of obscene language. While both authors draw attention to the various evils
and follies of contemporary Bengali society, they fall prey to “racy vigorous
language, not seldom disfigured by obscenity,” thereby contributing little, if
anything, to the education of the Bengali reader.68

66
A form of Bengali folk performance in which the emphasis is on a contest between performers who
can compose and sing taunts and responses on the fly.
67
It is worth noting here that the concerted efforts of Bankim and his ilk do little to dampen the
popularity of Iswar Gupta or Vidyāsundar. The sheer number of print editions of Vidyāsundar
published by the battalā presses stands testament to the Bengali readers’ ability and desire to read
unconstrained by the moral or aesthetic notions of the bhadralōk class. I discuss Vidyāsundar at
length in the Introduction. Iswar Gupta’s influence on Bengali literature, particularly poetry, should
not be understated either. He represents the tradition of literature that takes seriously the average
Bengali and their language as lived entities. The comfort and familiarity of his verse are attested
to by Akshaychandra who compares Iswar Gupta’s writing to homemade fish curry—no fanfare,
no foreign influence, and perhaps a tad common, but in this commonness lies its attraction (Kabi
Hemcandra, 1911). Rosinka Chaudhuri’s “Cutlets or Fish Curry” provides an excellent reading of
Iswar Gupta’s role in Bengali literary history.
68
Bankim, “Bengali Literature,” Bankim Racanāvali, 112.
72 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

However modern Bengali literature can only avoid the trap of obscenity if it
is able to reform itself as a language. That language is central to Bankim’s project
of creating a Bengali reading public is evident given his role in standardizing
modern Bengali, but it becomes even more observable in his advice to the editors
of Bengali newspapers and periodicals in particular, and to writers in general.
To return to “Bānglār pāthak parāna brata,” part of the need for good periodical
literature for the Bengali reader is the cultivation of a simplified Bengali language
unencumbered by the academese of both Sanskrit and English.69 This language
should be “simple, beautiful,” capturing the way the average Bengali thinks, and
effortlessly leading him/her toward intellectual development.70 The language
Bankim chooses to denounce in this particular essay is that used by the learned
because, though it contains within itself only the illusion of learning, its very
nature alienates the popular reader. It reinforces the policies of “filter down”
education by privileging the elite, and restricting the reading public to just a
handful of well-educated readers.
The goal of the alternative language should be to ensure that it can be
read and comprehended by the masses, and convey information which the
readers can align themselves with. The specific emotion to be aroused by texts
written in this simplified form of Bengali is sahānubhūti, a word of Sanskrit
origin, literally translated as sympathy. Yet in this instance, sahānubhūti
implies not merely the sympathetic reader, but rather one who is accepting
of the content, and this feeling of acceptance can only be encouraged if the
language is accessible and inclusive. Bankim argues “why should the Bengali
be accepting of newspapers which provide them with news of German
politics” in language comprehensible only to the learned?71 To accept, then,
the moral and intellectual guidance provided by periodicals and good works
of literature, the reader must be addressed in an accessible language. The literal

69
On the face of it, this might appear to be a somewhat contradictory position for Bankim to occupy
given the persistent view that his Bengali is far too inflected with Sanskrit to be the language of the
common reader. However, it must be noted that till Rabindranath Tagore’s prose achieves popularity
at the turn of the twentieth century, Bankim’s Bengali is that standard for formal prose writing. The
speed at which Bankim’s prose becomes archaic, following his death in 1894, is itself worth further
exploration, but beyond the scope of this chapter. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, however,
the Bengali of Bangadarśan is supposed to set the standard Bankim wants other periodicals to
emulate.
70
Bankim, “Bānglār pāthak parāna brata,” 438, translation mine.
71
“Je sangbādpatra āche, tāhāte jarmmān desher rājnīti […] likhita thāke, tāhāte bāngālir sahānabhūti
kena janmibe.” “Bānglār Pāthak Parana Brata,” 437, translation mine.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 73

meaning of sahānubhūti, sympathy, is no less important given that Bankim

perceives the average Bengali reader to be an emotional subject, moved by the
Bengali language. As he says in “A Popular Literature for Bengal,” “[t]o me it
seems that a single great idea, communicated to the people of Bengal in their
own language, circulated among them in the language that alone touches their
hearts, vivifying and permeating the conception of all ranks, will work out
grander results than all that our English speeches and preachings will ever be
able to achieve.”72
This particular essay, while ostensibly examining traditions of popular Bengali
literature, draws attention to the language best suited for instigating in the
average reader a desire for, and an appreciation of, good literature. The allusion
to language sparking life in the reader is not an incidental one as it establishes a
contrast central to Bankim’s project of creating the modern Bengali language. The
language becomes the site where he reclaims the racial stereotype of the colonial
Bengali subject; like its users, the Bengali language is cast as more emotional and
sensuous than the hard alien rationality of English. It is not a language intended
for preaching and haranguing, but is rather the medium for creating literature
which can be appreciated by the modern Bengali subject. However, it is also
important for Bankim to distance this emergent form of Bengali from that used
by the early Bengali poets such as Jayadeva73 and Vidyapati,74 and establish the
moral superiority of the new language. The older kind of Bengali substantiates
the colonizer’s perception of the Bengali as an ineffectual race because by reading
works in that language—such as Gītagōvinda and Vidyāsundar—the Bengali
reader became a race lacking “manly feeling,” being instead “grossly sensual,”
“inactive,” and “incapable of comprehending any other class of conceptions
[than love songs]!”75 The obscene and constrictive language of popular Bengali
literature pulled the reader into the morass of “his hookah and his love-songs”
and prevented him/her from seeing beyond the binds of tradition.76 Unlike the
Bengali of Jayadeva and Vidyapati, the Bengali championed by Bankim permits

72
Bankim, “A Popular Literature for Bengal,” 97, Bankim Racanābalī.
73
A twelfth-century Sanskrit poet, most famous for the epic poem Gītagōvinda, describes Kṛiśna’s
love for Rādhā, while placing the latter as more important than Kṛiśna. For Bankim, this poem is
emblematic of the effeminacy engendered in the Bengali reader.
74
A fourteenth-century Sanskrit poet, also known for his corpus of love songs, praises the love
between Rādhā and Kṛiśna.
75
Bankim, “A Popular Literature for Bengal,” 98.
76
Ibid., 99.
74 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

its reader to align him/herself with the finer expressions of sentiment in the form
of aesthetically pleasing literature.
Yet if Bankim must distance himself from the crass Bengali of popular
literature, he needs to do the same with English. To that end, he decries
the absurd Anglicization of the middle- and upper-class Bengali in “The
Confessions of a Young Bengal.”77 Here his point of contention is their over-
reliance on English as the adopted language of the Bengali individual. The
talented writers of the Young Bengal movement are not inclined to write in
Bengali because it is “degrading for the dashing young Bengali who writes and
talks English like an Englishman, to be caught writing a Bengali book.”78 The
Bengali language, and by extension the common Bengali reader, is perceived
as vulgar and thus beneath the social standing of the Anglicized Bengali. In
charging the English-like Bengali of neglecting their mother tongue, Bankim
once again draws attention to the colonial stereotype symbolized by the Bengali
language. It is a vulgar language because it is so intimately wrapped up in the
very Hindu orthodoxies rejected by rational, Western science, and because it is
used by the common shopkeeper and the village zamindar with no aspirations
toward greatness. The Bengali fashioned by Bankim needs to compete with the
fashionable library of the Anglicized gentleman, and be capable of producing
literature as morally edifying as Tom Paine’s Age of Reason and as aesthetically
sound as the Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Even when a member of
Young Bengal writes in Bengali, Bankim argues, his sense of shame prevents
him from associating his name with the work, and so “many of [Bengal’s] best
books are anonymous.”79
Another interesting site on which the debate over linguistic superiority
plays out is the Bengali primer, and in particular one such primer written by
Bankim for the exclusive use of those Bengalis ill-trained in the art of writing
in the language. Sahaj Racanāśikkhā (An Easy Guide to Composition) is one
of two primers Bankim writes in a bid to train the Bengali author, and the
Advertisement to the text reveals the extent of Bankim’s concerns regarding an
accessible Bengali language. While the primer itself is written in Bengali, relying

77
The group known as the Young Bengal were mostly followers of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who
rebelled against orthodox Hindu traditions while embracing European Enlightenment thought as
the more rational and modern mode of being. A number of Young Bengal members later contributed
to what is commonly known as the Bengali Renaissance, and despite Bankim’s apparent critiques,
these same people produced some of the earliest forms of Bengali literature Bankim was to endorse.
78
Bankim, “A Popular Literature for Bengal,” 100.
79
Ibid.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 75

upon “no English model,” the Advertisement is in English, ostensibly to attract

even those students with very little experience in Bengali:
It is a standing reproach against the educated Bengali that he cannot write
in his mother tongue. The reproach has perhaps an application still more
forcible in the case of those who receive only an elementary education in the
Vernacular schools than in the case of their more educated brethren turned out
of the colleges … In the second chapter he [the writer, Bankim] has explained
the existing practice of the best writers under three heads, (1) Correctness,
(2) Precision, and (3) Perspicuity.80

The student of the vernacular schools is as important to the project as college-

educated Bengalis, because it is the former who is the common Bengali reader
for whom Bankim wishes to create a better class of literature. This student, unlike
their “more educated brethren,” would have received the kind of elementary
education advocated by Adam’s Report on Education and Walker’s experiments
in Agra Prison. By addressing the reader as a potential author, Bankim further
narrows the gap introduced by the colonial state’s educational policies, while
simultaneously encouraging the reader to understand the so-called behind-­
the-scenes of producing good literature. This second task becomes evident from
the description of the second chapter, alerting the reader/writer to the hallmarks
of good writing—not only must the language be grammatically correct, it must
also be precise and clear. Bankim demands the same qualities from editors of
newspapers and periodicals, and from authors writing in Bengali because, for
him, only by constructing itself as such can the Bengali language rid itself of the
vulgarity of popular Bengali, the fake learning of the Sanskrit pundits and the
foreign ways of the Anglicized Bengali.

IV. The Muslim Reader

In his untitled autobiography, Muhammad Reazuddin Ahmad laments that “they

[the Hindus] have plenty of newspapers. We [Muslims] have this one alone,”81
and so the latter must protect this newspaper at all costs. The newspaper in
question, Sudhākar began publication from 1889, and served as the mouthpiece

80
Bankim, “Advertisement,” Sahaj Racanāśikkhā.
81
From Reazuddin’s untitled autobiography as published in Sambad-sāmayikpatre unish śataker
bāngāli musalmān samāj, 655.
76 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

of those Bengali Muslims who felt their faith to be under threat from Christian
missionaries and Hindus seeking to convert poor, rural Muslim communities. It
also provided a space for Bengali Muslim readers where they found themselves
to be the primary audience. It is difficult to capture the pathos expressed by
Reazuddin, the editor of Sudhakar and a prominent late-nineteenth-century
journalist, in English; the phrase “ei ekkhāni mātra” (“this one alone”) reveals
a sense of desperation when coupled with the construction “tāhāder tōh anek
kāgaj āche” (they have plenty of newspapers). The word “tōh” emphasizes the
difference in the number of Hindu- and Muslim-run newspapers in Bengali,
suggesting not merely a numeric disparity but an unequal social situation
whereby the Muslims have to struggle to become a part of the Bengali literary
scene. While by the last two decades of the nineteenth century—the period
Reazuddin is referring to—Bengali Hindus not only have numerous newspapers
but have also incorporated printed periodicals as part of their quotidian life,
the Muslims continue to remain on the periphery of the literary scene with few
Bengali language publications, and an even more tenuous relationship with
printed texts in that language.
I emphasize the language of these publications because Bengali Muslims are
far from being novice print readers; they are part of a pan-Indian publishing
industry printing mostly Urdu and Persian texts, and occasionally Arabic ones as
well. From 1859 onwards, they publish letters and articles in Urdu in the wildly
popular Avadh Punch coming out of Lucknow and write fan letters to Ratan
Nath Sharashar in response to his Urdu novel Fasana-e Azad. The Avad Punch
based itself on a London weekly named Punch, and encouraged its subscribers
to actively rethink modes of social interaction via the medium of satirical pieces.
Meanwhile, we find Persian weeklies such as Aina-e-Sikander, edited by Moulvi
Sirajuddin Ahmed and published from Kolkata, often carrying advertisements
for new works of poetry in Urdu and Persian. These newspapers were part of a
developed reading practice serving as vehicles not just of news and opinion pieces,
but also a means to advertise new texts being published in Urdu and Persian.
For example, in the late 1820s, Aina-e-Sikander advertised Mirza Asadullah
Baig Khan’s, better known by his penname Mirza Ghalib, Gul-e-Raana, a book
of poetry supposedly curated by the poet at the personal request of Sirajuddin
Ahmed.82 Bengali Muslims were equally interested in political drama; the Urdu

82
For more on the Urdu print world in the nineteenth century, see Jennifer Dubrow’s Cosmopolitan
Dreams where she identifies a body of Urdu readers, both Hindu and Muslim, making up what she
terms a “Urdu cosmopolis” (2018).
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 77

newspaper Sultan ul Akhbar, also published from Kolkata and edited by Rajab
Ali, reported on the trial of Shamsuddin Khan, the Nawab of Loharu, in 1835,
openly accusing the British government of framing Shamsuddin for the murder
of the British agent in Delhi, William Fraser. When the First War of Indian
Independence broke out in 1857, Sultan ul Akhbar published letters from its
readers in Bengal supporting Bahadur Shah’s claim as the last Mughal emperor
of India.83 The “Gagging Act” passed by Charles Canning, the governor-general
of Bengal, in 1857 suppressed a number of these publications because not only
were they now required to obtain an official license but also forced to publish
nothing that would impugn the government. By the time the Vernacular Press
Act is passed in 1878, Persian and Urdu publications, as with other vernacular
publications, have the choice to either convert to English (as Amritbazar Patrika
does) or be severely limited in the content they can publish. Regardless of these
restrictions, there continue to be numerous periodicals in Persian and Urdu
throughout the nineteenth century in Bengal, supplementing a huge body of
literary texts in these languages.
The examples mentioned above touch only the tip of the well-established
network of periodicals and literary texts being published in Urdu and Persian
from Kolkata and other parts of British India from the early 1820s onwards.84
They also suggest that Bengali Muslims were avid readers in the nineteenth
century, who actively shaped the literary scene, had well-developed aesthetic
and political tastes, and read a wide variety of material, including subscription-
based periodicals. How then do we understand Reazuddin’s next comment, a few
lines down from the first one in his autobiography, blaming this same reader for
not knowing how to be a participant in a print economy? Following the initial
financial struggles of the journal, Reazuddin hands the rights to Sudhākar over
to Nawab Sirajul Islam, but within six months of this, the magazine goes under.
Reazuddin claims this closure happens because the new owner stopped the
system of using agents to promote subscription numbers and collect dues. The
owner, says Reazuddin, “forgot that Muslims are new travellers on this road [of
becoming readers and subscribers], they needed to be forced into becoming

83
The history of Persian and Urdu newspapers is a complex and fascinating one, draws as it does
on the tradition of akhbar navees or news reporter from the Mughal court. While this history is
unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter, it is a subject dealt with at length by scholars such
as Dubrow, Maryam Wasif Khan in her Who Is a Muslim (2021), and Margrit Perneau’s “The Delhi
Urdu Akhbar” (2003).
84
That Bengali Hindus read the Persian texts as well is evident from the first Persian periodical, Mirat
ul Akhbar, founded in Kolkata by Raja Rammohan Roy in 1822.
78 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

subscribers.”85 From his autobiography—and indeed from the remarks of other

Bengali Muslim thinkers of the late nineteenth century such as Syed Nawab
Ali Chowdhury and Mearajuddin Ahmed—we find a very different picture of
the reader when compared to the reader of Urdu and Persian. When it comes
to Bengali, Muslim readers appear to be novices in every way; they do not
know the importance of subscribing so as to keep a periodical alive, they have
very few options when it comes to reading material in Bengali generated by
their community, and seem to not really know how to read. In fact, Nawab
Ali Chowdhury feels the Bengali Muslim to be backward enough as a reader
to need a separate literary society, Bangiya Sāhitya Bisayinī Mussalmān Samitī
(Muslim Society on the Subject of Bengali Literature), where they can be
trained to read and discuss Bengali literature. This society, founded in 1899, is
eventually merged with the better-known Bangiya Mussalmān Sāhitya Samitī
(Bengali Muslim Literary Society) a decade later in 1911, but even then, the
tenor of discussions remains similar to those voiced by Reazuddin, nearly
twenty years prior.86
Thus, if the Hindus feel the need to define reading as a means of moving away
from the popular and the vulgar, and the British seek to restrict reading to a
means of acquiring basic literacy, Muslims aim to place on reading the burden
of clearing a space for themselves in a literary scene that is explicitly Hindu and
actively exclusionist. For the Muslim intelligentsia, learning to read and write in
Bengali, then, is a new activity fashioned as being uninformed by their fluency
in foreign languages such as Urdu or Persian. They approach the Muslim reader
as the tabula rasa on which they can imprint a familiarity with and a preference
for Bengali such that by reading Bengali, this reader can insert themselves into
a Bengali identity. That this identity is either overtly Muslim or at the very least
rid of its Hindu underpinnings becomes evident in a range of texts, including
periodicals such as Islām Pracārak, also edited by Reazuddin, and Hitakarī,
edited by Mir Mosharraf Hossain, and in the first Bengali Muslim novels by
Hossain. As a conclusion to this chapter, I would like to examine a few examples
from Islām Pracārak, Sudhākar, and Hitakarī to understand how the Muslim
intelligentsia seeks to cultivate Muslim readers of Bengali. It is worth stating
here that Reazuddin—and thus the two periodicals edited by him—is politically

85
Sangbad-samayikpatre Unish Shataker Bangali Muslim Samaj, 655.
86
The very first issue of the Samiti’s journal, Bangiya Mussalman Sahitya Patrika, for example, begins
by noting the lack of literature being produced by Muslim authors, and sets itself up to rectify this
problem.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 79

at odds with Mosharraf Hossain’s Hitakarī. I allude to this difference briefly in

the following discussion, and take it up more fully in Chapter 4.
Founded in 1891, Islām Pracārak billed itself as a journal contributing
to progress in the fields of Islamic religious and social norms, history, and
literature.87 The name of the publication translates to “The Announcer of Islam,”
thereby underscoring its identity as a venue for and by Muslims. The journal
had to stop publication in 1893 owing to a lack of funds, and when it restarted
in 1899, the editor Reazuddin saw fit to preface the first of the new issues with
a warning to potential readers. The first iteration of Islām Pracārak, Reazuddin
claims, ran aground partly because of the faults of the owners and managers,
but mostly because of a lack of indulgence on the part of the subscribers. He
thus pleads with potential readers to pay their subscription fees in advance and
stop misbehaving as readers.88 The “durbyabahār” or bad behavior of readers/
subscribers does not stop at non-payment of fees; those belonging to the upper
classes (“bara lōk”) are negligent enough to give their employees the money and
never follow up to check where the money has been spent, while others are swayed
by these same employees who urge them to spend their money elsewhere. The
middle-class intelligentsia suffer either from an aversion to Bengali newspapers
(if they are Anglophiles) or, if they do read in Bengali, they would rather spend
their time debating which periodical is better than the other, rather than actually
reading the publications. Reazuddin continues to list the ways in which Bengali
Muslims are incompetent readers, sometimes dividing them up according to
class, sometimes according to linguistic preference, and sometimes according
to a preference for Hindu newspapers, but always as individuals who only know
how to read superficially. The result of these bad reading habits is the creation of
a group who cannot separate literary productions from other commodities, and
are thus stuck in a cycle of trying to achieve petty gains by cheating newspaper
editors of subscription fees.89
The preface continues to berate the Bengali Muslim for being bad readers
even as it weds good reading habits with correct Islamic behavior. In this it
moves away from Hindu Bengali or British examples of reading as a way to
cultivate morality as both couch the ethical position in secular rhetoric. Islām
Pracārak, however, is explicit in urging its readers to be good readers so as to be

87
The journal’s subheading provides this description, which also serves as its mission statement.
88
“Atma-nibedan,” Islām Pracārak, July 21, 1899.
89
Ibid.
80 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

good Muslims—bad reading practices indicate a failure to perform the tenets of

the faith, good ones suggest that one is a good Muslim in every sphere of life.
Seen from this perspective, the refusal to pay fees or be negligent in checking
whether or not they have been paid is un-Islamic:
Such cheating is a deeply unpleasant act for Muslims. Remember how ghastly
the consequences are according to the shastras (here referring to the teachings
of Islam). Is it a matter of little contempt and shame to come under the sway of
petty greed and perform such unfair acts? … As it is, the condition of our society
is deplorable, on top of it if the avenues of such cheating and embezzlement are
thus widened, the foundation of society will be totally loosened, and everyone
should remember this.90

The emotionally heightened register used by Reazuddin works in this context

precisely because it is adopting the tone of a sermon, thereby converting proper
reading into a moral act sanctioned by religion. The author’s missionary zeal
places on the reader the responsibility of holding together the social fabric, and
of ensuring that Muslim society does not sink any further into ignominy. The
very few who are both educated and socially conscious are called on to not only
read and write in Bengali—so as to set an example for the others—but also to
convince these delinquents in a simple manner (“saral bhābe”) and return them
to the path of righteousness (“sōjā pathe”).91
Toward the end of the preface, however, one notes a curious return to the idea
of a pan-Indian reading community which draws on the practices engendered
by Persian and Urdu. Thus far in the text there is no mention of either language,
or an awareness that Bengali Muslims might be readers, competent or otherwise,
of other literary traditions. The last page and a half initially moves toward a
community outside Bengal by suggesting first that “inhabitants of Europe
and America” have succeeded in progressing through their own efforts, and
Muslims will be able to do the same as well.92 In order to accomplish this task,
Islām Pracārak promises to publish not only religious works but include a wide
range of texts from travel narratives to lives of great people, reminding us of
the periodical’s mission statement. Having reiterated the publication’s goals,
Reazuddin asserts that this course of action will ensure the magazine has at least
10,000 readers in “wider Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Chotanagpur (Jharkhand and

90
“Atma-nibedan,” Islām Pracārak, July 21, 1899, translation mine.
91
Ibid.
92
Ibid.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 81

Bihar) and Bramha Desh (Myanmar).”93 The locations he identifies are not the
major sites within a Urdu-Persian literary community, but the gesture is based
on the understanding that Bengali Muslims are part of discursive networks
that extend far beyond Bengal.94 The implicit acknowledgment that this group
of readers have traditionally been readers of other language traditions allows
Reazuddin to remind his readers that they do know how to read, perhaps
just not in Bengali. What is equally interesting about the places he names is
that this region has historically been identified as part of a greater Bengal,
an affiliation which in modern Indian history has been one of violence, with
Bengal being the aggressor. So Reazuddin effects a merger of two seemingly
contradictory entities—an Indian aesthetic and intellectual network driven
by Islam and founded on Persian and Urdu, with an idea of a greater Bengal
united by a common Sanskritic language mutually intelligible to inhabitants of
eastern India.95 Bengali Muslims are thus given access to both these worlds, and
encouraged to believe that they can draw on their experience of reading in the
Persianate world so as to develop a practice unique to them in Bengal. As one
continues to flip through the title page of issue after issue of Islām Pracārak,
one finds this principle of combining both worlds guiding the contents. The
larger Islamic realm appears in the form of Muslims of Liverpool and China,
Shibli Nomani’s travel through what is today the Middle East, and translations in
Bengali of Persian and Urdu texts, while greater Bengal returns through essays
such as “Banga o Bihār biśay” (“On the Subject of Bengal and Bihar”) and “Banga
o Bihār bijay” (“Conquering Bengal and Bihar”).
While Reazuddin’s Islām Pracārak draws on the Bengali Muslim reader’s
familiarity with reading as part of a trans-regional group, Mosharraf Hossain’s
Hitakarī adopts the opposite approach by making his journal intensely local. In
Hitakarī we find reports from various parts of rural Bengal including the districts
of Nadia, Tangail, and Krishnanagar, with a particular focus on the villages
within mahakumā96 Kushtia, where the journal is based. When the periodical

93
Ibid.
94
In texts by Bengali Hindu, there are frequent references to regions outside Bengal within similar
contexts, but there the tendency is to see other places not a site containing Bengali readers but
as part of a world that will gradually come to know Bengal. Bankim’s letters to Shambucharan
Mukherjee, the editor of Mukherjee’s Magazine, is a prominent example of this, as are several essays
in the collected works of Aurobindo Ghosh. A similar note is struck by Bhudeb Mukhopadhay’s
historical works, and the list can be proliferated ad infinitum.
95
Sudipta Kaviraj provides an eloquent discussion of this linguistic tradition in several works,
including “Perfumed by the Past.”
96
An administrative subdivision within a district.
82 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

is launched in 1890, it is backed by Mosharraf Hossain’s considerable literary

fame as the first Bengali Muslim novelist, and he re-serializes his most popular
novel Biśād Sindhu in Hitakarī to boost its sales, but the editorial focus remains
on rural news. Thus, each issue contains reports on the effect of weather on
crops, on criminal and civil cases heard by the local courts, and on the tensions
between landlords and peasants. Literate peasants and those belonging to rural
lower classes are the publication’s target audience, with occasional references to
concerned middle-class citizens who would be interested in the former group as
their hitakarī or well-wisher. Regardless of whether the reader is an agricultural
worker suffering from the effects of a drought and negligent landlords, or a
well-wisher, they are part of a tightly knit rural community. To emphasize this
sense of kinship, reports frequently refer not just to specific villages by name,
but to individual villagers affected by events. Thus we hear of Macchlib Sabaj
Ali and Rajchandra Saha from the village of Balla in Tangail district who lost
their homes to a cyclone in late May 1890,97 and of Sabdal Sekh from near
Kushtia who is being tried at the Sessions court98 for killing his wife but the
man might be mad.99 Recounting events from everyday life with such attention
to details while simultaneously not sensationalizing them turns reading into a
quotidian act; even if one does not know the people named personally, they are
presented as members of the reader’s community, coming from the same locales
as the reader and inhabiting the same conditions. Even when such harbingers
of distance as trains are mentioned, the context is local; for example, the editor
reports of having received news from Madanpur Station, belonging to Eastern
Bengal Railways, that had there not been intense rains in 1889, the region would
have produced ample jute and rice.100 The train is instrumental in bringing the
news to the reader, but the reader is reassured that this news is about a context
intensely familiar.
Mosharraf Hossain includes both Hindus and Muslims as his readers, by
sometimes including news and opinion pieces explicitly addressing the plight
of peasants of both communities, and at other times by judiciously choosing
whose names to mention in the reports, as evidenced by the cyclone story
mentioned above. However, that this is a journal meant for Bengali Muslims

97
Hitakarī, July 13, 1890, p. 39.
98
The highest criminal court in a district.
99
“Sthāniya sangbād ō mantabya” (“Local news and comments”), Hitakarī, July 30, 1890, p. 59.
100
Hitakarī, July 13, 1890, p. 39.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 83

becomes evident from the very first issue when the “Editor’s Remarks”
includes two pieces of significance. The first is a report on the number of
Muslim students who cleared 1789 Entrance Exam vis-à-vis the number of
Hindu students. This exam which allowed students entry into the final years
of school leading to presumably a college had become a requirement by the
end of the nineteenth century for most educated middle-class Bengalis as it
offered the promise of social and financial stability. As Mosharraf Hossain
notes, however, that out of a total of 2,642 students who cleared the Entrance,
only 174 are Muslims, even though there are nearly as many Muslims in the
region as Hindus. The brief report continues to lament the Bengali Muslim’s
lack of ambition and education in a tone that includes the reader as part of
the Muslim community, and perhaps even one of these students who are not
realizing how they are harming their own interests. The second text alerting
us to the identity of the journal’s intended audience comes in the form of a
response to a letter to the editor. This letter written anonymously by a “janaik
Musalmān” or “a Muslim person”—also included in the same issue—calls
out the Hindu periodical Bangabhāsi for referring to Muslims as “mlechha”
(lit. non-Hindu but used as a slur to demean someone whose practices are
unclean). Mosharraf Hossain gladly welcomes (ādare grahan) this letter,
arguing on its behalf because Muslims are not the true unclean or mleccha.
The term should be used for those who are truly unclean, he continues, the
“Kōl, Bhīl, Cōwār, Bunō, Bāgdī,”101 but not the Muslims are part of a united
Hindustan (India).102
What is notable in the inclusion of these texts, and in reinforcing the
status of the local in the journal is Mosharraf Hossain’s positioning of the
Bengali Muslim reader as someone who is a concerned citizen, capable of
both bemoaning the fate of their community and defending its honor against
Hindu onslaughts. This is a reader who wishes to be informed of local news
and, unlike Reazuddin’s reader, is already a competent reader who is part of a
reading practice spanning Kushtia’s tiny villages and Kolkata’s bustling Kolutala
neighborhood. This familiarity with the local community, when coupled with
the reader’s knowledge of Kolkata-based weeklies such as Bangadarśan, creates

101
Each of these terms refers to specific indigenous communities within Bengal. Mosharraf Hossain
placing them together, almost indiscriminately, as examples of the truly unclean refers to the
prejudices held by caste Hindus and upper-class Muslims.
102
“Sampādakiya mantabya” (“Editor’s notes”), Hitakarī, June 28, 1890, pp. 24–5, translation mine.
84 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

the image of someone who is already a part of Bengal and can thus claim a
natural affinity with the Bengali Hindu reader and their practices of reading.
While Mosharraf Hossain’s Bengali Muslim reader reads in Urdu and uses that
language in conjunction with Bengali,103 they are equally comfortable reading
detailed discussions of Sanskritized Bengali grammar.104 Thus in Hitakarī we see
less a need to claim a special practice of reading for Bengali Muslims and more
an assertion that as Bengalis, these readers already know how to read. They are
drawn toward the plight of their community which is acknowledged as being
marginalized, but even this emotional affiliation does not take away from their
overarching affiliation with Bengal as a whole. The Bengali Muslim’s knowledge
of Urdu is proclaimed as a part of their communal identity, but even here, a
kinship relation between Bengali and Urdu is asserted, with the former being
the Bengali’s mātribhāśā or mother tongue and the latter being a bhrātribhāśā
or brother tongue.105 This insertion of the reader into the fold of the average
or sādhāran Bengali accords the reader all of the reading knowledge already
acquired by the Bengali (Hindu), removing the need to cultivate a different way
of teaching this reader to read.
The push and pull between the local and the global, and reading properly
in order to be a good Muslim, are all concerns made explicit in Mosharraf
Hossain’s novel Biśād Sindhu.106 What they demonstrate is the struggle faced by
the Bengali Muslim in recasting the Bengali language—and by induction, the
literature written in it—as one that can belong to both Hindus and Muslims.
Thus it is not enough that authors such as Mosharraf Hossain and Reazuddin
describe the relationship between the text and the Muslim individual, but that
they do so while resisting the conflation of Bengali with Hindu. The Hindu
nature of standard Bengali becomes evident when one notes the indignance of
readers of Hitakarī at the inclusion of “musalmānī kathā” in otherwise chaste
Bengali, and this reveals the ways in which Bengali Muslims are systematically
deemed alien to their own language. In a larger sense, this equating of Bengali

103
I refer here to Mosharraf Hossain’s response to a letter to the editor from the July 2, 1891, issue in
which the journal is accused of allowing “Musalmāni kathā” or “Muslim words” (Urdu, Arabic) in
articles and news reports. I discuss the question in detail in Chapter 4.
104
Notable examples are the review of Chandrakumar Lahiri’s textbook of Sanskrit grammar, Byakaran
klahār (November 1890), and several discussions of the state of India and the relationship between
Hindus and Muslims.
105
Refer to Chapter 4.
106
A topic I take up in Chapter 4 as well.
 Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers 85

with Hindu leads to the secularization of Hinduism whereby Hindu Bengali

becomes “Bengali” with Hindu being the unspoken, neutral norm. It is only
when one traces the various ways in which the act of reading is conceived in
nineteenth-century Bengal that the contours of this secularization become
visible. In looking at the Bengali Muslim’s relationship with the text one finds,
then, the need to control not just what reading means, but to define what being
Bengali means.
86
 2

Becoming a Reader: Letters, Reviews, and

Memories of Reading

I. Claiming Durgeśnandinī: The Anglicists

and the Sanskritists

In a remarkable passage in his essay “Bankimcandra o Dinabandhu”

(“Bankimchandra and Dinabandhu”), Purnachandra Chattopadhyay writes of
the first time Durgeśnandinī was presented before an audience. As the first Bengali
novel, Durgeśnandinī occupies a near-mythic position in the history of Bengali
literature, with Purnachandra’s account contributing actively to the project of
eulogizing the novel and its author, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. The event
occurs toward the end of 1864, when Bankim gathers in his Kanthalpara home
friends, fellow intellectuals, and Sanskrit pundits from Bhatpara,1 and reads to
them from the manuscript of his first novel. The story is part of Purnachandra’s
attempts at mythologizing Bankim as the literary center of nineteenth-century
Bengali intellectual life, as the former narrates the latter’s prowess in both
Sanskrit alamkāra śāstras2 and English literature.3 The reading lasts two days,
and such is its mesmeric power that members of the audience addicted to
tobacco forget to call for their hourly dose of the hookah. For Purnachandra,
the narrative serves to establish his own literary credentials as an insider to the
social circles within which the Bengali novel was being born, and it also allows
him to bolster the figure of Bankim as a founder of modern Bengal’s cultural and
intellectual milieu. The anecdotal quality of the account peels back the curtain
as it were, giving us a peek into an intimate social scene, led by Bankim the
celebrity novelist who had doubts initially about his own merits as an author,

1
Locality in Bengal known for being a seat of Sanskrit learning.
2
Treatises and rules on literary aesthetics.
3
“Bankimcandra o Dinabandhu,” 44 (1922), translation mine.
88 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

but whose doubts were quelled by the unanimous and vociferous praise received
from this first, and only, reading from his manuscript.4
My interest in the event, however, has little to do with either the ins and outs
of nineteenth-century Bengali literary society, or the self-aggrandizing narrative
of this intelligentsia. Rather, I wish to focus on two things that Purnachandra
glosses over somewhat briefly—Bankim performs a reading of the novel, and this
is the only time he ever conducts such a performance, or allows readers access
to his manuscripts. Purnachandra, as a member of this audience, confesses that
he so engrossed by the path (oral performance of reading) that he fails to notice
whether the Sanskrit pundits opened their snuff boxes or not. Similarly, an
elderly gentleman in the audience cannot help loudly exclaim his appreciation
of Bankim’s prowess as a speaker. Such is the power of Bankim reading from the
manuscript that both literate and illiterate members of the audience are held
spellbound for the entire duration of the performance; thus those able to read,
and those accustomed to hearing texts being read out loud both feel included
in this event.5 The sitting room of Bankim’s ancestral home hosts what can only
be called an inauspicious beginning for the Bengali novel reader, as the reader
is turned into an audience before they can perform the act of novel reading; not
only are some of them incapable of reading a text, but all of them are positioned
as srōtā (listeners) rather than as pāthak (readers) as Bankim reads to them.
Purnachandra explains the event as a novice author desiring to know everyone’s
opinion because “perhaps at that time, he had not yet developed the confidence
in his own ability to write.”6
But what if we move away from the cult of celebrity authors and Purnachandra’s
obsessive focus on his talented brother? What if we jettison this obsession which
later scholars of both Bankim and the Bengali novel share with Purnachandra?
Doing so, we find, allows us to return Durgeśnandinī to the practices of readings
shaped by a network of individuals and institutions including readers, reviewers,
publishers, distributors, and periodicals. The Bengali novel was not born and
championed by Bankim singlehandedly, as Purnachandra would have us
believe, but rather the author was one part of the practice of reading that ensured
Durgeśnandinī’s financial and literary success. The history of the Bengali novel

4
Purnachandra is at pains to remind us that Bankim never lets readers see a manuscript version of his
novels after Durgeśnandinī, let alone read out from it “Bankimcandra o Dinabandhu,” 41–2.
5
“Bankim o Dinabandhu,” Bankim Prasanga, 43.
6
Ibid.
 Becoming a Reader 89

can thus be repositioned from the perspective of its readers, and the genre be
wrested from the mythic influences of a founding figure. My reading of the
anecdote has less to do with Bankim’s anxieties as a new novelist, and more with
the practice of reading novels. What Bankim performs is an absence of a reading
practice, and through this performance, a desire to inaugurate the same. The
genre at its moment of inception has neither an identifiable practice of reading
nor readers; no one knows how to read a Bengali novel because Durgeśnandinī
is the first of its kind. Purnachandra’s story makes available for us that unique
moment in Bengali literary history when an absence is made visible, but this
absence is a site of rich possibilities, and a site which Bankim attempts to define
by sending out in the world the novel and his literal reading of the text. This
performance, as with any oral performance, lends a cadence to the text that
provides (burdens?) his audience-readers with an additional layer of meaning—
one which would have been absent had they been merely given the manuscript or
the print version of the novel. This point is worth stressing particularly because
of the composition of the audience attending this initial reading. A large portion
of them are Sanskrit pundits, specifically trained in orality and the arts of shruti
and smriti, of listening and memorization, for whom how the text is read out
loud is a significant interpretive tool. Bankim, then, can be seen as assuming
the role of the pāthśālā guru (teacher at a traditional Hindu school) imparting
to his pupils a method of reading the text. Durgeśnandinī is thus sent out into
the world carrying not only the weight of being the first of its kind, but also of
having to usher into existence a novel practice of reading.
That Bankim is conscious of the kind of reading he is performing—and thereby
sanctioning—becomes evident when at the end of the reading, he asks some of
the Bhatpara pundits, including Madhusudhan Smritiratna and Chandranath
Bidyaratna, whether they noticed the grammatical flaws in the novel’s language,
to which they both reply that the narrative’s mesmerizing powers cover any
linguistic flaws.7 Contained in this brief exchange are the seeds of what I call
a Sanskritist reading practice, a practice seeking to align Bankim’s linguistic
and thematic choices with classical Sanskrit aesthetic traditions. However, soon
after Durgeśnandinī is published, Bankim earns the sobriquet of the “Scott of
Bengal” which suggests that not all readers shared the practices of the Sanskrit
pundits, and that there existed alongside the Sanskritist yet another practice of
reading, which here I term Anglicist owing to its affinity for European aesthetic

7
Ibid.
90 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

models.8 As the reviews of the novel reveal, the readers in Bengal carved for
themselves two distinct identities based on the reading practice they affiliated
themselves with, and both remained as robust, viable avenues till the first few
years of the twentieth century at which point the Anglicist practice becomes the
dominant—and perhaps only available—practice of reading, given the violence
of colonial modernity. What is interesting, then, about the first four decades of
the Bengali novel’s life are the negotiations between reviewers, readers, politico-
cultural institutions such as periodicals and official policies, and Bhatpara
or England as centers of learning. The Sanskritist and the Anglicist reading
practices occur in the flux between these entities as each practice wants to claim
the novel and its future for itself.
For the Anglicists, reading Durgeśnandinī and subsequent Bengali novels in
the mold of the English version of the genre is both an appropriative and an
aspirational act. They wish to claim the philosophical and aesthetic principles
of the Enlightenment for Bengali and texts produced in that language. More
often than not, the Anglicist reading practice rejects any easy association with
the English language—in fact, if one looks at Aurobindo Ghosh’s response to the
Bengali novel, the term Anglicist is to be abjured simply because it represents
an uncritical Anglophilia—choosing to focus instead on Bengali as a language
capable of imbibing the civilizational qualities embodied by English. These
readers harbor a reformist attitude toward Bengali and frequently praise Bankim
for experimenting with the same. As they read in Durgeśnandinī the presence
of European influences, they admire the novelist’s ability to shear Bengali of
its conservative and vulgar Sanskrit past, and raise it to the level of a modern
world (read, Western) language. The similarities in plot between Durgeśnandinī
and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe—the source of Bankim’s literary epithet—become
symptomatic of Bankim’s talents, and of the reader’s ability to appreciate that
talent and recognize its source in the West. It is this recognition that I call
aspirational; the reader aspires to recognize the novel written in the new Bengali
language as a worthy counterpart to its English/European (the distinction is
frequently dissolved) version, and at the same time the reader aspires to be seen
as someone who can confidently make this connection. This recognition, on

8
While there are obvious casteist and classist implications to these terms—and indeed implications
that some of Bankim’s readers adhere to—I use these terms to refer to the literary and aesthetic
paradigms within which readers read these novels, rather than suggesting an identity for the readers
themselves. In other words, to read as a Sanskritist, in this argument, does not necessitate that the
reader be a caste Hindu but rather that they read within the framework made available by Sanskrit
literary traditions.
 Becoming a Reader 91

which the Anglicist reading practice is founded, derives from the negotiations
among different entities mentioned above. It is nurtured by a desire to situate
Bengal and England as civilizational counterparts, and manifested in English
language periodicals such as The Hindu Intelligencer edited by Kashiprasad
Ghosh, and cultural institutions such as the Vernacular Literature Society. If the
journal allows the Bengali bhadralōk9 to imagine himself as part of a literary
tradition that extended from Europe to India, the literary society supports that
same imagination by inserting railway timetables alongside images of Hindu
gods and goddesses in almanacs. The Anglicist reading practice, born amidst
these entities, thus places East and West in a continuum, even as this lineage is
sometimes a matter of comfort and pride and at others a source of considerable
anxiety for the Anglicist reader.
As against this, there exists the Sanskritist practice, which too perceives
Bengal as part of a literary and civilizational tradition, but in this instance
that heritage is classical Sanskrit and a Hindu past, rather than England and
the Enlightenment. For the Sanskritist reader, the practice of reading hinges
simultaneously on Bengali’s ability to form itself into a modern language within
the limits of Sanskrit grammar, and on the reader’s lived knowledge of Sanskrit.10
The latter is worth stressing as the Sanskritist reading practice consciously
distances itself from the conservatism and narrow pedanticism of Sanskrit
pundits.11 The gatekeeping and rule-bound nature of Sanskrit pundits is seen as
stifling the natural exuberance of Bengali and inhibiting the language’s progress.
The Sanskrit that is desired, then, is something of a paradox—it is the ideal,
classical version of the language, untainted by the pettiness of grammarians, but
it is also the Sanskrit made familiar by everyday use in mantras and epics. As
Akshaychandra Sarkar12 remarks, the Bengali of Bankim touches the reader’s
heart because it jettisons the pretentions of rigid Sanskrit while affiliating itself
with a more effortless, lived version of the language that is evident in the works
of only the best Sanskrit poets such as Kalidas. However, if the Sanskritist

9
Middleclass gentleman.
10
It is also worth noting here that the Sanskritist reading practice would also be more familiar with
the manuscript or the punthi form of the text. However, owing to the growth of the print industry in
Bengal, particularly of the battalā book market, the printed text would have become more common
than the punthi for the average reader. In many cases, the print text would have mimicked the form
of the punthi, including layout and font, to attract readers. For more on this see the Introduction.
11
I base my reading here on Purnachandra’s comments regarding the distinction between the more
liberal Sanskritists and the more conservative pundits.
12
Nineteenth-century Bengali literary critic and editor.
92 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

reader needs to keep the narrow-minded pundit at bay, the same must be done
to those authors propagating a vulgar iteration of the vernacular. The price of
wresting the language away from the clutches of the grammarians is protecting
it from its natural tendency to devolve into the obscene and the erotic, a
tendency born of the lack of good literature in Bengali. This simultaneous
affiliation with an idealized high Sanskrit and a rejection of low, vulgar uses
of Bengali functions under the larger umbrella of resisting the appropriation
of Bengali by those wishing to Anglicize the language. This linguistic push and
pull through which the newly emerging genre of the novel is perceived is the
Sanskritist reading practice performed by readers such as Akshaychandra and
Jogendranath Bidyabhushan.13 This reading practice is formed at the confluence
of colonial policymakers and educationists such as Charles Treveleyan and
William Adam,14 the Bramho Samaj,15 and its various affiliate bodies such as the
Tatwabodhinī Patrikā, and the Sanskrit pundits of established seats of learning
such as Bhatpara, Nabadwip, Harinavi, and Rajpur.16 Bound up in this Sanskritist
reading practice is also a desire to reform Hinduism such that it can return to
its true roots, long obscured by pedants, but also rid itself of those aspects of the
religion deemed oppressive and superstitious by the reformists. That a single
genre and its readers can carry such ideological weight is remarkable but such is
the reach and flexibility of a reading practice that is able to accommodate all of
the elements engaged in articulating this Bengali Hindu identity.
The ideological power of the novel and the surrounding non-novelistic
discourse is perhaps the most addressed subject in the context of nineteenth-
century Bengali literary history. This chapter—as indeed this book—is not an
addition to that body of scholarship. Rather, at stake for this chapter is to isolate
the moment when two competing reading practices become viable avenues
for the Bengali novel reader, and in thus pinpointing the start of the Anglicist/
Sanskritist debate to lay bare their various moving parts. An interesting
consequence of this approach is that it simultaneously reveals those elements
of a reading practice which later congeal into an ideologically charged narrative
and which perceive the Bengali novel as its most creative articulation. The
particular narrative I refer to here is that of nation building and the mythos

13
Editor of Aryadarśan, a Bengali periodical aligned with Bramho ideals.
14
I discuss Treveleyan later in this chapter while Adam is discussed at length in Chapter 1 of this work.
15
A Hindu reformist movement founded by Rammohan Roy.
16
For a detailed examination of areas of Sanskrit learning in early colonial Bengal, see Trina Das’
“Sanskrit Learning in Bengal under Foreign Invasion and British Rule” (2018).
 Becoming a Reader 93

of the novel reader as entering into subjecthood through the act of reading.
Bankim and Durgeśnandinī, and later most of the novelist’s other works, have
been traditionally read as central to the project of imagining the new Indian
nation, and to say that this is a dominant line in Bankim scholarship would
be an understatement. This attention to Bankim and the subsequent influence
exerted by his novels on the history of the novel in India have led most English
language scholarship on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian novels
to see the genre as principally associated with nationalist discourses. Alongside
this, it is undeniable that each of the individuals studied in this chapter is a
significant contributor to the idea of the nation, and thus it is not surprising
that the Bengali novel and its readers and critics are absorbed into a nationalist
vision. What is unfortunate is the pervasiveness of the narrative of nationhood,
both in early-twentieth-century thinkers and in later postcolonial scholars, such
that it overshadows other interests and agendas present in practices of novel
reading in nineteenth-century Bengal. That the Bengali novel is part of several
robust reading practices most of which concern themselves with matters entirely
unrelated to constructing the Indian nation becomes evident when looking at
the literary history of Durgeśnandinī. The Sanskritist and the Anglicist reading
practice strives to become the definitive practice of reading for the modern
Bengali reader, but as the following sections demonstrate, their desire to do
so ranges from ensuring global visibility for the Bengali language to bolstering
Bankim’s superstar status to demonstrating one’s love for a Sanskritized Bengali
despite its many grammatical anomalies. I take seriously the idea that readers,
reviewers, journal editors, British civil servants, social reformers, and Bengali
novels engage with each other in multifaceted, often messy, ways, and to reduce
this to any singular interpretive frame is to lose sight of the various meanings
held by the Bengali novel during the first few decades of its life.
One final note before embarking on an examination of these two reading
practices: I base my argument on two related sets of documents—published
reviews of Bankim’s novels (primarily of Durgeśnandinī though by no means
exclusively) and first-hand recollections of reading and encountering these
novels written and published by Bankim’s contemporaries. The second group
of essays, written over a period of about ten years after Bankim’s death in 1894,
couch their reviews of his novels in predominantly eulogistic prose, but are the
more interesting of the two sets because of the way they draw authority for their
readings from their authors’ personal relationships with Bankim. The figure
of the novelist prescribing a specific kind of reading appears frequently in the
94 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

recollections, and as such, becomes the counterpoint to the readings performed

by the essays themselves, Purnachandra’s anecdotal narrative, with which I begin
this chapter being a case in point. The following section analyzes the reviews
and essays to examine the Anglicist reading practice, while the final section
addresses its Sanskritist counterpart.

II. Reading Bankim as the “Scott of Bengal”

One of the earliest epithets Bankim earns is the “Scott of Bengal,” owing to the
uncanny resemblances his readers notice between Durgeśnandinī and Walter
Scott’s Ivanhoe. The moniker long outlives both the novelist and the popularity
gained by his novels, and marks a peculiar strand in Bankim scholarship—that
of proving or disproving the validity of the claims made by some of his earliest
readers that Ivanhoe is indeed the source text being imitated by Durgeśnandinī.
As one of the first examples of the novel in Bengali, Durgeśnandinī marks the
moment when the genre becomes available to Bengali readers in English and in
Bengali, thus widening its reach in the region. The story of the genre’s importation
into Bengal is by now a well-rehearsed one, thanks to the herculean effort of book
historians such as Priya Joshi and Anindita Ghosh, to name only two. The “British
novel of ‘serious standards’” is initially introduced in nineteenth-century India by
the Imperial government “as a means of propagating and legitimating Englishness
in the colony,”17 but the genre comes to be the figurehead of more than the British
civilizing mission. It contains within itself an aspiration toward what is represented
by an English identity, and this aspirational nature leads newly imported novels to
be read well outside the educational frame mandated by the Imperial state.
As lending library records and trade figures of book imports show, by the
second half of the nineteenth century the novel outstrips all other forms of
fictional and non-fictional texts in English.18 The bulk of the novels made their
way to the two Presidency19 towns of Kolkata and Mumbai which seem to be
the obvious choice given their proximity to colonial rule and, as a consequence,
openness to Anglicization.20 Kolkata as the site of some of the earliest experiments

17
Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India, 4 (2002).
18
Joshi, 38–41.
19
Administrative division in British India referring to the three major metropolitan areas, Calcutta,
Madras, and Bombay.
20
See Introduction and Chapter 1 of this work.
 Becoming a Reader 95

in Anglophone education had sufficient numbers of English language readers to

see a sharp rise in the number of public and private libraries stocking novels.
Lending libraries such as the Calcutta Public Library (later renamed the Imperial
Library, and then the National Library of India post-Independence) supplied
the growing demand for popular fiction, and in their catalogues we see names
of now-forgotten Victorian novelists such as George W. M. Reynolds, Rider
Haggard, and Marie Corelli.21 Reading societies proliferated to complement the
increase in lending libraries, documenting the existence of English language
readers with access to, and a taste for, Victorian novels. While Kolkata was
the landing site for these texts, they were by no means restricted to the urban
readers alone. Muffasil or district towns such as Jessore, Khulna, Sundarban,
Baruipur, Baharampur, Maldah, Alipur, Midnapore, Rangpur, Barishal, Hoogly,
Krishnanagar, Uttarpara, and Konnagar all boasted of developed libraries,
often founded by local landlords. For example, the 1865 catalogue of Uttarpara
Joykrishna Library—reputed to be the first free public library in the country—
documents over 12,000 English titles, a significant number of which are novels,
suggesting that the rural reader was as prolific a consumer of English language
novels as urban readers.22
This Bengal-wide demand for fiction, however, countermanded the directives
of the British policy of colonial education which insisted on more didactic texts
to create a morally literate subject population.23 Once again, the records of the
Calcutta Public Library reveal the sharp divide between official policy and
the readers’ demands, as the Library decides to cut back on prose fiction in a
bid to compel its readers to form better reading habits. The readers respond
by withdrawing subscription, and moving to competing libraries—such as
the Burra Bazar Family Literary Club—which, unhindered by government
intervention, continue to satisfy an appetite for eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century British novels. The Bengali reader, as Joshi’s study and extant records
show, exercises considerable choice; this reader’s taste is not governed by the

21
Joshi, National Library website.
22
Uttapara Joykrishna Library published Ekti Alokprobaho: Unish theke ekuś śatak to commemorate
its bicentenary, and part of the volume is dedicated to documenting the sheer variety and number of
titles held by the Library over the years.
23
William Adam’s Report documents the emphasis laid first by the East India Company’s Board of
Governors and then by the Colonial government post-1857, on the need to provide Indian readers
with practically useful texts, both in the vernaculars and in English. The utilitarian impulse rarely
considers novels as within the reach of the masses, suggesting instead that works of non-fiction be
promoted in the interest of giving the reader useful skills.
96 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

desire for self-improvement, but rather a willingness to be entertained. The

picture that emerges is that of a sophisticated reader of the British novel, albeit
of questionable taste according to colonial and Victorian morality. In this the
reader calls to mind Wilkie Collins’ “Unknown Public” whose deplorable taste
in literature hinders the rise of great authors.24 Like their Victorian counterpart,
the Bengali reader’s choice of reading material may not meet the standards set
by the literary critic, but both readers appear to be making conscious choices in
favoring entertainment over education. Q. D. Leavis, remarking on public tastes
and the consumption of novels in Britain nearly half a century after Collins,
is more generous and suggests that readers gradually learn to identify codes
such as “manly” and “virtue,” as “an idiom for common standards of taste and
conduct” develops.25
However, for the nineteenth-century Bengali reader, the ability to identify
the codes of a Victorian novel signifies more than an awareness of common
standards—it denotes a familiarity with an alien worldview. To be able to
successfully read a novel by G. W. M. Reynolds or Marie Corelli suggests that
not only is the reader privileged enough to have received an Anglo-centric
education, but is a participant in the version of Western modernity represented
by these novels. The reader’s participation in this modernity is a result of
literature’s pedagogical role in the colonies—British literature, and the novel in
particular, is taught in the colonies as metonymic of modern Western culture.
Yet what becomes evident from the writings of Anglicist readers is the desire
to do more than perceive the text as symbolic of the West; as these readers
read, they assume the position of the text’s implied reader. True, as cultural
figureheads, the novels buy their assent of the value systems encoded in them,
and thereby educate the readers to view a particular subject position as civilized
and morally desirable, but the readers also give their assent because they
perceive themselves to be in that position. What the readers read in the novels
is far from a self-representation—the colonized cannot become the colonizer,
the Bengali reader is not encouraged to become Marie Corelli’s heroine in
A Romance of Two Worlds—but a desire for identification contributes to the
pleasure of reading.
As the novel reader in nineteenth-century Bengal imagines and identifies
with the implied reader of the texts they are consuming, they take on the cultural

24
Wilkie Collins, “The Unknown Public,” Household Words, August 21, 1858.
25
Leavis, “The Growth of the Reading Public,” Fiction and the Reading Public, 123–4, 1939.
 Becoming a Reader 97

specificities of the latter; they make sense of what they read by assuming that
despite the racial and social divides between themselves and the text, they can
aspire toward the world presented in the text. The reader practices what I suggest
is an Anglicist reading because by imagining themselves as a Victorian novel’s
implied reader, they assent to those values the reader in England (presumably
British) would subscribe to. The reader continues to read Victorian novels because
they find plausible and attractive the ideological foundations of the narrative. As
they buy into the story, they also buy into the value system necessary to identify
with the story. By no means is this a wholesale assent—the reader does not
become British by proxy. Rather, they place themselves to comprehend—and
thus be free to choose from—the cultural systems indigenous to the text. Seen
this way, the threat posed by Victorian novels becomes more imminent; if the
reader consumes the novels such that they not only learn of the lax morals of the
West, but also imagines themselves as a possessor of the same, the text assumes
dangerous proportions.
When Durgeśnandinī appears in 1865, its form is as alien to Bengal as is its
use of the regional language, and it seems only natural that the existing novel
reader, being used to a diet of Victorian novels, reads Bankim’s novel in terms of
the European genre. The plot contributes in some measure toward this endeavor
as Durgeśnandinī and Ivanhoe share a number of remarkable similarities at the
level of the plot. Both are historical romances, set in a past that clearly serves as
an allegory of the novelists’ present, and have a love triangle as the key narrative
device. Both novels are narratives of nation formation, allegorized through
the romantic fortunes of the warrior hero. The relationships sanctioned by
marriage at the end of the novels—Ivanhoe and Rowena in Ivanhoe, and
Jagatsingha and Tilottama in Durgeśnandinī—represent the national identity
championed by Scott and Bankim respectively, while the unrequited loves of
Rebecca (and the Norman knight, Bois-Guilbert) and Ayesha come to stand for
the exclusions necessary for any conceptualization of the nation. Like Ivanhoe,
Jagatsingha abides by the rules of chivalry, and though the battle during which
the latter is seriously injured is a real one, and not a jousting tournament as is
the case in Scott’s novel, Jagatsingha too receives his reward in his union with
Tilottama. Their marriage symbolizes the consolidation of Mughal power in
Bengal—both Jagatsingha and Birendra Singha, Tilottama’s father, support the
Mughal emperor Akbar, but are on opposing sides at the start of the novel—
but importantly, the unification occurs through the marriage of two Hindu
individuals.
98 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Initial responses to Durgeśnandinī, however, do not identify the theme of

nation building as the most remarkable similarity between these two novels;
the relationship between the romantic leads, and how these characters are
written form the points of comparison. As becomes evident from several
essays, Durgeśnandinī is seen to work as a novel because it emulates Scott’s
narrative—both formally and thematically. Writing nearly one hundred and
twenty-five years after the publication of Durgeśnandinī, Sisir Kumar Das
revisits the popularity of Bankim as the “Scott of Bengal” suggesting that the
sobriquet is both positive and negative. Bankim earning the title in the first
place is a testament to the novel’s success, since a great work of art needs
to “accommodate the response of the readership,” both contemporary to the
work, and in the “periods following it.”26 Das, however, notes the persistence
of the moniker. For him, this demonstrates a continued interest on the part
of Bankim’s readers in the author’s relationship with the British novel in
general and with Scott in particular, but it also points to this comparison
as overshadowing Bankim scholarship. The predictability of Bankim being
hailed and denigrated as the “Scott of Bengal,” according to Das, demonstrates
that most readers, try as they might, cannot read Durgeśnandinī but as
modeled on Ivanhoe.
Das is only one in a long line of Bengali critics to note in Bankim’s first novel the
contours of Scott’s text. Rameshchandra Datta, one of Bankim’s contemporaries,
and the first president of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat (the Bengal Academy of
Literature), is an early proponent of the Anglicist reading practice. In a review
published in the journal Wednesday Review in August 1905, Datta comments
upon the relative merits of European and Asian literature, philosophy, political
economy, and religion. The range of subjects discussed in a relatively short
essay necessitates several broad generalities, but it is worthwhile looking at two
sections of the work:
Sir Walter Scott was my favourite author forty years ago. I spent days and nights
over his novels; I almost lived in those historic scenes and in those medieval
times which the enchanter had conjured up. Scott has, in fact, created a world of
his own—a somewhat idealized, but a vivid and, on the whole, faithful picture of
the medieval world in Europe.27

26
Sisir Kumar Das, “Bankimchandra and the Modern Reader,” Essays in Perspective, 443.
27
As quoted in J. N. Gupta’s Life and Work of R.C. Dutt, 383, 1911.
 Becoming a Reader 99

And of Bankim, he writes in the same essay:

Bankim Chunder is wiser [than Michael Madhusudan Datta] in drawing from
nature, and his portraiture of modern Bengal life is as vivid, as powerful, and as
true as the creations of the greatest masters in fiction.28

Comparing Bankim to the “greatest masters in fiction”—in this case with

the obvious reference to Scott—is hardly coincidental; the move allows
Rameshchandra to advance the Anglicist reading practice. For Rameshchandra,
this kind of reading, though augmented by learning, comes naturally, even to a
Bengali like him. A few pages into the essay, he recalls the opening line as he adds
Byron to the list of his “favourite poets forty years ago”—he suggests their appeal
lies in their style, simple and lucid enough to be “intelligible even to boys.”29
Rameshchandra weaves this thread of texts which are natural and depict life-
like characters—adjectives he employs first to describe Scott’s novels, and then
Bankim’s—to create an image of this reading practice as being organic to the
Bengali. If one accepts this as the essay’s framing narrative, the diversity of subjects
mentioned begins to make sense. It is not merely Rameshchandra the England-
returned30 member of the Imperial Civil Service showing off his knowledge,
but rather it is the author’s attempt to construct the colonized as comfortably
inhabiting European texts and ideas. Thus, the exposition on European history
is balanced by a discussion on Indian epics, and no distinction is drawn between
the Hindu boy who learns of Hindu myths and reads the religion’s sacred texts,
and the Christian child who reads the Scriptures sacred to his religion. The
Anglicist reading practice is not divorced from Indian (read Hindu) thought;
rather, it is one which places Europe and India in a continuum. The reasons
for establishing this unbroken connection between the two nations as necessary
and inevitable have been dealt with masterfully by scholars of the postcolonial
condition. What interests me here is the way in which Rameshchandra, as the
reader, conceives of both Europe and India as being organic to him. His reading
of Byron and Burns, and being moved by them, occupies the same position
as his mother telling him Hindu myths in Bengali, and his father and uncle—
though not Christian, as he is quick to remind his reader—narrating tales from
Christianity in English as soon as he is old enough to know the language. These

28
Life and Work of R.C. Dutt, 388.
29
Ibid., 385.
30
Bilet (broadly referring to Europe, but usually understood to be England) ferōt (returned)—a
peculiar turn of phrase quintessential to the Bengali notion of associating status with England.
100 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

experiences construct him as a successful reader possessing taste and the ability
to discern good literature from bad, but more importantly as a reader unique to
this moment in Bengal’s history who has simultaneous access to both cultures.
Rameshchandra’s review of Durgeśnandinī, when read along with his essay
published in the Wednesday Review, explains the nineteenth-century Bengali
reader’s propensity to perceive in Bankim the shadow of the Victorian novel.
The review titled “Bankimcandra ō ādhunik bānglā sāhitya”31 is ostensibly a
eulogistic piece on Bankim, and the author offers his reading of Durgeśnandinī
merely as an example of the novelist’s talent. The structure of the review is a
familiar one—Rameshchandra begins with the influence of Hellenic thought
on Christianity, and subsequently on Western culture, and argues in favor of
such influence. The impact of Scott upon Bankim is not a matter of concern for
Rameshchandra since those “who say that these outstanding men are totally free
from the influence of their times and derive strength from within, are in error.”32
The inspiration is not a slavish one, but rather a creative process of one culture
informing another. This conceptual framework is central to understanding his
reading of Bankim as incorporating the alien into the Bengali in a bid to enhance
the greatness of the Bengali race. Scott’s novel, or as Rameshchandra names it,
“foreign sentiments,”33 is metonymic of Western education, and Bankim’s ability
to profit from this relationship and raise the Bengali from being “a puny frail
people”34 demonstrates that the education has “not been a futile exercise”35 for
the Bengalis. If Durgeśnandinī reads like Ivanhoe, he claims, it is because Bankim
has imbibed the best of Western education. However, implicit in this claim is
Rameshchandra’s own position as a reader attuned to the same education he
praises Bankim for having utilized well. The reviewer, as the reader who can spot
in Bankim the influence of Scott, deserves accolades for his proper reading of
Durgeśnandinī, unlike the critics who, though they too identify the foreignness
of the novel, are unable to rise above censure.
The debate surrounding Durgeśnandinī and Ivanhoe starts even before the
Bengali novel is published, if one is to believe Bankim’s junior colleague Kalinath
Datta. Kalinath, working under Bankim during the latter’s tenure as deputy

31
Translated by Indrani Halder as “Bankimchandra and Modern Bengal,” which, interestingly, replaces
“Bangla Sahitya” or “Bengali Literature” with simply “Bengal,” 1996.
32
Rameshchandra Datta, “Bankimchandra and Modern Bengal,” Essays in Perspective, 73, 1996.
33
Rameshchandra Datta, “Bankimchandra and Modern Bengal,” Essays in Perspective, 76.
34
Rameshchandra Datta, “Bankimchandra and Modern Bengal,” Essays in Perspective, 74.
35
Rameshchandra Datta, “Bankimchandra and Modern Bengal,” Essays in Perspective, 75.
 Becoming a Reader 101

magistrate in the Baruipur mahakuma36 in 1864—the year before Durgeśnandinī

is published—recalls seeing volumes of the Waverly novels on the author’s study
table as he is composing his novel. His narrative is interesting not only because
he is one of the first readers of Durgeśnandinī—though not of the manuscript—
but also since he provides a glimpse into Bankim’s insecurities as a relatively
unknown novelist. Writing eleven years after Bankim’s death in the Bengali
literary magazine Pradip, Kalinath relates his early encounters with the novelist:
Around the time that he [Bankim] was completing “Durgeśnandinī” or right
before it was published, I saw a few volumes of Scott’s Waverly adorning his desk
in his study. He may have given a friend the manuscript of “Durgeśnandinī” to
read, and this friend may have told him of the many similarities between the
narratives of Ivanhoe and his text. This may have piqued his curiosity, and he
possibly bought new copies of the Waverly novels from the market. I do not
have the authority to comment on whether or not he read “Ivanhoe” prior to
composing Durgeśnandinī. In the interest of truth, I can only narrate exactly
what I saw. I read “Durgeśnandinī” first, and Ivanhoe much later. In fact,
I was amazed at the similarities between the two. Not for once could I forget
Ayesha while reading the character of the Jewess (Rebeca). Other readers
accept the composition of Durgeśnandinī to be a shadow of “Ivanhoe.” That
“Durgeśnandinī” has not been composed in the image of Ivanhoe is something
Bankimbabu has himself repeatedly said. Whatever my own opinions may be,
they have been retired based on my belief in Bankimbabu’s words, because
I believe his honesty to be unimpeachable. In reality, there is no alternative to
having faith in his words in this matter.37

Let me begin by drawing attention to a few interesting phrases Kalinath employs,

the first being a belief in Bankim’s honesty to be “unimpeachable.” This is the
crux on which the argument, and indeed the whole essay, rests, for Bankim is an
honorable man. To substantiate his claim that despite appearances, Bankim did
not recast Scott’s story in a Bengali setting, Kalinath constructs the character of
a friend who may have been lent the manuscript version of Durgeśnandinī, and
then may have informed Bankim of the apparent similarities. Bankim himself
is much perturbed by the suggestion of literary borrowing and rejects even the
mere possibility. I am, however, less concerned with either Bankim’s character
or claims; the intriguing question is why does Kalinath feel compelled to mount

36
The subdivision of a district; Baruipur is in the 24 Parganas (South) district.
37
Kalinath Datta, “Bankimchandra,” Bankim Prasanga, 131–2. Translation mine from Bengali, 1922.
102 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

a defense? What is it in his reading of Durgeśnandinī that prompts him to create

this elaborate construction of an unimpeachable character when his language
indicates otherwise?
The answer to this lies in Kalinath noticing the similarities between the
two novels almost despite himself. That Rebecca and Ayesha are alike is less
a matter of Bankim’s composition than the reader being unable to ignore the
resemblance. Later in the essay, the author describes reading yet another text by
Bankim, Krishna caritra (On the Nature of Krishna, 1886), and the experience
documented is in stark contrast to that of reading Durgeśnandinī. The former is
a religious treatise examining the figure of Krishna, and Kalinath finds himself
on surer ground when discussing it since he considers himself to be well versed
in the study of religion—not necessarily as a scholar or an expert, but rather as a
practicing Hindu with deeply held beliefs. Yet with Durgeśnandinī, Kalinath has
no points of reference given the genre’s newness in the Bengali language, and the
discomfort that becomes evident in his reading of the novel can be understood
as a form of disorientation. Written from the vantage point of the early twentieth
century, Kalinath’s essay provides a unique perspective—there is present the
simultaneous belief in Bankim’s literary greatness and the desire to read his first
novel as representative of that merit, and the problem of having to contend with
that same novel being an imitation. As a reader in 1865, even without having
read Ivanhoe, Kalinath’s awareness of the English flavor of Bankim’s language
demonstrates his familiarity with both the English language and its literature,
and this familiarity inflects his practice of reading Durgeśnandinī. Unlike
Rameshchandra, he is far less comfortable in performing an Anglicist reading of
the novel, but he is unable to go beyond it.
Unlike Kalinath, Aurobindo Ghosh—or Sri Aurobindo as he later styles
himself—has little hesitation in noting resemblances between Bankim and
Victorian novelists. Writing on Bankim’s life and place in Bengali literary and
cultural history, Aurobindo rejects Scott as a point of comparison, arguing that
Scott’s “style is never quite sure” and while the novelist may have been able to
“paint outlines […] he could not fill them in.”38 Instead, he offers Henry Fielding
as Bankim’s counterpoint, suggesting a similarity in form between Bengali and
British novels, rather than asserting imitation as a predominant conceptual
framework. The question of comparison thus rises above charges of plagiarism
or influence and becomes one of creating a level playing field for both the Bengali

38
Aurobindo, “Bankim Chandra Chatterji,” Early Cultural Writings, 1890–1910.
 Becoming a Reader 103

novelist and reader. If Fielding is creating the British novel, then Bankim is doing
the same with the Bengali novel, and both are part of the same world republic of
letters. The reader of Durgeśnandinī is thus a reader of world literature, equally
comfortable in the world of Shamela and George Meredith’s The Egoist as in that
of Dante and Boccacio. To read Bankim, one has to be conversant in Victorian
novels and Enlightenment philosophy on the one hand, and in classical Greco-
Roman literature on the other, and Durgeśnandinī epitomizes Bankim’s merits
as an author on a global scale. Aurobindo emphasizes this point by juxtaposing
Bankim with Michael Madhusudan Datta, the first Bengali poet to compose
in free verse as well as the first to write the first epic in modern Bengali.39 For
Aurobindo, both are “builders of the Bengali language,”40 but despite Michael’s
considerable talents, Bankim’s works continue to be read far outside Bengal
while Michael remains little known because the novelist possessed a nature
“with plenty of strength in it […] not intemperate.”41
The implicit argument in Aurobindo’s essay founds itself on this strength of
character; the good reader is one who is able to perform sustained readings, who
is moved by the grand passions of Michael but who can ultimately return to the
stability offered by Bankim. This is a reader who is comfortable enough in his
masculinity to counter the criticism that novels are suitable only for women by
saying that “[a]ll honour then to the women of Bengal, whose cultured appreciation
kept Bengali literature alive!”42 And most importantly, this is a reader who can see
Durgeśnandinī as capturing the essence of a new, robust Bengali language shorn
of its archaic past. It is worth revisiting Aurobindo’s text at length here:
Of Bankim’s style […] I will remark this only that what marks Bankim above
all is his unfailing sense of beauty. This is indeed the note of Bengali literature
and the one high thing it has gained from a close acquaintance with European
models. The hideous grotesques of old Hindu Art, the monkey-rabble of Rama
and the ten heads of Ravana are henceforth impossible to it.43

Aurobindo’s Anglicism does not derive from an adherence to English—in fact,

he vehemently calls out Anglicized Bengalis for turning their noses at Bengali
prose—but from an Anglicization of the Bengali language. Bankim’s Bengali

39
Dutt, Meghnād badh kābya, 1861.
40
Aurobindo, “Bankim Chandra Chatterji,” Early Cultural Writings.
41
Aurobindo, “Bankim Chandra Chatterji,” Early Cultural Writings.
42
Ibid.
43
Aurobindo, “Bankim Chandra Chatterji,” Early Cultural Writings.
104 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

as embodied in his novels comes to represent a radical move away from the
closed world of Hinduism and classical Sanskrit toward the world of possibilities
offered by “European models.” The fortitude mentioned above is a direct product
of this new Bengali; the good Bengali novel reader can note in Durgeśnandinī
both an adherence to European aesthetic principles and a rejection of those
drawn from orthodox Hinduism. In thus distancing Bankim from a Sanskritic
world, Aurobindo enacts a hollowing out of Bengali in which the form of the
language is seen as a vehicle for European rather than indigenous aesthetic and
philosophical principles. It is this positioning of Bengali as a language born of
European influences that allows Aurobindo to apply to Bankim the leveling logic
of comparison, and to see himself as a reader capable of directing the Bengali
novel away from the world of the Sanskritists.44
Paradoxically, this is similar in form to colonial pedagogical policies which
perceive Bengali as the more useful language of instruction given its reach when
compared to English, given Aurobindo’s anticolonial ideologies, but his review
of Bankim’s novels demonstrates that the idea of Anglicizing Bengali was not
in and of itself ideologically predetermined for nineteenth-century readers.
As noted in each of these responses to Bankim, there is a profound sense of
internal dilemma when it comes to articulating and accepting an allegiance to
English. However, for the Anglicist readers, regardless of their own relationship
with English, the West still represents a larger world outside the simultaneous
oppression of traditional religion and colonial control. This practice represents
an embracing of the tenets of the civilizing mission that present England as
the representative of aesthetic and philosophical thought worthy of emulation,
even as it rejects the supremacy of the West. That this is far from an impossible
position to occupy becomes evident with even a cursory glance at the works
of intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore and from institutions such as the
Indian National Congress.45 The Anglicist reading practice brings together
these conflicting perceptions—Europe is a model precisely because Bengal and

44
Much can be said here of Aurobindo’s own upbringing—his father sent him to England at the age
of seven to ensure that Aurobindu grew up to be more English than Indian—and his subsequent
revolutionary political and reformist spiritual philosophies. His academic and professional training
together with his commitment to anti-colonial politics informs much of what he says about Bankim
and the Bengali language. For more on Aurobindo see his Early Cultural Writings.
45
Tagore, for example, in his essay titled “Viswa sahitya” (“World Literature”) articulates literature
as the site for expressing the human, both of which he perceives as universal, transcending the
narrow confines of “desh-kāl-pātra,” or “country, time, protagonist” (Rabindra Rachanabali, 771).
The qualities thus present in great literature do not belong to any single nation or age, as each great
writer contributes toward the project of building universal literature.
 Becoming a Reader 105

the East are perpetually inferior, and Bengal can emulate Europe to become
its equal, thus inaugurating an arena of world literature, and holds them in
productive tension. That the Bengali reader finds family resemblance between
the early Bengali novels and those being written around the same time in
England causes some discomfort, but no apparent surprise because this reader
associates the form with more than just the narrative. Reading Bankim’s novels
comes to stand for reading—and inhabiting—a rational position informed by
Western thought. While Bankim himself maintains his distance from Western
influence in the context of Durgeśnandinī, his early readers perceive in a number
of his novels not only the shadow of Scott, but of other Victorian novelists such
as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Henry Fielding, and Wilkie Collins (with reference
to Rajanī), and of Shakespeare’s Miranda in Kapalkundalā. As his friend and
another nineteenth-century man of letters, Chandranath Basu, recollects,
“[o]n perusing Durgesnandini, it seemed to me that Bankimbabu had read Scott’s
Ivanhoe before writing it,” despite the claim being denied by the author.46 For
these readers, the novels come to symbolize a way of reading distinct from those
already existing in nineteenth-century Bengal and driven by predominantly
Hindu (Sanskrit) texts and scriptures.

III. “Beautiful, despite the linguistic anomalies”—Bankim

and the Sanskrit Pundits

If the Anglicists focus on narrative and character in Bankim’s novels, the readers
more familiar with Sanskrit rhetoric and prose comment on the novelist’s use—
and often misuse—of language. Purnachandra’s account of Bankim reading
Durgeśnandinī to an audience perhaps best captures the Sanskritist reader’s
concerns:
When “Durgeśnandinī” first appeared, the Sanskrit-walas of Kolkata were
all up in arms. The English-walas were of course copious in their praise …
From the very beginning Bankimchandra was worried that the language of
“Durgeśnandinī” suffered from grammatical flaws … However, it was only the
pundits of Kolkata who ran Bengali newspapers who took offence at the young
writer’s temerity in linguistic devaluing.47

46
Chandranath Basu, Bankimchandra: Essays in Perspective, 16.
47
Purnachandra Chattopadhyay, “Bankimcandra ō Dinabandhu” (“Bankimchandra and Dinabandhu”),
Bankim Prasanga, 42–4, translation mine, 1914.
106 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The author distances the Sanskrit pundits of Bhatpara from those of Kolkata to
draw attention to the latter’s intolerance of any experimentation with language,
but both groups, along with Bankim himself, appear to have similar reservations.
In this context, the attention is not so much on the genre as new and alien,
but on Bankim’s refashioning of the Bengali language. The Bhatpara pundits, of
whom Purnachandra writes more generously, are present at this first reading of
the novel, and they too are aware of the flaws in the novel’s language; only, unlike
their urban counterparts, they are supposedly so moved by the narrative that
they are prepared to overlook the linguistic anomalies.
Akshaychandra Sarkar, a late-nineteenth-century Bengali poet and the editor
of the literary magazine Sādhāranī, traces the problematic nature of Bankim’s
prose to one of the first pieces the latter publishes. In a peculiarly passive
aggressive review of Bankim’s linguistic habits, Akshaychandra draws attention
to an 1856 collection of poems published by Bankim—“Lalita,purākalik galpo,
tathā mānas”—and to the book’s advertisement. Having quoted the text in full,
the reviewer proceeds to a detailed analysis of its language:
Had the above advertisement appeared as a question on a B.A. exam, everyone
would have assumed it to be an invention of the examiner to deliberately
provide a grammatically incorrect composition. But that is not so. It is written
by Bankimchandra himself, the same who goes on to be the king of prose … By
the time Bankimbabu composed this advertisement, Bengali prose was already
on full display in Bengal, and it had become a pedagogic instrument as well as
a means of entertainment … Reading this 1856 advertisement by Bankimbabu,
one gets the feeling that Bankimbabu had completely ignored this treasure trove
of prose.48

Akshaychandra’s criticism of Bankim’s early prose rests on the latter’s propensity

for removing Bengali from the sphere of everyday life. The deliberate flaws
he identifies in the advertisement result from what he perceives to be either
excessively pedantic or dry legalese—both of which, according to the reviewer,
demonstrate a certain desire to show-off on Bankim’s part, but not necessarily his
artistic talent. Akshaychandra does not provide a reading of the poems themselves
because they are, for him, of a much better quality than the prose. Bankim, he
feels, fails to inspire life into his prose at this early stage because he is embroiled
in, ironically, archaic practices of grammar that rob the text of its lucidity.

48
Akshaychandra Sarkar, “Bankimcandrer Pratham Gadya Racanā” (“Bankimchandra’s First Prose
Composition”), Bankim Prasanga, 79–80, translation mine, 1901.
 Becoming a Reader 107

This final objection appears to introduce a contradiction in the reviewer’s

perspective—does Akshaychandra criticize Bankim’s prose for failing to be
grammatically correct, or is there an overabundance of grammar thus rendering
the text pedantic and stilted? The above quote is from a review Akshaychandra
publishes in the magazine Sāhitya in 1901, and one finds an explication of the
conundrum in his “Bankimcandra ō Bangadarśan” published three years later in
Bangabhāśār Lekhak. In this chapter, he implicitly states that the faults present
in Bankim’s first prose composition recur in his early novels. Durgeśnandinī
and Kapalkundalā suffer because the prose distances itself from living Bengali
by focusing too much on following the conventions of Sanskrit grammar. The
question of being grammatically incorrect thus takes on a new dimension—
Bankim’s prose in these novels is grammatically flawed from the perspective
of the kind of Bengali accessible to the ordinary reader. Bankim’s language,
which Akshaychandra claims appears only when the novelist begins to write
Biśabriksha, combines the high seriousness of Sanskrit grammar with the
colloquial vernacular, without either being overtly in awe of the first or indulging
in the vulgarity of the second. This middle language—Akshaychandra defines it
as “madhyabartinī bhāśā” or language which occupies the middle position—
becomes evident when Bankim relinquishes his Sanskrit-oriented Bengali.
The prose, free from linguistic pretensions, appeals to the common reader and
captures the poetry of the ordinary:
Poetry that can touch the Bengali’s heart must be in Bengali. The capacity
ordinary descriptions and words have to express emotions is denied to one
who is a devotee of Sanskrit … In Biśabriksha, Bankimbabu began to use
[colloquial] phrases such as “herding cows,” and both kinds of language [the
Bengali modelled after high Sanskrit, and that of everyday use] met. This was
while Biśabriksha was a handwritten, unpublished manuscript.49

As a scholar of Sanskrit, Akshaychandra is acutely aware of the incongruence

of a phrase such as “herding cows” in serious prose; the word gōru or cow
is intrinsically Bengali, and herding barely captures the latent vulgarity
of thyangāite lāgilen. Yet it is this incongruity that marks the prose as
accessible because gōru thyangānō has no aspirations to be Sanskrit, it
appeals to an activity familiar to the Bengali—herding cows—in a language
that is unambiguous. All at once, the reader is removed from the grandly

49
Akshaychandra Sarkar, “Bankimcandra ō Bangadarśan” (“Bankimchandra and Bangadarshan”),
Bankim Prasanga, 87, translation mine, 1901.
108 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

descriptive opening paragraph of Durgeśnandinī in which the hero rides

across a vast open plain, seeking shelter from an imminent thunderstorm,
or the description of Kapalkundalā, heavily inflected with rules of Sanskrit
poetry, into the mundane and recognizably Bengali world of landlords and
peasants. This is certainly not to suggest that Biśabriksha lacks high prose,
but the novel makes a conscious attempt at tempering Sanskritist Bengali
with the colloquial. Thus the reviews by Akshaychandra index more than
the minutiae of Bankim’s prose style—they represent a reading practice
that asserts Bengali as a respectable literary language while simultaneously
demonstrating its evolution from Sanskrit.
This sense of teleological progression is of import to the Sanskritist
because it serves two purposes—the first is to position Bengali as a modern
language in touch with its roots, and the second is to wrest Sanskrit and its
influences from the clutches of the grammarians and the pedants. The irony
of this claim is not lost on me given Akshaychandra’s own pedanticism, but it
is worth stressing the distance between his version of over-exacting approach
to language and the dogmatism of Sanskrit pundits. The latter marks a place
of conservatism which cannot accord Bengali anything more than the status
of a vernacular, and within whose worldview, a genre such as the novel is too
experimental to be considered high literature. The respectability of Bengali—
something that is gained when Bankim can combine the mundanity of the
cowherd with the high sentiments espoused by the narrator describing the
pastoral scene—provides the language and its readers with a buffer against
the vulgarity of popular literature. A fear of the vulgar, which is implicit in
Akshaychandra’s reviews of Bankim’s prose, becomes more apparent in the
texts discussed below, and Akshaychandra is acutely aware that bankimī
Bengali must walk a fine line if it is to lose whatever little protection offered
by conservative Sanskrit pundits.
However, the Sanskritist reading practice, though concerned primarily with
language, does not restrict itself to linguistic studies, as a number of reviews from
Āryadarśan show. The journal with a predominantly Bramho focus publishes
reviews and essays aimed at reviving the status of the Arya or the caste Hindu,
and the bias is evident in the responses to Bankim’s novels. The reviews, which
often span several issues of the magazine, provide detailed character sketches,
and the emphasis is often on the women in these novels and Bankim’s talents at
constructing them. The following anonymous review, signed “ekjan cāśā” or “a
farmer”—the moniker being a variation on the theme of the reviewer’s obvious
 Becoming a Reader 109

attempt at self-deprecation—captures the journal’s manifesto in the opening

lines. The review of Bankim’s first social novel Biśabriksha begins thus:
Bankim babu’s talent at drawing characters has made him both the foremost
among novelists in Bengal, and a name worshipped in every household, in
every heart. His prowess in drawing the interior world of the character in
unparalleled. There have been very few such artists born to India after Balmiki,
Byas, Bhababhuti, Kalidas, and Banabhatta … True, Bankim babu has not
depicted the low propensities of revenge, hatred, and unrealizable desires, or the
higher tendencies such as love for one’s own kind, love for humanity, and mercy
following Shakespeare, Schiller, and Fielding. Nor has he depicted the myriad
transformations caused in the human heart by excitement, or the many deeds
effected by humankind. But he has unknowingly created a wonderful moral
revolution in Bengal by raising love to a higher station from the depths it was
cast into by the disgusting sensuality of Bharatchandra.50

The allegiances held by this author are unambiguously presented—Bankim

follows in the footsteps of classical Sanskrit authors from the supposed golden
past of India, and, despite the depiction of higher human qualities in the works
of European authors, the Bengali novelist does not use them as his models. The
canon of which Bankim is a part consists of Sanskrit epics—Balmiki is credited
with the composition of the Rāmāyana, and Byas authors the Mahābhārata—
and classical poetry, and represents the best India has to offer. The nation thus
constructed is Hindu—given Āryadarśan’s explicit religious bias—and there
is little doubt that the moral revolution Bankim’s novels have brought about is
religious in nature.
A curious move can be observed in the last sentence of the above quote, in
which the reviewer distances Bankim from existing Bengali literature in general,
and Bharatchandra in particular. The objection against excessive sensuality is
one which Bankim himself shares, and it suggests a puritanical reading whereby
sensuality is equated with vulgarity and moral deprivation. Bharatchandra,
an eighteenth-century Bengali poet, is best known for Annadāmangal, which
is itself a part of the mangal kābya tradition in Bengal in which are narrated
the lives of various deities indigenous to the region. The reviewer, along with
most conservative Bengalis of the age, probably has in mind the second part of
Annadāmangal, in which Bharatchandra narrates the love of Vidya and Sundar in
what is considered to be graphic details. The distinction between Bharatchandra’s

50
Anonymous review, “Biśabriksha,” Āryadarśan, Māgh 1284, 436.
110 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

treatment of love and Bankim’s approach to the same is necessary given the
content of Biśabriksha. It is a tale of a married man’s (Nagendra) illicit attraction
toward a beautiful young widow (Kundanandini), and his wife’s (Suryamukhi)
self-sacrifice in bringing the two lovers together. The presence of the cad
(Debendra) who tries to unsuccessfully lure Kundanandini, and successfully
trap Heera, a maid in Nagendra and Suryamukhi’s household, not only creates
narrative tension, but brings the novel perilously close to depicting moral vices.
The review, like the novel, must assure its reader that woven through this tale
of love and betrayal is a lofty moral position. To accomplish this, the review
draws upon Bankim’s ability to create believable characters, and the rest of the
text is dedicated to carefully unravelling each character in the novel to show
that despite appearances, it is only Debendra who is an unreformed soul; the
novel’s protagonists, Suryamukhi, Kundanandini, and Nagendra are merely
misguided till the narrative’s end brings Kunda to her death, and reunites the
married couple.
The nature of the moral revolution is further clarified if one considers the
Sanskrit poets the reviewer likens Bankim to. These poets provide points
of reference for the reading practice performed by the reviewer—they are all
noted for composing love stories, but each of these stories represents a virtuous
mode of being in the world. The eighth-century Sanskrit poet Bhababhuti,
whose Malatī-mādhava serves as a model for Bankim’s eponymous heroine
in Kapalkundalā, presents the perfect amalgamation of the various rasas,51
such that the predominant erotic or sṝngāra rasa is both complemented and
highlighted. Similarly, Banabhatta’s Kādambarī (seventh century CE) and
Kalidasa’s Abhijyanaśankuntalam (between first century BCE and fourth century
CE) narrate tales of love that transcend all obstacles, but do so only because of
the virtuous nature of the lovers. The reviewer urges his reader to keep in mind
this illustrious lineage not only to receive a purified vision of love, but to perceive
themselves as being an inheritor of the Sanskrit (Hindu) worldview. Like the
Anglicist reader, the Sanskritist reader too is asked to inhabit the world they
read about, but unlike their Eurocentric counterpart, they are not encouraged
to identify with the characters. They are either so elevated or denigrated as to
be beyond human reach; rather, the reader approaches them as one would gods

51
The aesthetic theory developed around Sanskrit dramatic and literary arts, literally translated
as “flavor.” It is first recorded in Bharat Muni’s Nātyaśāstra (The Dramatic Arts) which he began
composing around the third century BCE and was then modified, adapted, and expanded by later
theorists.
 Becoming a Reader 111

and monsters.52 Thus, Suryamukhi’s love for her husband is mythic, and the
reader worships her (in much the same way, the reader worships the author of
the novel) and buys into the purity of her love, while Debendra comes across as
too far fallen to be worthy of redemption, and Heera, perhaps the only accessible
character, serves as warning for women straying from the path of virtue.
The reasons for reading Bankim as one in a continuous line from classical
Sanskrit to modern Bengali are as well-documented as those prompting an
Anglicist reading, but perhaps a brief glance at some of the available texts on
colonial education is necessary to provide a context. Both Akshaychandra
and the anonymous reviewer of Āryadarśan share an interest in the Bengali
Bankim employs in his novels, and this is the predominant characteristic of
the Sanskritist reading practice. The language used by the novelist is seen as
productively reworking the rigidity of Sanskrit rules of composition, while
never straying too far from this originary language. Like the classical Sanskrit
poets, the language itself is perceived as providing Bengali with a cultural
heritage rivalling that of the west. The Sanskritist reading practice seeks to wrest
Bengali from Anglophone influences, and to establish Bengali as a Sanskritic
language. To one using the language in the twenty-first century, this seems an
unnecessary battle—after all, Bengali uses the Indic script, and its root language
is very clearly Sanskrit. However, the nineteenth-century Bengali reader does
not have the luxury of certainty that I do, given the emphasis placed by the
colonial government on anglicizing the language. Charles Trevelyan, a British
civil servant posted in Kolkata in the mid-nineteenth century, is instrumental
in propagating a policy of supporting European learning over Sanskrit, Arabic,
and vernacular education. In his treatise On the Education of the People of India,
Trevelyan founds his arguments on the “Resolution of Government, dated 7th
March 1835,” in which the colonial administration states its desire to promote
“European literature and science amongst the natives of India.”53 This, by itself,
is not entirely novel, although the proposed plan of not supporting indigenous
students financially if they pursue any form of schooling other than European
causes some resentment in both European and Indian circles.54 The threat posed

52
I discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 3.
53
Charles Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, 13.
54
Under the old system, students are provided a stipend to encourage them to attend schools funded
at least partially by the government, whether they be Hindu pāthśālās or Islamic madrasās, and
teachers in both forms are salaried employees of the colonial government. For more, see Introduction
and Chapter 1 of this work.
112 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

by the new policies concerns the relationship between the vernaculars and
English. Sanskrit and Arabic, Trevelyan acknowledges, are languages of some
historical merit—mostly because they are studied as such by European scholars
of the time—but, Sanskrit, being a dead language, has little practical utility,
and neither of these two languages can be considered fit vehicles for imparting
European learning. However, Trevelyan also points out the problem of first
teaching indigenous students English before they can be exposed to higher forms
of learning. Like most educators of his generation, Trevelyan believes in the
Indian (and, peculiarly enough, the Russian) student’s ability to learn languages,
but this extends only to being able to parrot the most rudimentary forms of
English. The actual learning, if it is to be imparted, can only be comprehended
by the Indian student in his or her vernacular, and the government’s goal, then,
becomes the Anglicization of regional languages. The vernaculars themselves
offer no resistance since they are seen to have “nothing … fixed; every thing
is yet to be done, and a new literature has to be formed, almost from the very
foundation.”55 The blank spaces left in the vernaculars cannot be occupied by
Sanskrit, because the language contains no useful learning, and the only logical
alternative is therefore English. What Trevelyan proposes is a hollowing out of
vernaculars such as Bengali, and filling it with English; the resulting language is
Bengali only in name as the ideas it conveys, and many of the words it uses, are
English in nature.
Against this backdrop, Akshaychandra’s somewhat petty quibbles with
particular words used by Bankim take on a new meaning. For the Sanskritist
reader, the very existence of Bengali as a language is at stake, and in order to
oppose the gradual Anglicization of Bengali, he must invest in Sanskrit grammar
and rhetoric. The decision to use upākhyan or kābya in the place of novel is no
longer a matter of linguistic preference, but rather the act of claiming literature
being produced in Bengali as having a heritage of its own, and thus being
fixed, contrary to Trevelyan’s claims. When the anonymous reviewer refers to
Bhababhuti, and by induction Malatī-mādhava, he is asking for a reader familiar
with the references, but also for one willing to read Malatī-mādhava as Bankim’s
source text rather than Ivanhoe. This is perhaps closest to the reading Bankim
himself embeds in his novels but he is by no means a wholehearted champion
of the same. The Sanskritist reader still reads Bankim’s novels against the grain
because this reader wishes to distance the texts from European influences,

55
Charles Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, 122.
 Becoming a Reader 113

while the texts themselves advocate a more nuanced position. For this reader,
the novels’ primary task is to allow them to cultivate a viable Bengali Hindu
persona, by simultaneously modernizing the values of the Hindu scriptures,
and creating a continuous link between pre-colonial and nineteenth-century
Bengal. Positioning Bankim’s linguistic and aesthetic choices within the world
of classical Sanskrit literature becomes a way for the Sanskritist reader to claim
that the Bengali, too, has a literary heritage capable of supporting a genre as
modern as the novel.

IV. Conclusion

Rather than take the Bengali novel as inevitably moving toward a reading
suggestive of Victorian mimicry, or as a genre representing a stable, singular
version of national modernity, or even as a renewal of a golden Hindu past,
we as scholars ought to be attentive to the practices of reading contemporary
to these novels. My interest in documenting the Anglicist and the Sanskritist
reading practice is to demonstrate how even a single novel could, and did, exist
within multiple practices of reading, and to suggest that there were available
other practices not addressed in this chapter. One of these, the Perso-Arabic,
is the subject of Chapter 4, but even with the inclusion of the third we cannot
possibly have covered the gamut of reading practices present in nineteenth-
century Bengal. As scholars of the period, we have to come to terms with the
fact that we cannot know precisely how these novels were read, and that our best
option is to infer the contours of these practices by looking at documents and
institutions invested in cultivating novel literacy. However, being faced with this
challenge also forces us to look beyond received narratives about novels and their
readers, and to question efforts which seek to channel the act of reading into an
inevitable, teleological trajectory. This is not to say that the Sanskritists and the
Anglicists did not seek to impose an order on the kinds of reading available to
the nineteenth-century Bengali reader. Indeed, they frequently marked certain
readings as off limits while placing other in a continuous chain which is often
causal. But it is to argue for both these practices existing alongside others, each
striving for dominance, and each seeking to define the Bengali novel’s present
and future. What is at stake, then, has less to do with whether or not the Bengali
novel reader read like their Victorian counterpart, or how the novel was made
to tell the story of the emergent Indian nation. Telling the story of the novel and
114 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

available practices of reading as this chapter does shift our focus to the larger
worlds of which the above-mentioned elements were only minor aspects.
In the chapter that follows, I take up that practice of reading which definitively
falls out of favor by the start of the twentieth century, so much so that we come to
forget how significant it was during the early years of the Bengali novel’s history.
The Sanskritist reading practice allowed readers to be novel literate as soon as
Durgeśnandinī is published, and it explains the genre’s popularity which cannot
be accounted for by arguments based on the influence of Victorian novels given
how few readers would have had access to them. By turning away from essays
and reviews about novels to the novels themselves, we see the push toward
producing and consuming novels in light of classical Sanskrit literature and the
rasa theory, but the theory used such that it draws on the Bengali reader’s lived
experience of Sanskrit as a cultural and religious rather than a literary language.
In the novels of Bankim, we see in action that ideal version of Sanskrit which
appeals to the reader’s heart, and which provides the reader with clear signposts
rendering the new genre intimately familiar. Bankim as a conflicted champion
of the Sanskritist reading practice uses elements of Sanskrit kāvya literature thus
training the reader to read the Sanskrit past as encoded in the text, and coexisting
with the Westernized colonial present, albeit in a difficult relationship. It is
telling that Bankim and his contemporaries position the novel as upākhyan or
ākhyāyikā, and rarely refer to the genre with its English name. The unfamiliarity
of the term “novel” might be appealing to the few readers equipped with the
English language or at least English-literate adjacent, but for the vast majority of
the readers, it is not a term that contains much meaning or attraction. The novel
thus becomes a reworking of Sanskrit prose forms such as the kathā and the
ākhyāyikā, and emerges as a genre less in conversation with European models
than from classical Sanskrit and a quotidian familiarity with the same.
 3

Dear Reader, Good Sir: The Reader and

Bankim’s Novels

When the British publishing house Macmillan launched its Colonial Library
series on the 1st of March 1886, it was Maurice Macmillan’s way of capitalizing
on the colonial readers’ growing fascination for Victorian novels. The Colonial
Library series gave its readers the works of novelists such as William Black,
Hugh Conway, and Mary Anne Barker. In colonial Bengal in particular,
the series contributed to a distinct spike in the book trade, and one that had
doubled between 1850 and 1890.1 In the same period, the Imperial Library (now
the National Library of India) in Kolkata was adding more fictional than non-
fictional works to its holdings to whet the Bengali reader’s appetite for novels.
The reader’s love for English language novels—and Bengali ones inspired by the
same—meant that when Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay came to publish the
first Bengali novel Durgeśnandinī in 1865, she perceived in that work the shadow
of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and conferred upon Bankimchandra, the moniker of
the “Scott of Bengal.”
It appears from such a reading of novel production and consumption
patterns in early nineteenth-century Bengal that the Victorian novel inevitably
prefigures the Bengali novel, and the Victorian reader represents the model to
be emulated by the Bengali reader. The latter and their responses to texts are
trapped within originary reading practices which are invariably European and
British, thus condemned to emulate the Victorian novel reader; the Bengali
reader is assumed to read like a Victorian reader, learning the proper way to be
in the world. This chapter perforates the narrative by examining an alternate

A version of this chapter appeared in Comparative Literature, vol. 73, March 1, 2021.
1
Priya Joshi, In Another Country, 143, 2002.
116 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

reading practice—one founded in Sanskrit aesthetic theories—championed by

Bankim and his early readers.2
The market-driven impetus of the Colonial Library series fits neatly into
the policies of the Imperial government in Bengal, which sought to hollow out
Bengali of its Sanskrit tendencies and fill it instead with one of the languages of
European Enlightenment—English. While Lord Macaulay infamously suggested
English replace all the Indic languages in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,”
on the ground, the British found it far more practical to retain vernaculars as
the medium of instruction for the colonized masses and replace the content
imparted rather than overhaul entire linguistic traditions, using English only to
educate the elite upper classes of Indians. As I discuss elsewhere in this work,
education reformists such as William Adam sought to bolster the vernaculars
so as to use existing pedagogical structures to impart Western knowledge, thus
saving the colonial government considerable effort and capital. The novel plays
a key role in the pedagogical policy by providing an entertaining shorthand to
Victorian tastes and morals, governing social passions through the medium of
literary prose.
However, looking closely at Bankim’s novels and essays reveals a very different
story, one which is systematically rendered absent by colonial practices by the
end of the nineteenth century. My interest lies less in the forces effecting this
erasure than in recuperating an alternative narrative of reading practices in mid-
nineteenth-century Bengal. In what follows, I argue for a practice of reading
rooted not in Victorian England and Enlightenment principles but in Sanskrit
literary and aesthetic traditions. I examine the period between 1865 and 1894—
beginning with the publication of Durgeśnandinī and ending with Bankim’s

2
At this juncture, I would like to note that there is a more complex history of the Victorian novel’s
“rise,” to borrow from the staples of novel theory, Ian Watt and Michael McKeon, than discussed
here. Michael McKeon—in The Origins of the English Novel and The Theory of the Novel (the latter
being a collection of essays edited by McKeon, and important for the range and scope of theories
presented therein)—uses what he terms his “dialectical method” to examine the Victorian novel as
a product of epistemological and social continuities and discontinuities, rather than focusing on the
“birth” of the novel as a moment of sharp disjuncture. As his work shows, one witnesses in England
during the period from 1600 to 1740 two parallel moves—the epistemological move from romances
to skepticism, via naïve empiricism, and the “socio-ethical” move from locating individual worth in
birth to merit. According to McKeon, these two strands are revealed in the novel, which both draw
on existing narrative modes—such as the early modern romance—and enact the crisis of individual
worth, while creating for itself an identifiable, coherent identity. He argues that a multiplicity of
specific narrative practices come together during this 140-year period of socio-cultural upheaval
to bring the novel into “cultural consciousness.” His work is significant in that it demonstrates how
the Victorian novel speaks not merely to the system of modernity, but is equally indebted to past
epistemological, social, and cultural practices.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 117

death—and suggest a relationship between Bankim and his readers unique to

a Sanskritized Bengal. Bankim provides his readers with signposts in his novels
drawn from Sanskrit rasa and kāvya aesthetics, and the popularity of the novels
indicates both a recognition and an appreciation of the same by his readers.
This practice of reading allows both the novelist and the readers to imagine a
viable modernity in which Sanskrit traditions coexist with and even dominate
Enlightenment principles.

I. Sanskrit as Lived Experience

“Is there even a farmer in Bengal who does not understand the meaning of the
words dhānya (crop), pushkarinī (pond/lake), gṝha (house) or mastak (head)
etc.,” asks Bankim in the 1877/8 Jaiśtha edition of the Bengali literary periodical
Bangadarśan? The farmer in question is a stand-in for the average Bengali who,
according to Bankim, comprehends Sanskrit words (the words glossed in the
quote are in Sanskrit) even when there are Bengali equivalents for the same.
Bankim acknowledges that this is not true for all Bengali words, and there are
instances when the Bengali form of a Sanskrit word is too enmeshed in the former
language to bear replacing. It is this intrinsic relationship between Bengali and
Sanskrit that Bankim champions both in this particular essay and in his larger
body works. For Bankim, Sanskrit as the originary language contains all that one
can desire in its “word stores filled with jewels,” and as such, forms the skeleton
of the Bengali language. The linguistic—and by consequence, cultural—stability
that Sanskrit can lend Bengali cannot be derived from any other language, and
again, it is the language comprehended by the masses, unlike English or Arabic.
One should, he continues, use all available linguistic resources be they “English,
Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, rural, wild” to write beautifully and simply, and not use
Sanskrit for the sake of sounding grand or in the name of tradition. However,
the natural foundation for Bengali remains Sanskrit, and the Bengali writer must
return to this.3
The nuances of Bankim’s arguments regarding the affinities between Bengali
and Sanskrit—in terms of linguistics and literary aesthetics—are lost by the
time we come to the generation of writers immediately following him. For
authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim’s language is experimental,

3
Bankim, “Bānglā bhāśā,” 317–21, unless otherwise noted all translations of Bankim are mine.
118 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

marking the period of transition between premodern and modern Bengali

rather than indicating a continuous, organic relationship with Sanskrit.
Rabindranath reads him as abjuring the beautiful, yet affected, Sanskrit past
of Bengal in favor of a robust engagement with the modern—read, Western—
and establishing the language as emerging from its nonage.4 Following this
argument, the nineteenth century, and Bankim’s works along with it, forms
the precursor to modern Bengali literature in an inevitable teleological
progression—the Sanskrit past is gradually worked out of Bengali literature’s
system to make room for the modern anglicized present and future. Later
Bankim scholars, such as Sudipta Kaviraj and Amitrasudan Bhattacharya,
adopt a similar position, implying Bankim as effecting a radical break between
the Sanskrit past and the anglicized present. Kaviraj, for example, reads this
in-between position as revealing itself in a “sharp sense of historical rupture”
in Bankim’s “reflections on the discourse on literary taste” (Kaviraj, 170). The
colonial present, though cruel in its destruction of Bengali sovereignty, is
undeniable and, if one follows Kaviraj’s argument, instrumental in Bankim’s
artistic decisions.
It is interesting to note that this sense of sharp rupture is all but absent when it
comes to a discussion of battalā or cheap popular presses in nineteenth-century
Bengal. Bankim and his readers inhabited a world which effortlessly mixed the
high and the low—Sanskrit aesthetics representing the high, and the battalā
texts the socially and the morally low. I would like to refer to the following
theoretical texts in particular—Sukumar Sen’s Battalār chapa o chabi (The Prints
and Images of Battalā), Sripantha’s Battalā, and Gautam Bhadra’s Nyara battalāy
jay k’bar? (How Often Does Nyara Go to the Battalā?), alongside Sukumar Sen’s
four volumes entitled Bānglā sāhityer itihās (The History of Bengali Literature)—
to underscore the sense of continuum evident in nineteenth-century Bengali
literary history. These works engage with the robust tradition of prose writing in
Bengali that predates the popularity of the Victorian novel in Bengal, and provide
textual evidence to support the claim that the origins of the Bengali novel lay not
exclusively in Britain, but in a layered body of texts produced and consumed by the
elite and the everyday reader. As Sen, Sripantha, and Bhadra argue, nineteenth-
century readers familiar with proto-novelistic texts such as Pyarichand Mitra’s
Ālāler gharer dulāl (1858), Kaliprasanna Singha’s Hutam pyancār nakśā (1861–2),

4
Rabindranath Tagore argues that Bankim rouses Bengali from a Sanskrit-induced somnolence, and
frees it from the shackles of the past.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 119

and the anonymous Hemlatā-Ratikanta (1847) or Kaminīkumār (1856) would

have had models other than British novels to draw on.5
However, since the above discussion focuses primarily on battalā presses,
Bankim and the Bengali novel only get tangential mentions, and along with
colonial pedagogical policies and later Postcolonial scholarship, this body of texts
fails to account for the pace and extent of the popularity Bankim’s novels achieve
during the author’s lifetime. As Jogeshchandra Bagal, the editor of Bankim’s
collected works, notes, Durgeśnandinī undergoes thirteen reprints in Bankim’s
lifetime. How does a genre so new become so popular in such a short span of
time? There are few readers with access to either the English language or British
novels,6 and none of the proto-novelistic texts in Bengali, such as Ālāler gharer
dulāl, command the popularity of Durgeśnandinī.7 Even Bankim’s first novel,
Rajmohan’s Wife, written in English and published just a year before Durgeśnandinī
fails to gain a substantial body of readers. My contention is that the popularity
of Bankim’s novels can be explained through the following argument—Bankim
is not counting on a base of readers familiar with English and the conventions of
reading Victorian novels, but is rather drawing on elements of aesthetic literacy
possessed by existing readers of Bengali in order to present the new genre of
the Bengali novel as more familiar than alien. He rightly assumes his readers’
familiarity with Sanskrit literary aesthetics not as Sanskrit pundits but rather as
part of their everyday lived experience, and decants the new wine of the Bengali
novel into the existing bottle of Sanskrit literary traditions. In doing so, he is true
to his desire both to establish a continuum between Sanskrit and Bengali and
to rectify the mistake made in Rajmohan’s Wife—of modeling the Bengali novel
along the lines of the social and domestic novel of Victorian England.8

5
See also Chapter 1 of this work.
6
While Joshi documents the sharp rise in the profits made from selling English language novels
between 1850 and 1899, combining this information with Adam’s Report on Vernacular Education
reveals a fairly small body of readers, limited mostly to the presidencies.
7
I must also mention Chandranath Basu’s essay “Nabel bā kathāgranther uddyeśya” (Novel or the aim
of prose texts) to acknowledge the debate surrounding novel reading during the latter part of the
nineteenth century. A number of late-nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Basu, Akshaychandra
Sarkar, and Purnachandra Chattopadhyay, to name only a few, are invested in allocating Bankim’s
novels to the Sanskritist or the Anglicist camps. I take up their reviews of Durgeśnandinī in Chapter 2.
8
Bankim is not alone in experimenting with genres; Michael Madhusudan Dutt, for example, charts
a similar path when he creates modern Bengali poetry as an amalgamation of classical Sanskrit and
Miltonic styles. Bankim himself begins his literary career by writing verse in a volume entitled Lalitā
tathā mānas (1856), which I discuss briefly in Chapter 2. Throughout the nineteenth century we note
the presence of changing modes of writing (see Introduction for more), and this creates in readers
the appetite for newer genres. Thus this is the moment when one sees the emergence of genres as
varied as self-help books, letter writing manuals, blank verse poetry, alongside the Bengali novel.
120 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

As a novelist trained in Sanskrit aesthetics and Enlightenment principles

alike, the tension between the so-called East and West is palpable in Bankim,
but the predominance of the former is undeniable. Most Bankim scholars agree
that there is marked transition in his thinking from the publication of “Sāmya”
in 1876 to that of Kṝśnacaritra in 1886, when his investment in Hindu revivalism
becomes overt, and he clearly moves beyond his Enlightenment attachments
(notably Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill). “Sāmya,” published in the journal
Bangadarshan, is the work of a younger Bankim who draws on the principles of
the French Revolution, among other things, to argue for social equality between
men and women. However, by the time we come to the Bankim of Kṝśnacaritra,
the hagiography of Krishna, the earlier version of the author has been repudiated,
and he has moved overtly in the direction of Hindu philosophy mediated by
Sanskrit aesthetics. I would claim that in this more mature Bankim we find a
man who has not only refused to reprint “Sāmya” (as Sureshchandra Samajpati
notes in Bankim Prasanga), but has found a precarious resolution for the tension
between Sanskritist and Anglicist tendencies—he is able to recast principles of
Sanskrit aesthetics to connect his present to a Sanskrit past that is not atita (a
past that is inert and distinct) but agama (a past that produces the present and is
contiguous with it). Hence we find his last novel, Anandamath (1882), guided by
the śanta (tranquil) rasa—śānti (tranquility), sneha (non-sexual love), and daya
(compassion) are the sustainable sentiments that Bankim relies on.9
In keeping with his multifaceted training, Bankim draws inspiration from all
available sources but the material is arranged such that the reader recognizes in
the text aesthetic signposts from Sanskrit literature, guiding the act of reading
and rendering the text as part of a known universe. Bankim signals a unique
moment in Bengali colonial history when the traditional and the modern are
both viable aesthetic options, and indeed when the practices of Sanskrit kāvya
literature are the dominant structural and aesthetic elements of the Bengali
novel. I locate my claim in the reader as invoked by the texts to suggest that

9
Bankim’s relationship with Sanskrit aesthetics reveals itself in two more distinct, yet related, ways.
In “Uttarcarita,” he comments on his uneasiness with the term rasa, given Bengali literature’s
fascination with obscenity or the aslil, and of the Bengali reader’s propensity toward favoring the
ādirasa, a euphemism for lust or sensuality. His aim is to identify and condemn those traditions
of Bengali literature that have corrupted classical Sanskrit aesthetics—and have become low and
vulgar as a result—and push the readers toward a better (read, more modern) understanding of
these aesthetic principles. The second is his desire to express that which is referred to by the rasas,
but given the mire of connotations surrounding the word rasa, to simply use another term. He does
not wish to do away with the rasas or Sanskrit aesthetics but to avoid the sexual overtones acquired
by the term rasa itself.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 121

Bankim’s novels train her to read the Sanskrit past as encoded in the text, and
coexisting with the modern present, albeit in a difficult relationship. The presence
of Sanskrit aesthetics indicates not so much a desire to provide the modern
Bengali reader with a newly minted literature that can compete with English,
but rather the belief that the reader and the author share a cultural past which
they inhabit at the same time as the present. This is not a past that “perfumes”
the present, to use Kaviraj’s words, as the present hurtles toward modernity, but
rather one that is lived on a quotidian level through communal recitations of
the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, through an offhand knowledge of Kālidas’
poem Abhigyanaśakuntalā, or the poetic oeuvre of Vidyapati and Jayadeva.10 By
approaching Bankim’s relationship with his reader as more than one of training
the future subject of the Indian nation,11 one is able to explore both his texts
and his readers’ responses to them in light of alternate reading practices, ones
which exist independent of colonial pedagogical policies or received reading
from Britain.
Bankim’s training in Sanskrit aesthetics, and influence of the same in his
novels, has been documented by scholars but the discussion has been mostly
restricted to discovering whether the novels repurpose original British source
material.12 Studies of the bankimī novel’s reader are more difficult to find,
and when the reader is mentioned she is assumed to be female or adolescent
(since the novels are mostly romances written in the vernacular).13 Memoirs
of nineteenth-century readers—almost exclusively male14—are revisited to

10
As a scholar of reading practices, however, I understand all too well the ephemerality of reading,
and the fragmented nature of the nineteenth-century Bengali reader. This chapter is cognizant of
the lines that would have separated Bankim from his readers. Of the former, we have a vast body of
textual material—composed both by him and his friends and followers—chronicling the tendencies
evident in how he read, while of the latter we have significantly fewer direct textual records. Will all
of his readers have read him with Sanskrit aesthetics in mind? Probably not—Sanskrit would have
been a more lived rather than an intellectual experience for many of his readers, and the very debate
over the provenance of Durgeśnandinī’s story stands testimony to the sometimes prospective nature
of Bankim’s readers. However, it is possible to reconstruct the reader and their reading practices
using the texts as coded clues—we have factual evidence of the immense popularity of his novels,
numerous reviews of and responses to the novels from contemporary readers, and a sustained,
if not growing, use of Sanskrit aesthetic principles in the novels themselves. This third claim, in
conjunction with the first, provides us with substantial resources to imagine the reader, and to use
the reader as a theoretically viable site for this work.
11
The dominant line in Bankim scholarship, cf. Rochona Majumdar, Jashodhara Bagchi, and Amiya
P. Sen.
12
Amitrasudan Bhattacharya provides an extensive discussion of Bankim’s source material, 82–8
(1998).
13
For a discussion of Bankim’s novels being received as romances see Amiya P. Sen’s Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay: An Intellectual Biography (2008).
14
Rassundari Debi is a notable exception, and I discuss her as a reader in the Conclusion to this work.
122 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

discuss the legitimacy of Bankim’s Bengali language with reference to Sanskrit

grammar, or the proximity of the content of his stories to British sources.15 Yet
the publication history of Bankim’s novels does not support the argument for
the gender and age of his reader,16 and the references to Sanskrit are more deeply
entrenched than merely at the level of linguistic experimentation. In this chapter,
I argue for a fuller examination of Bankim’s relationship with his reader in light
of Sanskrit aesthetics, namely rasa theory. Contrary to the school of thinking that
claims a radical break between the Sanskrit past and the Westernized present in
Bankim’s novels, I suggest that the novelist attains mythic levels of popularity
by encoding the novel not as a foreign genre, but as one the nineteenth-century
Bengali reader would have been already familiar with. Bankim relies on his
reader’s knowledge of the Sanskrit kathā and the ākhyāyika, and the various
rasas (roughly translated as flavors or moods, but also affective tones) evoked by
literary works.17 His reader is not one who imitates their Victorian counterpart,
but is rather a rasik—one who is aware of, and participates in, evoking the rasa.
In order to satisfy the rasik, Bankim employs several methods prescribed by
rasa theorists, and I examine two of these techniques—evoking the śṛngāra
(erotic) rasa, and introducing verse in longer works of prose. I restrict my
discussion to three novels by Bankim—his first, Durgeśnandinī (The Chieftain’s
Daughter, 1865), Biśabṛksha (The Poison Tree, 1873), and one of his last novels,
Anandamath (The House of Bliss, 1882)—to demonstrate Bankim’s commitment
to rasa aesthetics, and his readers’ participation in the same. As a note, I use
rasa theory as applicable to literature as a whole, and not just the dramatic arts.

15
Cf. Amiya P. Sen and Amitrasudan Bhattacharya.
16
Literacy, even in the vernacular, while on the rise for women, was far from being the norm in
nineteenth-century Bengal, and one wonders whether most women or adolescents contemporary to
Bankim would have been buying/subscribing to the magazines in which the novels were published,
or the novels when they were published as independent books.
17
The first essay in the collection titled Bankim Prasanga (On the Subject of Bankim, 1922), by
Rabindranath Tagore, narrates Tagore’s first meeting with Bankim at a literary meet near Kolkata. As
with most of the essays, Tagore’s “Bankimchandra” is anecdotal in nature, and recounts the event as
memorable not because the author met his literary hero, but owing to Bankim’s pained response at
a speaker using the bibhatsa or the odious rasa. Bankim apparently covers his face and moves away
from the crowd, thus imprinting on the young Tagore the sensitive nature of the poetic soul. Such
casual but specific reference to rasas is a common feature of a number of the essays, including those
by Chandranath Basu, Haraprasad Sastri, Akshaychandra Sarkar, and Sureshchandra Samajpati,
again to name only a few. My claim is that while these are the elites of Bengali intelligentsia, Bankim
Prasanga is not designed to be a scholarly volume; it collects stories and reminiscences by those who
knew Bankim best, and as such is intended for the general public. As late as 1922, references to the
rasas in particular, and to Sanskrit aesthetics in general, would have appealed to the average Bengali,
so it is not too far off the mark to assume the presence of the same in lived experience of the Bengali
reader in the second half of the nineteenth century.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 123

In this, I follow practices established by classical and contemporary Sanskrit

scholars who note the presence of the rasas in literary texts, dance forms, and
musical compositions. Given my focus on literature and reading, I refer to the
audience as pāthak (reader) rather than darśak (spectator).
Instead of a complete rejection of the modern in favor of a mythic indigenous
past, this chapter suggests that the traditions of rasik principles, generic
conventions of Sanskrit literature, and a linguistic fluidity between Bengali and
Sanskrit are a part of the lived experience of both Bankim and his nineteenth-
century reader. His novels retain enough of the familiar to provide the reader
with points of reference, both in terms of aesthetics and structure, and are thus
new enough to be attractive and fashionable while still bearing the marks of the
comfortably known.

II. The Rasik Pāthak and the Model Reader

Durgeśnandinī occupies a mythic position in the canon of modern Bengali

literature for a number of reasons—it is the first self-consciously crafted novel in
the language and in a remarkably short span of time grants its author, Bankim, the
honor of being a superstar in the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Bengal.
Tilottama, the novel’s heroine, however, is largely overshadowed by Bankim’s
later female protagonists; she has none of Kapalkundala’s enigmatic charm, nor
Kundanandini’s ill-fated passion, nor is she as fully formed a character as Prafulla.
Yet Tilottama has one unique feature—she is the first character to appear as a
reader in the genre, and through her practice of reading, Bankim guides the
readers of Durgeśnandinī in particular, and of the Bengali novel in general. As
she reads, the invoked reader—addressed simply as pāthak (the masculine for
“reader” in Bengali)—occupies a voyeuristic position and learns that this strange
new genre can, after all, be read in a comfortably familiar way. Through her, the
reader is invited to note in Durgeśnandinī the evocation of the śṛngāra rasa that
orders the novel’s narrative and stylistic contents in accordance with classical
Sanskrit aesthetics, and situates the text not as recklessly moving toward an
unorthodox modernity, but rather as organically reworking elements of Sanskrit
tradition. Bankim’s technique of enframing Tilottama before presenting her as a
reader of a deliberately chosen set of Sanskrit texts isolates her as the ideal reader
who inhabits the pāthak’s psyche both as a guide and as a dimly recollected past.
This invoked reader is urged to fall in love with Tilottama both because of her
124 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

own allure and her ability to remind the reader of someone he has intimately
loved in the past, and because of the familiarity of the reading she performs. This
love for Tilottama depends upon the reader deciphering the code embedded in
her practice of reading—the rasik pāthak will understand that she is formed after
Kadambari, Vasavadatta, and Radha and, like these women, can only be truly
appreciated if she evokes the sentiment of śṛngāra in the pāthak. The reader,
then, has to read like Tilottama so as to be able to fully comprehend her charm,
and by induction the beauty of Durgeśnandinī.
At first glance, Tilottama is the quintessential romantic heroine, intended to
be the object of the male gaze of the author, the hero, and the invoked reader.
We first see her inside a Hindu temple on a predictably stormy night, framed
by the light of a lamp and her veil, when she encounters the novel’s protagonist,
Jagatsingha. It is love at first sight for both, but she must return to her father’s
castle with her chaperone, Bimala, and he must go away to defend Bengal against
the Pathans, acting on behalf of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Following a brief
foray into the history of the region in the late sixteenth century—the novel’s
temporal setting, referred to as the ākhyāyikābarnita kāl18—the narrator returns
the reader to Tilottama and the prospect of learning more about the romance.
Bankim paints her as lovesick and distracted, and invites the reader to recall his
love from his adolescence to fully experience Tilottama’s beauty. The passage,
evocative in its use of alamkār (ornamental figures of speech), describes the
archetype of innocent, youthful, feminine beauty, and leaves both the reader
in no doubt of the author’s intentions—to underscore that Tilottama is, indeed,
beautiful (sundar). This beauty is both seen and experienced by the reader,19 and
these are as central to the passage as the descriptions of the protagonist herself.
The passage commences with the phrase “Tilottama is beautiful” but it
immediately transitions to the vocative case as the pāthak is asked if he has
ever, in his youth (kiśōr bayese), seen with/in his “eyes of love” (premcokkhute)
such beauty as Tilottama’s.20 The pāthak’s access to her is conditional upon
an affirmative response to the above question—“Only if you have seen [such

18
The phrase translates to “the time described in the ākhyāyikā” but given the complex relationship
between history and imagined narratives in the ākhyāyikā and the kathā, I explore this phrase more
fully later in the chapter in relation to Durgeśnandinī.
19
I advisedly conflate the invoked reader with the reader of the novel or the actual reader, as the
former is meant to represent the latter. Using the figure of the invoked reader allows Bankim to keep
the reader in close proximity to the text, and call on him at significant moments in the narrative. The
goal is, what the pāthak learns under Bankim’s direct tutelage, the actual reader learns by proxy.
20
Durgeśnandinī, 11, translation mine.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 125

a figure]” the narrative claims, “can you feel in your mind the true nature of
Tilottama’s form.”21 This act of seeing is said to occur in a memory that is almost
dream-like, as Bankim effects a conjunction of reading, remembering, and
seeing. As the reader reads, he is urged to both remember and dream the ideal
that is Tilottama; the adjectives used to describe her call to mind something
very familiar, yet there is a certain unknowability that places her in the realm
of the reader’s dream.22 By itself, the passage is far from extraordinary—by
delimiting Tilottama to the reader’s dream and memory, the author ensures that,
while enticing, she is preserved by her innate virtue for the sole consumption of
the hero.
However, what Tilottama does immediately following this description
undermines the apparently straightforward nature of the passage. It grows dark
outside, and the return of the lamp (reminiscent of our introduction to her in
the temple) compels her to turn to her room, and to her books. This is a strange,
even scandalous, action for a female character in the middle of the nineteenth
century, and Bankim is acutely aware of that.23 He hastens to add, “Tilottama
knew how to read; Abhiram Swami [her father’s political and spiritual advisor]
had taught her to read Sanskrit.”24 Tilottama being a literate woman is a fairly
novel concept for Bankim’s audience in an age when the education of women is
far from an accepted norm, and later in the novel, Bimala too must also explain
her ability to write letters. Thus part of the sentence’s effect is to establish the
plausibility of Tilottama’s action. Of interest to my argument is the language
of instruction—she knows Sanskrit. This too is not extraordinary in itself;
Tilottama is the daughter of a wealthy landowner whose political affiliation with
the Mughal court is distinct from his explicitly articulated Hindu identity, and
Sanskrit is an integral part of that process of Hindu self-formation.
My contention is that the choice of Sanskrit allows Bankim to model through
Tilottama, a particular practice of reading which would be far more familiar to
the pāthak than either the novel genre imported from the West, or the particular
example of Ivanhoe. Among other things, this practice assumes the reader’s

21
Ibid.
22
Tilottama is “serene, constant, soft-natured” who travels the paths of the reader’s memory like a
dream, Durgeśnandinī, 11.
23
Popular satires, such as “Miss Binobibi B.A.” and “Novel Nāyikā,” capture what was a commonly
held belief—a woman ought not to be allowed to read works of fiction, novels, and romances in
particular, by herself in the seclusion of her room. In such a circumstance, the woman would be
without supervision and free to indulge in the moral depravity encouraged by these texts.
24
Durgeśnandinī, 11.
126 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

knowledge of Sanskrit prose romances and stylistic elements of the same. As

Tilottama reads, the reading list becomes more than mere intertextual reference:
Tilottama left off worrying and sat near the lamp with a book … The book
was Kadambari. After reading for a while, she expressed annoyance and rejected
Kadambari. She got another book; Subandhu’s Vasavadatta. She read, thought,
read again, thought distractedly; she didn’t like Vasavadatta either. Setting it
aside, she started reading Gītgōvinda; she liked Gītgōvinda for a while. She
smiled coyly while reading, then threw the book away.
(Durgeśnandinī, 11–12)

Bankim introduces three texts through his model reader—Bānabhatta’s

Kadambari (first half of the seventh century CE), Subandhu’s Vasavadatta (also
seventh century but before Bāna), and Jayadeva’s Gītgōvinda (twelfth century
CE). Both Kadambari25 and Vasavadatta are prose romances in classical Sanskrit,
while Gītgōvinda is in verse, and all three appear to have been inserted to inform
the reader about Tilottama’s romantic sentiments. The works by Bāna and
Subandhu refer specifically to instances of well-known lovers, initially suffering
biraha (separation owing to fate and circumstance) but ultimately achieving
milan (united thanks to their virtue, faith, and divine intervention). Gītgōvinda
narrates the love of Radha and Kṛshna in the Vaishnava tradition, celebrating
the divine couple and rewarding Radha’s devotion to the sometime unfaithful,
yet eventually penitent, Kṛshna. The thematic structure of these three texts
prioritizes milan following biraha; each couple must undergo separation and
prove their fidelity through prolonged—often seemingly interminable—periods
of waiting before experiencing milan. This echoes the narrative of Durgeśnandinī
in which Tilottama and Jagatsingha are separated when the Pathans attack and
capture her father’s castle. Their reunion occurs only after a prolonged separation
during which Jagatsingha must be convinced of her fidelity, and both must suffer
physical and emotional privations.
The texts stand in for more than a narrative foretelling owing to the dominant
rasa—śṛngāra—evoked in each, and by implication in Durgeśnandinī. According
to the Nātyaśastra (composed orally and transmitted to writing between 100
BCE and 100 CE) by Bhārata,26 there are eight dominant or fundamental feelings

25
It is also interesting to note here that Bankim is not alone in his fascination with Kadambari.
Tarashankar Tarkaratna translates the text into Bengali, also naming his work Kadambari in 1861,
merely four years prior to the publication of Durgeshnandini.
26
I follow the convention of attributing the Nātyaśāstra to Bharata, even though it is generally agreed
that the text is a composite.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 127

(sthāyībhāva) which exist in a latent form in all human beings. He names them
as follows—Delight (rati), Laughter (hāsa), Sorrow (śōka), Anger (krōdha),
Heroism (utsāha), Fear (bhaya), Disgust (jugupsa), and Wonder (vismaya). The
eight rasas correspond to the eight sthāyībhāvas. In the Nātyaśastra, the rasas
are the Erotic (śṛngāra), the Comic (hāsya), the Pathetic (karunā), the Furious
(raudra), the Heroic (vira), the Terrible (bhayanaka), the Odious (bibhatsa), and
the Marvellous (adbhuta).27 Later a ninth rasa, the Tranquil (śānta), is added
to this list, probably by the theorist Abhinavgupta around the tenth century,
and is gradually accepted as being the highest rasa an author must strive
toward, although during the period of Bana and Subandhu, the pinnacle of the
rasas is śṛngāra. The Nātyaśāstra outlines a set of practical rules by which the
composer may successfully express a sthayibhāva through the text, which is
then aesthetically transformed into a rasa experienced by the audience. When
the rasik audience encounters a sthāyibhāva in art, she feels particular pleasure,
and it is this feeling that Bhārata names rasa. Aesthetic experience involves the
audience being first aware of the sthāyibhāva, and then tasting the rasa, which
is born of the union of the text and its performance.28 For a work of art, there
should a dominant rasa, which dictates all the other elements, and provides an
affective framework for the audience.
Of significance to my argument is the śṛngāra rasa, and it is worth quoting
the Nātyaśāstra’s description at length:
Of these [the rasas], the Erotic (śṛngāra) Sentiment proceeds from the Dominant
State of love (rati) and it has as its basis (lit. soul) a bright attire; for whatever
in this world is white, pure, bright and beautiful is appreciated in terms of the
Dominant State of love (śṛngāra). For example, one who is elegantly dressed
is called a lovely person (śṛngārin) … Hence the Erotic Sentiment has been so
named on account of its usually being associated with a bright and elegant attire.
It owes its origin to men and women and relates to the fullness of youth.29

The text places as much emphasis on “a bright attire” (ujwalveshhātmak) as it

does on love and the “fullness of youth,” and leaves open a considerable room
for interpretation. This juxtaposition of the erotic with vibrant attire can be
explained in part by the range of meanings encompassed by the word śṛngāra. As

27
I draw on Gnoli’s translation here.
28
For a more detailed discussion of the transition from the state of awareness to that of savoring the
rasa, see Kathleen Marie Higgins’ “An Alchemy of Emotions.”
29
Bharata, chap. 6, verse 45.
128 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

the entry in the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary of 1872 indicates,

śṛngāra simultaneously refers to love, amorous passions, sexual union, as well as
elegant attire, and in particular, a dress suitable for amorous purposes or the act
of dressing up for such an event.
I wish to dwell on the implicit meaning here; śṛngāra connotes beauty
(soundarya) and the beautiful (sundar). In a twentieth-century commentary
on the Nātyaśastra, the classical Bharatnātyam dancer, V. P. Dhananjayan,
elaborates upon Bhārata’s cryptic passage by equating śṛngāra with soundarya;
amorous love based on physical attraction can only serve as the initial moment
of the rasa, but for the work to achieve the culmination of the śṛngāra rasa,
there must be an exploration of that which is truly beautiful, both in the mind
and the body. According to this commentary, the love thus born between two
individuals is able to overcome any obstacles, and because it is another form of
truth, it is suitably elevated to be the subject matter of great art.
It is this definition of the śṛngāra rasa that colors both Bankim’s description of
Tilottama and the pāthak’s perception of her. If one keeps in mind Dhananjayan’s
commentary, then Bankim’s repetition of the word “beautiful” in relation to
Tilottama becomes more than mere word play:
Tilottama was beautiful [sundari] … Tilottama’s body, though beautifully
proportioned [sugathan], was not fully developed; whether it was because of
her young age, or the natural built of her body, this beautiful body [sundar
dehe] was more slender than plump. Yet every part of this young girl’s body
was perfectly rounded [sugol] and delicately soft [sulalita]. Gem bracelets on
her perfectly rounded wrists [sugol praoshthe]; a diamond studded ornament
on her perfectly rounded arms [sugol bahute]; a ring on her perfectly rounded
finger [sugol angulate]; a mekhala on her perfectly rounded thighs [sugol urute];
a golden necklace on her beautifully formed shoulder [sugathan angsopare]; a
gem necklace on her beautifully formed neck [sugathan kanthe]; everything
beautifully formed [sarbatrer gathan sundar].30

This passage is clearly meant to demonstrate Bankim’s ability to mold Bengali

into an ornate and rhetorically charged language. The use of anupras (alliteration)
bears this out—every descriptive unit begins with either sugathan (beautifully
formed) or sugōl (perfectly rounded), and the repetition of the syllable “su”
employs shabdalamkār (ornamentation based on the sound of the word). The
alliteration, however, perfectly captures the interpretation of the śṛngāra rasa

30
Durgeśnandinī, 11.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 129

Dhananjayan alludes to. “Tilottama is sundar (beautiful)” cues the reader into
both a description of her physical self and the dominant rasa of the work. The
sugathan of her body echoes the first syllable of sundar and its meaning, as do
sugōl and sulalita (delicately soft). The choice of the alliterative syllable is similarly
telling—“su,” much like the Greek “eu” refers to that which is auspicious, good,
and, by implication, inherently beautiful. Bankim evokes the rasa by enhancing
each portion of sundar Tilottama with an ornament, thus coupling the alamkār
(ornament) of the language with a physical adornment. Each member of her
body is decorated with an appropriate ornament, and together they infuse
the prose with the appropriate rasa. The catalogue of jewels further obeys the
dictates of the Nātyaśāstra by presenting the heroine in glittering attire. While
Tilottama’s jewels help the reader gauge her social status, at the level of aesthetic
theory, the ornaments are as necessary as Tilottama being in the “fullness of
youth” in enhancing her beauty and evoking the śṛngāra rasa.
This play on alamkār is present in Kadambari as Bāna surrounds the heroine
with handmaidens, each of whom is both bejeweled as well as a jewel herself31;
Kadambari’s beauty is reflected in the jeweled pavement, walls, roof, and figures
carved into the roof of her pavilion.32 For Bāna, Kadambari abandons childhood
in favor of youth the moment she falls in love and becomes a woman the poet can
describe as the erotic ideal,33 but Bankim very consciously refuses to cross that
line. Tilottama, though ornamented, is the archetype of innocent adolescence,
and hence her body, though beautifully formed is not fully formed. Thus while
Bāna’s text plunges into a vivid description of Kadambari’s heavy breasts which
are jewel-like, Bankim prudishly restricts himself to Tilottama’s arms, fingers,
shoulders, and neck. The śṛngāra rasa is to be evoked, but within the bounds of
Bengali decorum.
Tilottama, however, is not an isolated instance of the śṛngāra rasa in
Durgeśnandinī. After the reader is invited to gaze upon her beauty, he disappears
for two chapters, reappearing when Bimala, Tilottama’s chaperone, is performing

31
Kadambari narrates the tale of two pairs of star-crossed lovers, Mahāswetā and Pundarik, and
Kadambari and Candrapida. Using the structure of stories nestled within stories, Bana describes
how both couples are separated by fate, with the heroes either dead or suddenly called away. As a
result both heroines feel compelled to die following the departure of their beloved, but are urged
by the gods to believe in rebirth, and are finally rewarded for their patience by being reunited with
their lovers. The moment in the narrative I discuss above occurs when Chandrapida first encounters
Kadambari, and both are captivated and physically weakened by their love for the other.
32
Kadambari, 59–62 (Kane translation), 217–19 (Layne translation).
33
Kadambari, 60 (Kane translation), 218–19 (Layne translation).
130 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

her toilette, or the act of śṛngāra. The author asks the pāthak to contemplate the
more mature, self-consciously erotic beauty of Bimala.34 She is also ornamented,
but the prose used to describe her is far less poetically charged; Bimala is the
erotic incarnate, the more sensual element of the rasa, and Bankim is clearly
anxious to contain her sexuality. By the end of the narrative, Bimala is widowed
and shorn of all her physical charms, but not before she employs those very
charms to seduce Katlu Khan (the lascivious and cruel Pathan villain) to his
death. In Bimala one notices the novelist’s hesitance with fully exploring the
bounds of the rasa; it is too erotic, too sensual to be emulated completely.
Tilottama’s presence mitigates what to Bankim are the cruder aspects of this
rasa, as she can be relied on to filter śṛngāra through the sundar (beautiful), and
allow the novelist to reinterpret a classical theory for the modern reader. Thus
Tilottama does pick up Kadambari first, but abandons it with annoyance soon
after; Bankim’s use of the verb parityāg describes Tilottama’s rejection of the text
connoting an explicit rejection of the text.
The work she takes up next, Vasavadatta, is more appealing. Subandhu’s
Vasavadatta recounts the romance between Kandarpaketu and Vasavadatta,
both of whom have a vision of the other in their dreams which serves as a
catalyst to their meeting. Like Kadambari, Vasavadatta too subjects the lovers
to a separation, when the heroine accidentally wanders into a hermitage, and is
turned into stone by an ascetic whose penances are interrupted by her excessive
beauty. Kandarpaketu, having lost Vasavadatta, is on the brink of committing
suicide when a divine voice assures him of reunion; his search leads him to her
statue which returns to life on his touch. The narrative is much shorter than
Kadambari and the structure less intricate, but here too the dominant rasa is
śṛngāra, as becomes evident from the author’s introduction of Vasavadatta—
“(Kandarpaketu) saw Vasavadatta brilliant with a pair of legs <reddened feet>
as grammar has <rubricated padas>; with <goodly joints> as the Bhārata has
<a hundred books>.”35 This translation by Louis H. Gray is notable for its
attention to Subandhu’s style, and in particular the latter’s reliance on slesha
or paronomasia. According to Gray, Subandhu declares his mastery of this
particular form of alamkār in the text’s introduction, claiming that he is able to
arrange “a series of paronomasias in every syllable.”36 In this particular section,

34
Durgeśnandinī, 14.
35
Subandhu, 113–14.
36
Gray, Introduction, 17.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 131

the extended slesha compares Vasavadatta to various classical Sanskrit texts and
rhetorical devices, thus textualizing the body of the woman, and extending the
śṛngāra rasa to the literary arts. Vasavadatta’s beauty is comparable to the true
beauty of the pada (lit. feet, here referring to the quarter divisions of Panini’s
treatise on grammar). Subandhu puns on the multiple sense of the word sundar;
Sundarkānda refers to the fifth book (kānda) of the Ramayana, but sundar as
beauty also stands in for śṛngāra. The mention of Bharata reminds the reader
that the author is punning on descriptions from the Nātyaśāstra. Unlike Bana
who introduces Kadambari with the help of visual ornamentation, Subandhu
relies on the alamkār (ornaments) of literature and the arts. He follows the
conventions of the blazon by comparing each portion of the heroine’s body with
a beautiful object, thus enhancing the attractiveness of the body, but replaces the
traditional lexicon of precious gems and heavenly bodies with rhetorical devices
and the śāstras (religious or secular treatises).
Little wonder then Tilottama prefers Vasavadatta to the more sexually
explicit Kadambari. The essence of the rasa is filtered through the literary arts,
and as the reader, Tilottama chooses to identify more with the textualized beauty
of Vasavadatta than the explicit sexuality of Kadambari. More importantly,
Bankim’s reader hears echoes of Subandhu’s description and perceives Tilottama
as the beautiful Vasavadatta. The intertextual reference elevates Durgeśnandinī
to the level of Vasavadatta, from where it can then be compared to the body of
classical Sanskrit texts, in the same way that Bankim’s heroine can be compared
to Subandhu’s. The reader who recognizes this connection between the two
texts finds in Bankim a modern practitioner of a classical rasa and notices the
Bengali novelist rinsing the sentiment of its overt sensuality. Tilottama, and by
extension the reader, prefers that iteration of the śṛngāra rasa which focuses on
the sundar as not merely transcending the bodily but conflating the corporeal
with the textual. In Kadambari, the alamkār used in the prose evokes the rasa,
but the object of the sentiment is always the beautiful woman; in this passage
from Vasavadatta, the alamkār of slesh, by virtue of equating the body of the
woman with the text, makes the prose as much an object of the rasa as the body.
Bankim’s style makes the language itself an object of the śṛngāra rasa. Like
Tilottama, like Bimala, Bankim’s prose possesses the beauty worthy of evoking
in the reader the rasa, and it is most evident in the description of the novel’s third
female character, Ayesha. As the daughter of the Pathan Katlu Khān, Ayesha is
necessarily in the wrong camp, but that does not prevent Bankim from lavishing
some of the most beautiful language in the novel on her. She also forms the third
132 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

side of the love triangle when she falls in love with Jagatsingha after he has been
taken prisoner by her father, and her unrequited love for the hero, along with
her beauty, wins the reader’s sympathy. Bankim again addresses the reader after
seemingly forgetting her in the heat of narrative’s action. He then displays his
mastery of slesha, as he plays upon the idea of painting a picture of Ayesha for
the reader. If he were an artist, Bankim says, he would take up a brush and paint
her complexion, outline her forehead, her ears, her mass of beautifully parted
black hair, draw her eyes and her lips. However, as one reads the passage, one
begins to note the insertion of the verb “I would write” (likhitām) for the verb
“I would paint” (ānkitām). The construction plays with the reader’s expectation;
the writer is writing a picture, but using verbs associated with painting an
image.37 By the end of the passage, the only verb used is “I would write” but the
construction is still that of “I would paint.” The word play Bankim effects relies
on the reader noticing the syntactical incongruity upon a careful perusal of the
passage, but humoring the author nonetheless as he conflates the two verbs and
paints a word picture. The elaborate pun culminates in the author’s somewhat
perplexing confession; having described her incomparable beauty, he says, “[I]f
I could write it [the extent of her beauty] all, even then I would not touch the
paintbrush.”38 Such is the force of Ayesha’s beauty, that any effort to capture it in
words or lines is in vain, and yet this false modesty merely serves to intensify
the exquisiteness of the prose that, through this syntactical confusion, evokes
the śṛngāra rasa. If Ayesha’s beauty is worth the reader’s attention, the allure of
Bankim’s prose is a formidable competitor; the latter might ostensibly serve as
the vehicle for evoking the sentiment for the former, but in its beauty, it is as
much an object of the rasa as Ayesha herself.
The audience for all three moments when the śṛngāra rasa is evoked through
a description of feminine beauty is Bankim’s reliable pāthak. At these moments,
the narrative takes on the aspects of a dramatic performance, as the author
invites the pāthak to direct their attention to the performer on stage, and marvel
both at her beauty and at the perfection of the composer’s craft. As with the
portrayal of Ayesha, with the reader too Bankim plays on the verbs; he calls on
all of the reader’s senses, thus constructing reading as an act that transcends
the restrictions of the medium, and becomes one performed by the body and
all its senses. The reader sees the words on the page, but she also imagines,

37
Durgeśnandinī, 41.
38
Ibid.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 133

hears, and tastes them, and this entire encounter is the pāthak experiencing the
śṛngāra rasa. The rasik reader transcends the worldly and specific moment in
the text toward a depersonalized, universal articulation of emotions and senses.
Bimala’s description captures the centrality of rasa for the audience-like reader;
she is not young, much like the pāthak, but age has not tarnished her beauty
because her mind (man) brims with rasa. Bankim uses rhyming ideophones
(dhyanātmakśabda) to further cement the equivalence between beauty (rūp)
and rasa. Hence, Bimala’s body overflows (dhalodhalo) with beauty because her
mind overflows (talotalo) with rasa. Age, for Bankim, only serves to make the
rasa perfectly digestible, and the reader who is past her prime can attest to this.39
In many ways, Victorian critics also allude to reading as a fundamentally
bodily experience; G. H. Lewes, for example, suggests reading is a physical
act governed by the temporal rhythms of both the body of the reader and the
sequence of words on the page. Indeed, the Sensation novel as a genre specializes
in addressing the nerves rather than the readers’ rational faculties. However,
the argument presented is in favor of viewing the reader’s body as a machine—
so as to echo industrialized Victorian England—not the visceral, organic
experience espoused by the Bengali novelist. The physiological theory of Lewes
and the characteristics of the Sensation novel further indicate attempts to create
theoretical tools exclusively for the novel, and not borrowed from older literary
genres such as the epic and the lyric.40
For Bankim, however, the immersive experience of consuming the text is
a conscious situating of the novel in the non-novelistic tradition of classical
Sanskrit. In using culinary terms such as “paripāk” (digestion), and coupling
them with ideophones evocative of vessels filled with liquid (dhalodhalo,
talotalo), the novelist draws on a parallel evoked by the Nātyaśāstra between
reception of art and consumption of food. Rasa in Sanskrit means juice or
flavor, and in using this term to indicate aesthetic principles the Nātyaśāstra
suggests that the rasik audience’s body performs an act similar to the ingestion
of flavorful food—it takes aesthetic pleasure from the emotional and physical
satisfaction of eating good food.41 The text consciously asks the reader to

39
Ibid., 14.
40
Dames, 9–12; also see Vanessa Ryan’s Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (2012). Ryan’s
work is reminiscent of Dames’—in both we are reacquainted with George Henry Lewes and William
James, and their impact on novelists such as Henry James and George Eliot who envision reading to
be an act intimately tied to the reader’s body.
41
The relationship between art and food is discussed by both Royona Mitra and Kathleen Marie
Higgins, with particular reference to the rasa theory and Indian classical dance forms.
134 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

model herself along the lines of the rasik sahṛdaya (empathetic) audience who
necessarily tastes the myriad flavors (rasas) of a work of art while consuming
the text. It is this satisfaction that Bankim’s reader derives while voyeuristically
gazing on Bimala, Tilottama, or Ayesha through the act of reading. For the
pāthak, like the audience of classical Sanskrit drama, the act of consuming
the aesthetic object produces the sensory delight in the same way as that
produced by the partaking of a “flavorful meal.” Thus the deliberate confusion
of verbs attunes the invoked reader of the novel to the extent to which the
theory of the rasas informs the text she is reading, and assures the reader
that Durgeśnandinī as a work of art follows conventions familiar to her; the
organization of the elements into a genre may be new, but the elements of
which the reader knows well.

III. The sahṛdaya pāthak

The Nātyaśāstra delineates the rules a work of art must follow in order to convey
affective states to the audience. However, no matter how competently the author
may depict a sthayibhāva so as to allow the audience to experience it as a rasa,
the rasa cannot be achieved without the participation of the audience. For the
rasa to be experienced, the work requires an ideal spectator, one who is defined
as being not only of “high birth,” “good character,” and “proficient in drama,” but
also capable of experiencing “gladness on seeing a person glad, and sorrow on
seeing him sorry … [feel] miserable on seeing him miserable.”42 In other words,
the audience capable of experiencing rasa must be sahṛdaya (lit. possessing of
heart) or have the ability to be in sympathetic resonance with the emotions
depicted in the work. The sahṛdaya audience may sympathize with the characters
(hṛdayasamvada), and even identify with the situation (tanmayibhāva), but the
very experience of rasa is maintaining an aesthetic distance from that which
is depicted, and aesthetically relishing this resonance instead.43 By asking his
reader to be a rasik pāthak, then, Bankim is necessarily writing for a sahṛdaya
pāthak—if they are to fully experience the rasa they must sympathize with the
novel’s protagonists and their predicaments, but always maintain an aesthetic
distance from the same.

42
Higgins, 50 (2007).
43
For more see Masson and Patwardhan (1970), Higgins.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 135

The significance of such a reader becomes obvious in light of the charges

leveled against novels in both Victorian England and nineteenth-century Bengal.
The arguments accusing novels and novelists of corrupting readers by exposing
them to narratives of lax moral standards are too well known to require restating
in detail here. Even a cursory glance at works by theorists such as Priya Joshi
and Anindita Das—to name only two—reveals that both the nineteenth-century
Bengali novel and its Victorian counterpart are thought to be harmful for the
average reader.44 Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland faces criticism for believing in
lurid Gothic imaginations, while the heroine of the popular Bengali satire Nabel
nāyikā (The Novel Heroine) becomes a social outcast after reading romances such
as Bankim’s. These accusations are founded upon the novel’s ability to immerse
the reader and compel them to identify with the characters they read about, so
much so that they are unable to tell reality from fiction.
However, the reader of Bankim’s novels is not called on find themselves in the
texts—rather, as the rasik pāthak, they can aesthetically enjoy the sympathetic
connection with the characters and the situations depicted while keeping a
morally unambiguous distance from that which they read. In invoking the reader,
Bankim returns to the conventions of dramatic staging—the characters perform
before the audience-like reader, unmindful of their presence, and the reader is
aware of seeing them at a distance from themselves. The pāthak is connected to
the action on the page/stage as though they occupy the same spacio-temporal
location, but their aesthetic experience of the characters ensures that they never
identify fully with the characters or their situations.
Vijaya Subramani traces the roots of the rasa theory in the Vedantic tradition
of Hindu philosophy which seeks to find a “balance between indiscriminate
indulgence and self-starving asceticism” by urging the individual to enjoy
without the desire for ownership.45 She suggests that the audience who is truly
sahṛdaya enjoys the aesthetic experience by being in harmony with the rasas
or the emotions in common with universal humankind, instead of seeking
ownership of that particular emotion through the aesthetic object. Thus in a
text like Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, the sahṛdaya audience does not desire ownership
of the erotic sentiment they experience through the performance of the play, or

44
For a more detailed discussion on Victorian readership, and the rich reading lives of Victorians, see
Louis James’ The Victorian Novel (2006), Vanessa Ryan’s Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian
Novel, Rebecca Mitchell’s Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference (2011), and Grace Moore’s
The Victorian Novel in Context (2012).
45
Subramani, 244.
136 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

seek to be in the same situation as the lovers so as to feel in reality the erotic.
Rather, their experience of the aestheticized emotion relies upon their ability
to perceive it as not belonging to anyone in particular; it is not the audience’s
personal emotion, or that of the character, performer, or even the composer. It
is the universal feeling of the erotic produced within the emotional space of the
text which the audience shares with all others experiencing the aesthetic object.
Watching King Dushmanta professing love to Śakuntalā allows the audience to
experience what being madly in love feels like, without inducing the desire to
own that feeling for themselves; the experience is entirely aesthetic without moral
or ethical consequences since the sahṛdaya audience is not tempted to follow in
the characters’ footsteps.46 This sense of detached enjoyment thus prevents the
audience from fully identifying with the representation they encounter, and the
understanding that what is being experienced is fleeting further distances them
from uncritically emulating the aesthetic object. The aesthetic object itself, while
depicting nature—and by extension emotions and life—does not imitate nature.
The sahṛdaya audience becomes aware of the sthayibhāva or the fundamental
feelings in the text, but experiences them not as textual imitations of everyday
emotions, but rather as a means of transcending the mundane toward a higher,
universal expression of emotions.
Given the range of fairly risqué subjects in Bankim’s novels, the aesthetic
distance the reader places between themselves and the text is of significance. The
presence of the sahṛdaya pāthak capable of deriving aesthetic pleasure from the
situations represented on the page allows the author to introduce characters who
prioritize desire over morality, become willing accomplices to seduction, and go
against codes of social behavior, without the fear of providing the reader with
bad role models.47 The recurrence of the śṛngāra rasa in particular, in texts aimed
at the conservative Bengali reader during an age when it was taboo for the wife
to even meet her husband during the day, suggests that the reader is expected
to maintain a certain distance from the situations and emotions depicted, a
detachment which owes its origin to the sahṛdaya audience of classical Sanskrit
aesthetics.

46
For a detailed analysis of the transcendence and aesthetic experience see Arindam Chakrabarti’s
“Play, Pleasure, Pain: Ownerless Emotions in Rasa-Aesthetics.”
47
I should emphasize that Bankim does not rely exclusively on his reader’s willingness to be sahṛdaya
to ensure that she does not suffer from the moral repercussions of his narratives. There is a
didactic strain prominent in his novels that defies rasa aesthetics, and it becomes evident in the
construction of Tilottama as the reader to be emulated, or of Kamal and Shrishchandra as the model
of companionate marriage in Bishabṛksha.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 137

In Bishabṛksha, for example, Bankim chooses as his protagonist Kundanandini,

a woman who, compelled by fate and her own desires, falls in love with her
benefactor, Nagendra. Their illicit relationship almost destroys Nagendra’s first
marriage, when his wife Suryamukhi chooses to sacrifice herself for the sake of
her husband’s happiness. The moral world appears to be inverted when the reader
finds Suryamukhi destitute and on the verge of death while Kundanandini,
already widowed, becomes Nagendra’s second wife. While polygamy is still a
fairly common practice among the landed gentry in nineteenth-century Bengal,
Kundanandini’s story assumes a peculiarly scandalous edge because the reader
is made privy to her uncontrolled desire for Nagendra while he is still parpuruś
(lit. someone else’s husband, but also a man outside the inner chambers of the
house). Even when Suryamukhi initially throws her out of the house—before
inexplicably bringing her back in—the reader learns of her plan to return for
a single glimpse of Nagendra, the wave of love (pranaysrōt) overcoming that
of shame (lajjasrōt).48 Yet despite this non-normative admission of desire,
Kundanandini remains the novel’s heroine and the subject of both pity and
admiration. When Kundanandini hears of Suryamukhi’s apparent death, the
reader—whom Bankim here addresses as thakurāni (a term used to address
female elders, also suggestive of a social acquaintance)—is chastised for being
gleeful at the death of a satin (co-wife), but the heroine mourns.49 The narrative
attains closure only when Kundanandini consumes poison, thus leaving the
legitimate couple to continue unhindered, but it still treats her with considerable
poignancy while reinscribing the warmth of her passions; she dies as a virtuous
wife, having gained both the love of Nagendra and the forgiveness of Suryamukhi.
The novel leaves little doubt as to which character sustains the reader’s
attention; Suryamukhi, the only other contender, physically disappears for a
significant stretch of the narrative, while Kundanandini, even at the height of her
shame, remains a constant presence. She is the aesthetic object who evokes the
śṛngāra rasa even when she first elicits an extramarital confession of love from
Nagendra. We see her in a garden, and the beauty of her surroundings echoes
her own as the pāthak witnesses the blossoms caressing her body. Bankim
introduces the rasa with the word sundar (beauty), but unlike Durgeśnandinī, here
Kundanandini ascribes the quality to everyone but herself—she thinks everyone
is sundar while she has no attractive qualities at all. The effect on the reader,

48
Bishabṛksha, 244–5.
49
Ibid., 270–1.
138 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

however, is the opposite. The more she laments that Suryamukhi, Haramani,
Bishu, Mukta, and all the members of the household, down to the conniving
and morally destitute maid, Hira, are prettier than she is, the more the reader
perceives her as the model of innocent yet doomed beauty.50 Yet this beauty is
also dangerous, as Kundanandini’s contemplation of death demonstrates. She
has this initial chance to kill herself, thereby removing the threat posed by her
allure, but as the narrator wonders at the close of the chapter, “why [doesn’t]
Kunda kill herself by drowning?”51
Despite her perilous beauty, Kundanandini can thrive in the novel as the reader
is shielded from emulating her self-destructive passion by her aesthetic distance
from the text. The reader derives pleasure and thrill from seeing Kundanandini
challenge fate and social customs, without becoming embroiled in the world of
the novel. Her death at the moment she transgresses would preserve the moral
universe but detract from the rasa, and so the narrative chooses instead to
minimally contain the damage by suggesting she kill herself while emphasizing
her fragile beauty that is evocative of both desire and death. The reader feels what
it is to give in to a forbidden love, but the experience of the rasa prevents them
from identifying with Kundanandini or desiring to be in the same situation as
the novel’s heroine. As the sahṛdaya pāthak they recognize the rasa’s emphasis is
not mimetic (anukaran) but detached appreciation, and their aesthetic distance
from the text allows Bankim to accentuate the taboo and the erotic.52 Like
Kālidāsa’s audience, Bankim’s reader sympathizes with Kundanandini, but they
do not see themselves in the character; the sahṛdaya pāthak’s morality suffers no
damage from their experience of reading the novel.

IV. Kathā, Ākhyāyikā, and a Sanskritized Bengali

One significant difference between Bankim and Kalidasa is their choice of

artistic medium. The latter composes in the highest of genres—verse—while
the former employs a relatively new and secondary genre in Sanskrit literary
history—prose. If the texts read by Tilottama—in particular Kādambarī and
Vasavadattā—provide Bankim’s reader with an aesthetic reference point, they

50
Biśabriksha, 230–2.
51
Ibid.
52
Chakrabarti’s chapter is a good reference here, in particular the discussion on page 196.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 139

also situate his novels within the tradition of classical Sanskrit prose narratives.
He describes Durgeśnandinī as an ākhyāyikā, which is one of two available modes
of Sanskrit prose narratives, the other being the kathā.53 This choice of descriptor
is significant as Bankim does not merely identify the text as a kāhinī or a story;
he selects a specific genre, one which his reader would be more familiar with
than the foreign form of the novel. The word “novel” itself becomes assimilated
into the Bengali language soon after the publication of Durgeśnandinī and enters
colloquial use to the extent that popular, cheap satires regularly refer to the
ill-effects of reading “nātak-nabel” (“plays, novels”).54 Yet Bankim persists in
his use of the term ākhyāyikā in texts as late as Ānandamath (1882) and Debi
Chaudhurāni (1884), assuming his readers’ familiarity with the form even when
the novel as a genre and a term is well-established in Bengal.
However, before examining how Kādambarī and Vasavadattā are employed
to create a literary lineage for the Bengali novel, it is worth looking briefly at
the history of prose in the Sanskrit literary tradition, given the primacy of verse
compositions and the wealth of commentary surrounding poetic texts. The
record of Sanskrit prose is a contentious one, not least because it is rarely accorded
the literary merit associated with the more illustrious poetic tradition. Sanskrit
scholars situate prose as an inferior art form, composed in the shadow of poetry,
following the accepted hierarchy in Sanskrit art; poetry is the repository of beauty
or alamkār and characterized by rasa.55 The history of prose is dependent upon
that of poetry because the artistic features of prose are almost exclusively derived
from poetic compositions, and it is a history narrated through difference rather
than identity. Sanskrit prose is initially described as the absence or limited use
of verse, and consequently lacking the rhetorical sophistication of poetry, while
its content is seen as a smaller subset of the subjects fit for poetic composition.
Even in such classic texts as Kādambarī and Vasavadattā, prose is frequently
interspersed with stanzas of verse which either indicate a break in the narrative
or—and this is more often—express the more creative articulation of the rasas.
The status of prose improves when the seventh-century Kashmiri rhetorician,
Bhamaha, addresses kāvya or poetry and its variations based on structure,
subject matter, and the manner of composition, in the most significant treatise
on classical Sanskrit rhetoric, Kāvyalamkāra (The Ornaments of Poetry).

53
Durgeśnandinī, 5.
54
Nabhel Nāyikā Bā Śikkhita Bou and Miss Bino Bibi, B.A. are only two such examples.
55
Cf. Hrishikesh Bose, Kadambari ō gadya-sāhitye śilpa-bicār (1968).
140 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Bhamaha suggests that the word kāvya—traditionally taken to mean poetry

or verse compositions—is a combination of word and meaning, rather than a
literary form, and as such, can be composed as verse or prose.56 He establishes
aesthetic rules particular to prose, and demarcates historical and imaginative
prose writing—itihās as the former, and kathā and ākhyāyika as the latter. While
the distinctions between kathā and ākhyāyika become a matter of considerable
debate among prominent theorists of ancient India such as Dandin, Lollata,
and Rudrata, the two are generally accepted to be the class of fictional prose
narratives to which both Kādambarī and Vasavadattā belong. The rules of
composition encompass both form and content, and the essential ones require
that the kathā and the ākhyāyika be literary compositions, written primarily
in prose using “words pleasing to the ear (sravya) and agreeable to the matter
intended (prakrtanukula).” Verse should be used “in vaktra and apavaktra
metre” to provide “a timely indication of the future happenings in the story.”
The Kavyalamkāra also recommends the theme for such compositions to
be the “abduction of a girl (kanya-harana), a fight (samgrama), a separation
(vipralambha), and the (final) triumph (udaya), apparently of the hero,” and the
narrative to be divided “into several pauses called ucchvasas” so as to allow the
narrator time to breathe.57 Most commentaries on Kādambarī and Vasavadattā
as archetypes of prose narrative agree that the tenor of these works is dictated
by their central theme—kanyālābha (winning of the maiden) or kanyāharana,
which gives “free scope to the delineation of the amorous sentiment” (śṛngāra
rasa).58 This furthers the idea that the prose texts are fundamentally inventions
of the composer, and can be read as examples of romantic fiction in the Sanskrit
canon. The udaya marks the victory of love as much as it does of the hero with
the removal of the cause of separation and the union of the lovers. There is added
emphasis on the śṛngāra rasa when theorists such as Rudrata and Vishwanatha
insist on sarasa vastu (subject matter imbued with rasa, but also implying a
contrast between the flavor of fiction and the dryness of historical accounts) as
substance fit for the form.
The difficulties of applying the tenets of classical Sanskrit poetics to a set of
texts written in nineteenth-century Bengal are obvious, not least of all given

56
Bhamaha, 6.
57
For more, see Sisir Kumar Das’s “The Ākhyāyikā and the Kathā in Classical Sanskrit” (1924).
58
Rudrata’s version of the Kāvyalamkāra replaces kanyāharana (abduction of a maiden) with the
less valorous kanyālābha (winning of the girl), but the emphasis on the hero acquiring his beloved
remains.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 141

that the Sanskrit theorists assume both prose and verse compositions to be
initially oral. This transition from orality is perhaps most evident in the absence
of ucchvāsas or pauses for breath in the novels. Bankim follows later conventions
in conflating some of the distinctions, choosing to focus more on the rasa of
the kathā while still retaining the historical allusions of the ākhyāyikā, thus
modifying the genres to suit his treatment of historical romantic fiction. Given
the difference in stress between Bengali and Sanskrit as languages, the meters
are also different, and neither the vaktra nor the apavaktra meters occur in
Bankim’s texts. However, despite these differences, most of Bankim’s novels
do follow Bhamaha’s dictates in using verse to foreshadow future events in the
narrative, use language both lofty and pleasant, and have lovers’ union following
an enforced separation as their overarching theme.
The technique of preparing readers for future events through sections of
verse is most notable in Bishabṛksha, in which Bankim contends with a subject
matter peculiarly thorny for a conservative Bengali audience. I wish to focus in
particular on two such instances when the novelist presents one of the characters
in disguise whose songs cue the reader—and all other characters except the
naïve Kundanandini—to what is about to happen. Debendra, the narrative’s
black-hearted villain, intent on seducing and ruining innocent beautiful women,
particularly Kundanandini, gains access to the inner chambers or antarmahal of
the house she lives in by disguising himself as a baiśnabī (a female mendicant,
usually followers of the god Vishnu, and often noted for their singing talent). He
introduces himself as Haridāsi and offers to sing and entertain the women of the
household. Harisdāsi pointedly asks Kundanandini what she would like to hear,
thus ensuring the audience (and the reader) knows who the song really is for.
He sings a kirtan (semi-religious songs about Radha and Krishna’s love), and the
following lines foretell the crisis about to occur:
Unless you look at me again,
I’ll go off to the shore of the Yamuna,
I’ll break my flute, give up my life,
Let your vanity go now59

Debendra turns Kundanandini into Radha, while he assumes the voice of

Krishna, and implores her to look at him again—she has already refused
to meet him—and threatens to kill himself if she continues to ignore him.

59
Biśabriksha, 217.
142 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The sentiment is an oft-repeated one in kirtans, and in itself not particularly

notable. In the context of the narrative, however, it presages the future; even
when physically threatened, Kundanandini stands her ground and rejects
Debendra’s advances. He ultimately dies of liver cirrhosis, driven to excess
by his failure to conquer her. The song applies not merely to Debendra and
his fate; it encodes the future of Kundanandini’s story with Nagendra as well.
The roles are reversed, and Kundanandini is now the one professing love to
the sometime reluctant Nagendra, but like Debendra, she too must die of
unrequited love.
The method of encoding future events in verse is not exclusive to the tradition
of Sanskrit prose, but in this context, it allows one to understand the repeated
intrusion of verse in Bankim’s otherwise emphasis on prose.60 In almost all
his novels, he includes verse stanzas and they predominantly serve the same
function as in Bishabṛksha. If one takes into account the requirement that the
verse additions reflect the tenor of the section which they either begin or are
a part of,61 their utility in helping establish the dominant rasa of the narrative
becomes evident. In the above example, the song explicitly articulates the erotic
sentiment, and serves to reinforce the emotion that has already been invoked
for the reader through the heightened descriptions of female beauty and love.
In Durgeśnandinī, Bankim utilizes the descriptions of the female characters to
highlight the śṛngāra rasa; in Bishabṛksha, a more mature novelist reintroduces
the rasa through the subtle use of predictive verse.
Perhaps the most famous example of verse in Bankim’s novels is from his
last work, Ānandamath. “Bande Mātaram” (“I bow to thee, Motherland”) has
acquired a life independent of the novel because of its association with Indian
nationalism. In part, “Bande Mātaram” owes its popularity to the role played by
the novel in imagining the nation as the motherland demanding service from its
seventy million children.62 The song lies at the heart of the narrative as a prayer

60
What is also unique about Bankim’s use of verse in this instance is the mélange he effects between
the highly Sanskritized Bengali and the everyday common—occasionally vulgar—Bengali of folk
songs. Akshaychandra Sarkar praises this version of bankimī Bengali when he calls is madhyabartinī
bhāśā or the language of the middle path. For readers such as Akshaychandra, this form of the
language retains the beauty of Sanskrit while still appealing to the heart of the average Bengali
reader, and shows the craft of a mature novelist fully in control of the language. As these examples
from Biśabriksha demonstrate, the narrative incorporates the low into the high in ways that are
generative in terms of both form and narrative content. For more on Akshyachandra’s discussion,
see Chapter 2. For a related discussion on the incorporation of the low into the high in Mosharraf
Hossain’s Biśād Sindhu, see Chapter 4 of this work.
61
Sisir Kumar Das discusses this construction in detail in his work, and in particular on page 512.
62
The song can be found on page 663 of the novel.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 143

to the motherland who is dharma (faith, purpose) and marma (meaning),

foreshadowing the guerrilla war waged by the Hindu Santan (lit. children,
referring to men who fashion themselves as the Sanyasis or the ascetics, serving
the motherland) against both the British and the Muslim rulers of Bengal. Set
against the 1771 Bengal famine, the narrative follows Mahendra and Kalyani as
they try and survive in a land destroyed by hunger and consequent rebellions.
They are given shelter by the Sanyasis who show them the vision of the
motherland as she was (glorious, fertile, like the goddess Jagaddhatri), as she
is (denuded, dark, like Kali), and as she will be (renewed, golden, like Durga).
The narrative culminates in a battle between the Sanyasis and the British, as the
former attack a fort and, despite all odds, win their first victory against the rājā
(king, ruler).
The importance of Ānandamath to the project of Indian nationalism, and as
an example of Bankim’s brand of revolutionary politics is well documented;63 of
interest here is the language of “Bande Mātaram.” Similar to the verses used in
Bishabṛksha, “Bande Mātaram” too establishes the dominant rasa, which here
is the vira rasa (heroic) culminating in the śānta rasa (tranquil). By appearing
at a key moment in the narrative—soon after Mahendra has been rescued by
Bhabananda, one of the Sanyasi leaders, close to the start of the novel—the
verses inform the reader of the actions to follow and the ultimate victory of the
Sanyasis in establishing a glorious motherland. Bankim’s linguistic choice is a
distillation of the Sanskritized Bengali he employs in his prose, and is emblematic
of the bankimī style in its infusion of the two languages. The verse, like the prose,
uses language intended to be pleasing to the ear and fit for the subject, thus
meeting the criteria established by Bhamaha. This language, however, appears
to be particularly impenetrable for a modern Bengali reader as it practically
disappears from literature after Bankim’s death, and also because it requires at
least a passing familiarity with Sanskrit. In the first line of the verse—“bande
mātaram” (“I bow to thee, Mother”)—the script is Bengali, as is roughly the
syntactical structure, but the words Bankim uses are Sanskrit. To emphasize this
distinction, most editions of the novel either use the diacritic mark hashanta
after the final “m” in “mātaram,” which represents a consonant sound without
an inherent vowel, or replace the “m” with “ng,” thus creating a nasal sound.
Both forms are common in Sanskrit but rare in Bengali. The words that follow—

63
Jashodhara Bagchi’s “Positivism and Nationalism” (1985) and Meenakshi Mukherjee’s “Anandamath:
A Political Myth” (1982), to name only two.
144 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

“sujalāng sufalāng malayajaśītalāng śaśyaśyāmalāng” (“richly watered, fertile,

cooled by the gentle south winds, green with the harvest”)—are Sanskrit in
form, both in terms of the “ng” endings as well as the compound words, yet
comprehensible in Bengali. A pattern begins to emerge in this song which is
present in all of Bankim’s Bengali works. The language uses the Sanskrit style of
compounding words (samās), often resulting in entire phrases being constructed
as single word units. This technique of using samās is a commonplace in Sanskrit
compositions, and various regional styles are identified by their propensity for
samās and sandhi (euphonic combinations). Bankim is almost unique in using
samās as most of his contemporaries either rely on a form of Bengali mimicking
the English grammar,64 or write in the popular form of the language, which often
incorporates the vulgar.65
As mentioned in the introduction, the story that the scholar of modern
Bengali literature has inherited positions the language of “Bande Mātaram,” and
by implication that of the novels, as innovative yet anomalous since it forms
merely one stage in the teleological progress of Bengali literature.66 Yet the
bankimī style of Bengali containing the complexities of alamkār and rasas has
a long history in early modern Bengali literature, and in many ways, Bankim is
perhaps its final practitioner. For an audience familiar with, if not competent
readers of, authors such as Bharatchandra Ray, Rama Prasad, and Ishwar
Gupta,67 Bankim’s style of writing in Sanskritized Bengali would have produced
the linguistic pleasure Bhamaha advises even though they occupy a world in
which Sanskrit has become increasingly inaccessible.
The final text Tilottama reads in Durgeśnandinī, Jayadeva’s Gītagōvinda, is a
perfect example of this comingling of Sanskrit and Bengali as the following lines
demonstrate:
Lalitā-lavanga-latā-parisilana-kōmala-malaya-samire
Madhukara-nikara-karambita-kōkilā-kujita-kunja-kutire
The gentle clove leaf pursues the soft southern wind
The humming of bees is echoing and the cuckoo sings in the hut and in
the garden68

64
Ālāler gharer dulāl.
65
Hutam pyāncār nakśā.
66
Cf. Sudipta Kaviraj’s “Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal” (2003).
67
For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Bengali, Sanskrit, and Prakrit, see Dinesh
Chandra Sen’s History of Bengali Language and Literature (1911).
68
Jayadeva, xli, translation mine.
 Dear Reader, Good Sir 145

The language Jayadeva uses is Sanskrit, but the lines can be read in Bengali as
each word is tatsama or identical in meaning in both languages. A reader of
Bengali would read the last four words “kōkila-kujita-kunja-kutire” (“the cuckoo
sings in the hut and in the garden”) as Bengali, thus making the language of the
poem ambiguous. Compare this to a few more lines of “Bande Mataram”:
SaptakōTīkanThakalakalaninādakarāle
DwisaptakōTībhūjairdhṛtakhara-karabāle
Seven million voices in unison
Twice seven million hands bearing arms69

In syntactical form, the lines appear to be in Sanskrit; yet, the language is

clearly Bengali. Each component of the compound is a Bengali word that is
either tatsama or tadbhāva (derived from Sanskrit). The alliterative sound in
the segment is “k,” and Bankim is able to play with it because of the alliterative
effect created in the previous segment (“sujalāng sufalāng malayajaśītalāng”). In
that, the rhyme is based on Bengali using a single “sh” sound for both s and ś,
even though the words are Sanskrit, and would not rhyme if pronounced in that
language. The linguistic play here draws on the literary culture that exists among
the Bengali-speaking readers who inhabit the junction of both these languages
and are able to appreciate Bankim’s texts for their continuance of this tradition.

V. Concluding Thoughts

The study of the British novel has benefited from a multifaceted literary history,
but significant work remains to be done on the histories of novels from Britain’s
erstwhile colonies. This chapter is one such attempt at engaging with the larger
project of revising the literary history of former colonial spaces by placing the
Bengali novel in conversation with non-Western practices of reading. This novel
is premised on a rejection of the English language novel by the same readers
who enthusiastically embrace the former. Bankim’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife,
published in 1864, one year before Durgeśnandinī is largely forgotten by all but
Bankim scholars, and even when his readers compare his first Bengali work to
Ivanhoe, there is no evidence to suggest they even draw on Rajmohan’s Wife to
support their claim that Bankim is indeed trying to imitate the British form.

69
Anandamath, 663.
146 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The Sanskritist reading practice aligning the genre with classical Sanskrit literary
traditions clearly resonates with readers who still inhabit these traditions as part
of their present. That this does ultimately give way to the Anglicist practice bears
testimony to the pervasive and violent nature of colonial rule and the degree to
which its ideologies infiltrate and inform native practices.
While the Bengali novel emerges after the introduction of its Victorian
counterpart, the former is a product of engagement with tensions foreign
to the British novel. Examining the connections shared by readers, reading
practices, and the novel provides an opportunity to re-evaluate the genre of the
postcolonial novel, and to approach it neither as an allegorical form passively
reflecting anticolonial ideologies, nor as just another cultural artifact among
others. As the texts by Bankim suggest, the novel can instead be understood to
actively create a reading public and instruct it on how to read the text, and in the
process, be created as a form distinct from the British novel.
 4

Another World of Reading: Hossain and

Islamic Bengali Prose

I. From the Global to the Local: Mosharraf

Hossain’s Biśād Sindhu

My grandmother, who was originally from undivided Bengal, moved to Kolkata

around the partition of India in 1947, and brought with her stories from her native
city of Comilla.1 One of these stories was about reading Mir Mosharraf Hossain’s
novel Biśād Sindhu (Ocean of Sorrows) and watching its narrative performed
on the banks of the Dharmasagar (a lake in the city) during Muharram.2 For
her, as a young Hindu girl, the act of watching the ritualized mourning of
the fall of Husayn Ibn Ali and his brother Hasan evoked the same emotional
response as that of reading of their martyrdom in the pages of Biśād Sindhu;
the pathos of the story brought tears to her eyes, whether it was by watching the
mourners in public or reading the novel in private. As she recounted this story
to my mother during the second half of the twentieth century, the world of the
novel, of the religious performance, and her own affect would merge to create an
indistinguishable whole. For her, the transition between reading and watching
this narrative was seamless, and the novel continued to be one of her favorites
despite being an avid reader of world literature. This is a story I have inherited
as family lore which, for the longest time, was a marker of my grandmother’s
connection with Bangladesh and of her personal sense of losing her homeland.
It represented one individual’s relationship to a text which I assumed was born
of her attachment to Comilla rather than a quality of the novel itself.
Years later, when I sat down to write this book, Biśād Sindhu reappeared as
one of the first Bengali novels written by a Muslim author, Mosharraf Hossain.

1
Following the partition of India, city is now in Bangladesh.
2
For Shia Muslims, Muharram marks the death of Husein Ibn Ali, the Prophet Mohammad’s
grandson, at the Battle of Karbala, and is a period of mourning and remembrance.
148 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Originally published in three parts in 1885, 1887, and 1891, this novel generated
considerable interest among late nineteenth-century readers, leading to
critical discussions and advertisements in contemporary periodicals such as
Hitakarī, Sādharanī, The Education Gazette, and Bangadarśan. Soon after, it
was adopted as a textbook in various schools across Bengal, and continues
to be on school and college curricula in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.
In short, the novel became integrated into Bengali print culture immediately
following its publication, like most other late-nineteenth-century Bengali
novels. However, I also discovered that unlike most of these other novels, being
read in print formed only one part of Biśād Sindhu’s life as both its pre- and
post-publication history exceeded the print medium by referring to modes of
consumption similar to those my grandmother recounted. Despite his own
claims to the contrary, Mosharraf Hossain did not take as his inspiration
quasi-historical texts such as the Persian classic Maqtal Rawzat al-Shuhada
(1504) by Husain Waiz Kashifi or its articulation in Bengal titled generically3
Maqtul Husayn by Muhammad Khan (eighteenth or early nineteenth
century), but instead chose Bengali folktales on the story of Hassan and
Husayn as his source.4 These folktales were sometimes to be found preserved
in punthis or manuscripts,5 and frequently performed as jārigān—a folk music
performance—during either Muharram or other religious ceremonies. Once
the text of Biśād Sindhu is published, the novel’s language is adopted by jārigān
performers, and Mosharraf Hossain’s written text became a mainstay of their
repertoire. Thus the same performances that served as the novel’s inspiration
began to use the novel’s language to tell the story of Husayn and Hasan. These
are the same jārigān performances my grandmother recalls having attended in
the late 1920s and 1930s in Comilla, suggesting that this relationship between
print, performance, and manuscripts lasts well beyond the novel’s initial entry
into Bengali literary history. The merger of various modes of perception, then,
is far from one person’s memory of a lost homeland—it is an intrinsic part of

3
Maqtal as a genre refers to narratives of the Battle of Karbala and Husayn’s martyrdom.
4
As several scholarly sources including Fakrul Alam’s introduction to the English translation of Biśād
Sindhu, and Anisujjaman’s discussion of the novel’s publication history suggests, I comment on this
at length later in the chapter.
5
It is also worth noting here that for Islamic texts, punthi refers to not only the form of the book but to
its language as well. This language, known variously as misra bhāśā, dōbhāśā, or Musalmānī bānglā,
is a mix of Persianate languages and Bengali. Frequently associated with the lower classes, misra
bhasha was looked down upon by upper-class Muslims and Hindus alike, but it formed a significant
part of nineteenth-century Bengali life because of its abundant use in oral performances such as jāri
and later in cheap battalā texts.
 Another World of Reading 149

the world in which the text is published and read, performed and watched. This
was the way the novel was read, as part text and part performance, narrating
a significant moment in Bengali Islamic history with its pathos appealing to
Hindus and Muslims alike.
Exciting as this discovery was on a personal front—it allowed me to see my
grandmother as belonging to a particular time and place with their own tangible
traditions—it also led me to the set of literary historical questions informing
this chapter. What was it about this first self-identified Islamic Bengali novel
that allowed it to straddle multiple perceptive worlds? What might one say about
the practice of reading a novel such as Biśād Sindhu, and what did it mean to be
literate in the Perso-Arabic reading practice of which the novel was a part? What
were the traits peculiar to this reading practice which differentiated it from the
Sanskritist or the Anglicist practice? As one begins to answer these questions,
the paucity of the archive becomes evident; there are very few novels being
written by Bengali Muslim authors in Bengali during the nineteenth century.
The predominance of Bengali Hindu authors, whether Sanskritists or Anglicists,
has obscured the legacy of Bengali Muslims writing long prose narratives during
the period, such that we are left with only a handful of names and works. In this
group are authors such as Nawab Faizunnesa whose part autobiographical poetic
composition Rupjālāl (1876) is one of the first by a Muslim woman in Bengal,
journalist Reazuddin Ahmed who is responsible for editing periodicals such
as Islam Pracārak and Sudhakar, and novelist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain who
publishes her first novel Sultana’s Dream in 1908. We also find proto-novelistic
texts such as Shamsuddin Mohammad Siddiqi’s Uchit Sraban (1860), and satires
or sketches by a range of authors including Golam Hussain, Sheikh Ajimuddin,
and Ayen Ali Sikdar.
However, Mosharraf Hossain appears as the only Bengali Muslim writing
novels in Bengali in the nineteenth century, and it is with his novel Biśād Sindhu
that this chapter concerns itself. Biśād Sindhu and later novels by Mosharraf
Hossain are part of a different reading practice—what I am calling the Perso-
Arabic practice—that sets them apart from novels written within either the
Sanskritist or the Anglicist practices. Hindu readers are perfectly adequate
readers of these novels, and as the discussions6 in the periodicals of the day show,

6
Somprakash, for example, praises the novelist for eschewing Persianate languages in review of the
novel dated March 29, 1886, and the sentiment is echoed by the Magh 1888 issue of Bharati o balak,
and the Ashwin 1886 issue of Bangadarśan.
150 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

they read the texts just as they would Bengali works that are overtly or covertly
Hindu, or European.7 That Mosharraf Hossain’s novels can accommodate the
reader who has little to no knowledge of Islam or its stories is evidenced by
their popularity among even conservative Hindus such as Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay or Akshaychandra Sarkar who take from these texts examples
of heightened human emotions, critiques of social ills, or descriptions of rural
Bengal written in chaste (read, Sanskritized) Bengali.
For the Bengali Muslim, however, the novel inaugurates a practice of reading
that is simultaneously global and local, and fundamentally performative in
nature. The text encourages reading as a form of pious practice by drawing on
the principle of adab—broadly defined as a code of conduct, but that meaning
is far from exhaustive—thus urging the reader to view themselves as part of
the larger Islamic umma or community invested in proper adab. The novel
being set in Medina and Damascus, telling the story of Hasan and Husayn as
one of the central narratives of Islam aids in this process of identification, but
as I argue in this chapter, it is adab that serves as the conceptual foundation
allowing the Bengali Muslim to feel connected with Muslims outside their
immediate local context. At the same time, Biśād Sindhu is related to another
kind of performance—the jārigān tradition—that is unique to Bengal. As a folk
performance, jārigān narrates the events at Karbala as ritual theater, inviting
the community to take part in a shared expression of grief venerating the pak
panjatan, or the five sacred figures of Islam, the Prophet, Ali, Hasan, Husayn,
and Fatema. The novel both draws on one of the first jāri texts, Heyat Mahmud’s
Jārijungnama, and itself becomes an integral part of the jāri repertoire. The reader
of Biśād Sindhu participates in this integration of print and performance through
the act of reading the novel as they are part of the community that consumes
both the text and jārigān performances. This form of reading Biśād Sindhu is
performative not only because it resides in the same perceptive world as that of
jārigān, but because the narrative encourages the same pathos-laden response as
it presents the reader with the story of Hasan, Husayn, and their family.
The reason behind Biśād Sindhu’s success in integrating reading as
performance lies in the story it chooses to tell. The sectarian split between Shias
and Sunnis can be traced to the battle of Karbala which marks a key moment in
the debate over inheriting the prophetic line. In 680 AD, the Prophet’s grandson,

7
Anglicized Bengali is seen as representing Europe rather than Christianity, while Hindu is often
perceived to be the neutral (secular?) form of Bengali.
 Another World of Reading 151

Husayn, is killed at Karbala, and for Shia Muslims mourning the event becomes
ritualized as Muharram. As the event gets embedded in oral and written
literature, it also provides a way for Islam to transmit itself as it travels across the
world, forming a core of belief for those moving outward from their homelands
as well as for those newly converted. In South Asia, and in other parts of the
Islamicate world with a predominantly Shia population, these narratives of the
Prophet and his family as told by the Sufi pirs8 come to be the authoritative
religious source given that, for many local communities, the sacred texts of the
Qur’an and the Hadith9 do not exist in vernacular translations till late into the
nineteenth century.10 Alongside this narrativized version of Islam, Muharram
rituals of chest beating and loud laments of “Hai Hasan Hai Husayn” create an
affective whole capable of attracting a population becoming familiar with the
religion. These rituals gradually become the basis of the folk poetic traditions of
the marsiya and the nauha in South Asia, both of which mourn the martyrdom
of Husayn. These two forms are formally adopted by Muslims in Bengal as space
and time within the hussainiya11 are accorded to mourners to sing marsiyas and
nauhas during Muharram.12 Jāri, though born of this same tradition, is not one
of the designated rituals within the hussainiya as it continues to exist just outside
structured religion, in a syncretic space occupied by rural, Bengali-speaking,
Hindus and Muslims.
Biśād Sindhu narrates the story of Karbala as it is known to this rural community
thanks to the prevalence of jārigān. In the preface or the “mukhabandha” to the
first edition of Biśād Sindhu, Mosharraf Hossain tells his readers that the novel
draws on the story of Muharram when Hosen (Husayn)13 and his family are
killed by Ejid’s (Yazid) soldiers at Karbala. The narrative is divided into three
parts titled “Muharram parba” (“Muharram Episode”), “Uddhar parba” (“The

8
Saints.
9
A narrative record of the sayings and customs of the Prophet and his companions.
10
One of the earliest mentions of the Qur’an in Bengali, for example, appears as late as 1891 in the
magazine Indian Nation, and even there, the reviewer notes that the text is not considered to have
religious authority by the Muslims since it was translated by a non-Muslim scholar of Arabic.
11
A communal hall built to house mourners during Muharram, and for other religious observances.
Originally in eighth-century Iran, mourners performed in open public spaces, and gradually
shelters were built to protect them against the elements, leading to the formalization of hussainiyas,
also known as Imambaras.
12
See for example Ahmad Hasan Dani’s Dhaka: A Record of Its Changing Fortunes for more on the
Muharram rituals in Dhaka.
13
A note on Bengali transliteration of Perso-Arabic names. When referring to characters in the novel,
I use the Bengalicized forms of Arabic names to be faithful to Mosharraf Hossain’s text. Outside the
novel, I use the Arabic names.
152 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Rescue Episode”), and “Ejid badh parba” (“The Episode on killing Ejid”), and
as the introduction or the upakramanika informs us, the novel exemplifies the
inevitability of the divine plan. The Prophet Mohammad foretells the death of
his grandsons Hasan and Hosen at the hands of Ejid, and as each part unfolds,
Mosharraf Hossain shows how this prophecy comes to be. Ejid’s desire for Hasan’s
wife Jaynab (Zainab) leads to Hasan and Hosen’s death in the “Muharram parba”
as the reader is shown the follies not just of lust but also the treachery of women.
The following part, “Uddhar parba,” narrates how the rest of Hasan and Hosen’s
family is saved, and how the great warrior Mohammad Hanifa swears to avenge
Hosen’s death. This promise leads Mohammad Hanifa to engage in a slaughtering
spree where he kills both the innocent and the guilty living in Damascus, the city
ruled by Ejid. Finally in “Ejid badh parba,” the novelist describes the fate of an
imprisoned and repentant Ejid who, along with Mohammad Hanifa, must burn
in eternal hellfire for their crimes. The novel ends on the note that sinners must
always pay for their sins, and the virtuous will be rewarded even though theirs
is a path of suffering.
Despite the clearly Islamic overtones, discussions of Biśād Sindhu in
nineteenth-century literary circles are telling of the ways in which the novel is
co-opted into Sanskritist reading practices which focus almost exclusively on
Mosharraf Hossain’s ability to use bishuddha or pure Bengali. Such is the force
of this narrative that many reviewers suggest “Mosharraf Hossain” must be a
nom de plume of a Hindu writer because no Muslim author can use Bengali so
beautifully.14 Even when critics accept the novelist’s religious identity, they praise
him for couching Arabic terms in ways that are pleasing to the Bengali reader,
thus cementing Hindu Bengali as the neutral or normative position. Yet outside
this co-option lies a very different reading practice, one which is attentive to
Persianate languages and Islamic aesthetic structures, and my interest in Biśād
Sindhu lies in the novel’s ability to grant us access to this Perso-Arabic reading
practice. In this chapter, I argue for reading Biśād Sindhu through a practice
of reading rooted in the concept of adab and one of its folk manifestations in
Bengal, the jārigān. I suggest that Mosharraf Hossain’s novel incorporates
aesthetic markers which direct the knowing reader on how to read the text so
as to acquire the knowledge necessary for an ethically correct life. While adab
allows Biśād Sindhu to be part of a larger Islamicate world which includes

14
Included in this list are the Education Gazette and the Calcutta Review, both nineteenth-century
periodicals.
 Another World of Reading 153

novels in Persian and Urdu, its relationship with jārigān returns the narrative
to the familiar context of Bengal and to the ways in which the sacred becomes
a function of a community. Examining these two aspects of the Perso-Arabic
reading practice provides us with the unique opportunity of understanding
how Bengali Muslims engaged with, and entered, literary modernity in late-
nineteenth-century Bengal.

II. Adab as the Implicit Code, or How to Read Biśād Sindhu

When the first part of Biśād Sindhu, “Maharam Parba” (“Muharram Episode”),
is published in 1885, the following review of the novel appears in the Bengali
periodical Education Gazette:
The novelist has collected the gist of the original event from Persian and Arabic
texts and has beautifully written the book in clear Bengali. There is not even the
whiff of Islamic language [Musalmani bhasha] in his book. He has described the
events in pure pleasant Bengali […] The novel is filled with karuna rasa, even
the burning effect of vir rasa is apparent in it.15

The reviewer praises Mosharraf Hossain for not only avoiding the use of
“Musalmani bhasha,” but goes so far as to see in the novel the aesthetic principles
of rasa.16 The various adjectives used to describe Bengali—pure, pleasant, clear—
draw the reader’s attention to not Hindu bhasha but to bhasha, in this case
Bengali, or language in general. According to the review, the novelist is successful
in creating a novel that the reader wants to read from start to finish because
he has told a story many “average” (“sadharon”) Bengalis are unaware of in a
language that is simple, using a literary structure that this average reader knows
well. One notes similar reviews of Mosharraf Hossain’s first novel, Ratnabati
(1869), in periodicals such as Rahasya Sandarbha17 and Calcutta Review.18 A
few years later, the author published his play Jamidar Darpan (A Mirror Held to
the Landlords, 1873) to yet again the same remarks, this time from the literary
periodical Bangadarshan. The magazine found no trace of “Musalmani bangla”

15
Education Gazette, June 12, 1885, translation mine.
16
See Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of the rasa theory.
17
“Natun granther samalochana” (“Review of new books”), 5 parba, 54 khanda, 1869, in Sambad-
samayik Patre Unish Shataker Bangali Musalman Samaj, pp. 490–1.
18
Vol. 50, 1870, in Sambad-samayik Patre Unish Shataker Bangali Musalman Samaj, pp. 489–90.
154 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

(“Islamic Bengali”) in the play, suggesting that its linguistic merit was its use
of unalloyed Bengali even though it was written by a Muslim author.19 While
both reviews are anonymous, their authors’ religious affiliation is not hard to
gauge. Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, the editor of Education Gazette, and Bankim,
the editor of Bangadarshan, are both upper-caste Hindu men, and book reviews
were nearly always the task of a magazine’s editor. Bhudeb and Bankim read
Mosharraf Hossain’s texts as desiring entry into Sanskritized Bengali in order to
become part of mainstream Bengali literature. From the perspective of Bhudeb,
that the novel in particular is able to evoke karuna (compassionate) and vir
(heroic) rasas adds to the ease with which it might be seen as simply “Bengali”
without the need for the descriptor “Muslim.” This emphasis on the text using
pure Bengali, matched only by the reviewers’ surprise at a Bengali Muslim’s
ability to write in such a register, represents the Hindu Bengali’s parochialism
toward the language and its literary productions.20
However, when we consider Mosharraf Hossain’s own remarks regarding
the supposed purity of Bengali, he seems far from advocating for the erasure
of “Musalmani bhasha” from his works. In the July 2, 1892, issue of the journal
Hitakarī, Mosharraf Hossain responds to a letter to the editor asking him to
explain why, in a publication otherwise using “bisuddha” or pure Bengali, there
are articles using “Musalmani katha” (Muslim words, referring to Urdu and
Arabic words).21 He defends the periodical’s language policy on two fronts: first,
he says, there are Muslim authors who contribute to Hitakarī regularly, and
second, he resents the day’s fashion of intermingling of Bengali and English,
saying that he would rather fuse Bengali (matribhasha or mother tongue) with
Urdu (bhratribhasha or brother tongue).22 Hitakarī is not overtly Islamic in its
mission, unlike more conservative publications such as Islam Pracārak and
Sudhākar, but as the editor of a journal conscious of its Muslim reader base,
Mosharraf Hossain refutes the suggestion that Sanskritized Bengali is either

19
Bangadarśan, Bhadra 1873 in Sambād-sāmayik Patre Uniś Śataker Bāngāli Musalmān Samāj, p. 493.
20
Mosharraf Hossain is far from being the sole recipient of such comments remarking on the
Bengali Muslim’s ability to successfully mimic their Hindu counterparts. For example, when a
group of students from Mohsin College in Hooghly launch their periodical, Ajijan Nehar in 1874,
the publication receives considerable praise from the government sponsored and Hindu edited
Education Gazette for being the first Muslim-led journal to use “saral bangala bhasha” or simple
Bengali.
21
“Sampādakiya mantabya” (“Editor’s notes”), Hitakarī, July 2, 1891, p. 287.
22
“Sampādakiya mantabya,” p. 288.
 Another World of Reading 155

the definitive form of the language or the only one used by Bengali Muslims.
Instead, he juxtaposes Bengali and Urdu as bhrātribhāśā thus effecting a familial
connection between these two languages, and incorporating the Muslim
reader into the fold of the Bengali. He creates a metaphor whereby Bengali
as the mātribhāśā is mother to all her children, regardless of whether they
speak Bengali or Urdu, are Hindu or Muslim. Mosharraf Hossain repeats the
verb mesānō or to mix when referring to the relationship between mātribhāśā
and bhrātribhāśā, but he is careful to not suggest that this mixing produces
something new. After all, misra bhāśā or mixed language has deeply negative
connotations for Hindus and Muslims—for both, it is the language spoken by
the uneducated and illiterate peasantry and boatmen, and as a result, it bears the
marks of vulgarity, obscenity, and a form of religious syncreticism suspicious
to both religions. Instead, Hitakarī’s editor suggests an addition which retains
the individual identity of both Bengali and Urdu, thereby allowing both Hindus
and Muslims to participate in reading and writing on equal terms. This natural
affiliation between Bengali and Urdu underscores the Muslim reader’s familiarity
with both languages, providing us with a way to understand how a novel such as
Biśād Sindhu is shaped by the aesthetic structures inherent in Urdu rather than
those that are Sanskritic by nature.
Jettisoning, then, the Hindu Bengalis’ claims to linguistic purity, we are free
to look more closely at the aesthetic paradigms available to Mosharraf Hossain
via his relationship with Islam and Persianate languages such as Urdu. Looking
at the world of Urdu literature is particularly instructive at this juncture as Biśād
Sindhu enters the public imagination within a few years of the publication of a
set of three Urdu novels which significantly reshape the Indian literary scene.
These three texts Mirat-al-arus (The Mirror of the Bride, 1869), Banat-an-nāsh
(Daughters of the Bier, 1872), and Taubā-an-nāsuh (The Repentence of Nasuh,
1874), all by Nazir Ahmad, are some of the first novels to be written in Urdu. He
responds to a call for “useful works in the vernacular” issued by William Muir,
the lieutenant-governor of the North-West provinces in 1868.23 Muir offers a
cash reward to any writer capable of producing work in either “Oordoo [Urdu]
or Hindee [Hindi]”24 that was not sectarian or overtly religious, and could
be used for the intellectual amelioration of native readers. There is an added
emphasis on texts aimed at women, and in response, Nazir Ahmad writes three

23
The notice as quoted in C. M. Naim’s “Prize Winning Adab,” 292–3.
24
C. M. Naim’s “Prize Winning Adab,” 292–3.
156 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

novels which essentially conduct books for women. Mirat-al-arus, in particular,

becomes hugely popular across the Indian subcontinent, finding its way into
Urdu syllabi (where it remains till this day), and being translated into a number
of languages, one of which is Bengali.25 We find advertisements for Urdu and
Bengali versions of the novel in not only Hitakarī but also other contemporary
Bengali periodicals such as Sōmprakāś and Ādarinī, and in Persian newspapers
such as Aina-e-Sikander, suggesting that it had considerable reach among
readers in Bengal. Even readers in rural Bengal who may not have adequate
knowledge of Urdu thus had access to Nazir Ahmad’s novel. With Mirat-al-arus,
Muslim readers in India find one of the earliest iterations of a novel which allows
them a point of entry into a modern literary genre through Indian vernacular
languages, while still being guided by the principles of Islamic adab literature.26
It provides its readers domestic and spiritual guidance through a narrative
that foregrounds the aesthetic structures of adab, thereby placing itself in a
continuum with literature in classical Persianate languages.
Mosharraf Hossain’s early works appear to bear little resemblance to
Persianate realm of Nazir Ahmad’s novels. Ratnabati, Mosharraf Hossain’s
first novel, is described by reviewers as “a romantic tale designed to shew that
knowledge is of greater importance than wealth.”27 In it, he narrates the story of
a prince, Sukumar, who is a rich, spoilt young man, and who gets imprisoned
because of his own folly. When he discovers that his wealth cannot save him,
he has to rely on his friend, the minister’s son Sumantra, who, though not very
wealthy, is intelligent enough to free him, thus demonstrating the moral of the
story. The narrative—both in form and content—is Sanskritized enough to lead
yet another reviewer from Rahasya Sandarbha to claim Mosharraf Hossain
the equal of any pundit (teacher) of the Sanskrit College.28 Indeed, what the
novelist writes is a Bengali Hindu fairy tale, often referred to as thākurmā’r
galpa or grandmother’s tales, putting his characters through their paces in
a world that would be intimately familiar to a Bengali Hindu. Four years

25
Frances Pritchett, in the afterword to her English translation of Mirat (1985), as well as Ralph Russell
in his The Pursuit of Urdu Literature (1992) note the popularity of Nazir Ahmad’s novel and the
speed with which it was translated into multiple Indian languages, including Bengali, Gujarati,
Kashmiri, and Punjabi.
26
Following scholarly custom, I use this term to refer to literature on adab as well as texts based on the
principles of adab.
27
Calcutta Review, vol. 50 1870 in Sambād-sāmayik Patre Uniś Śataker Bāngāli Musalmān Samāj,
pp. 489–90.
28
Rahasya Sandarbha, 5 parba, 54 khanda, 1869 in Sambad-sāmayik patre unish śataker bāngāli
musalmān samaj, pp. 490–1.
 Another World of Reading 157

later, Mosharraf Hossain’s play Basantakumārī (1873) delineates a similarly

Sanskritized landscape with characters who have distinctly Hindu names such
as the protagonist Basantakumari, the princess of Bhojpur, and her beloved,
Narendranath, the prince of Indrapur. The play opens with a prastabana or a
prologue, an intrinsic component of Sanskrit nataka (play) which makes its
way into Bengali theater, thus infusing the form with Sanskrit aesthetic modes.
The only moment of dissonance arises when Mosharraf Hossain has the Nati
or the female actor in the prologue exclaim the impropriety of performing a
play written by a Muslim before Bengali (implicit: Hindu) audiences. The Nata,
the male actor, chastises her for being so communally divisive, and the play
begins.29 If one reads these two early texts by Mosharraf Hossain—Ratnabati
and Basantakumārī—one would be forgiven for thinking that the author wishes
to produce works that are mainstream because they are aimed at Bengali
Hindu readers with the awareness that Bengali Muslims are perceived as alien
or foreign. The reviewer from Calcutta Review who assumed “that the author
has concealed his real name under the nom de plume of a Musalman,”30 in this
context, appears to be voicing something obvious—Mosharraf Hussain wishes
to write like his Hindu compatriots.
Biśād Sindhu, however, disrupts any such easy narrative of assimilation,
and not just because the novel is about the Battle of Karbala. With Biśād
Sindhu, one notes a turn away from the overtly Sanskritic style in Mosharraf
Hossain’s oeuvre, a turn which persists in the texts he goes on to write after
the novel, including the semi-autobiographical Gāji Miyār Bostāni (1899) in
which he depicts late-nineteenth-century rural Muslim life through a critique
of an oppressive Muslim landlord. The “Bostani” in Gāji Miyār Bostāni, for
example, alludes to Mir Taki Khayal’s eighteenth-century dāstān or tale titled
Bostan e khayal, thereby suggesting an explicit allegiance with Persian and Urdu
literary traditions. Similarly, Biśād Sindhu contains the markers of a dāstān
but complicates these allusions by drawing from Bengali punthis. However,
what is more important than identifying particular generic traits in these texts
is to place them as examples of literary adab. In the wake of Nazir Ahmad’s
popularity, a Bengali novelist such as Mosharraf Hossain can rely on a market
that is receptive to long prose works providing both entertainment and moral

29
Basantakumārī, 11–12.
30
Calcutta Review, vol. 50, 1870 in Sambad-sāmayik patre unish śataker bāngāli musalmān samaj,
pp. 489–90.
158 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

guidance to the Muslim reader. In Mirat-al-arus, Muslim readers find a text in

an Indian vernacular investigating the limits of moral propriety, and it is in this
tradition that I wish to read Biśād Sindhu. Mosharraf Hossain’s novel is not a
straightforward etiquette narrative like Mirat or Banas but like them, it, too,
aims at guiding the Muslim reader toward knowledge which can produce correct
behavior. It is only when we read Biśād Sindhu thus that it becomes apparent that
those elements of the novel deemed inexplicable by Bengali Hindu readers—
such as the insertion of Persian, Urdu, or Arabic words, or the supernatural and
coincidental portions of the narrative—are far from being anomalies. These are
the markers embedded within the text that indicate it be read as part of a Perso-
Arabic reading practice rather than as a Muslim author’s attempt at entering the
Sanskritist reading practice. Rather than find in the novel examples of karunā or
vir rasa—using an aesthetic frame imposed on it by those within the Sanskritist
practice—it is more productive, then, to take seriously the text’s adherence to the
principles of adab.
The concept of adab has a rich history in classical and modern Islamic
thought. The term in Persian has a range of meaning broadly converging along
the lines of civility and its expression in one’s actions, and there are ethical, social,
and intellectual components to it. Adab articulates the moral expectations for
all Muslims and the external behavior whose practice leads to the embodiment
of these expectations. Thus one encounters the adab of princes31 and of the
common person,32 while Ansari’s Mukhtasar fi adab assufiyya (1393) describes
codes of behavior particular to the sufis. In the context of South Asia, we find
notable examples in Yusuf Gada’s fourteenth-century ethical treatise Tuhfa i
nasaih in which the author posits adab as “embrac[ing] both moral authority
and etiquette in the individual’s ordinary daily behaviour.”33 The extensive body
of scholarship on the concept of adab compares it to the Greek notion of paideia
as both remark on the individual’s modes of comportment in accordance with
ethics.34 The register of adab, however, exceeds that of social conduct to include
the literary; adab “is both polite learning and its uses.”35 The literariness of adab
comes to be consolidated from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries onward

31
Qabusnāmā (Mirrors for Princes, 1082).
32
al-Ghazzali’s Ihya ulum ad-din and Miskawaih’s Tahdib al-akhlaq, both from the premodern period.
33
Simon Digby, “The Tuhfa I nasaih of Yusuf Gada,” 104.
34
Peter Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam” (1984), Ira M. Lapidus, Knowledge, Virtue and Action: The
Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfilment in Islam (1984).
35
Bray, “Adab,” Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopaedia, 13 (2006).
 Another World of Reading 159

when adab comes to mean not only literature, but becomes institutionalized “as
a modern discipline” in places such as Egypt36 and India.37
Yet as Barbara Metcalf Daly reminds us, adab is not a unitary concept with a
coherent definition that is independent of context. She suggests that “[a]dab not
only comprises various strands within itself but is also potentially challenged
by other Islamic styles.”38 As Islamic history demonstrates, a preoccupation
with explicit codes of moral conduct and the founding of the individual
on the same is not always evident. Various Islamic societies emphasize an
adherence to adab to greater or lesser extent at different moments in time.
The contradictions within the concept, along with the multiplicity of meaning,
suggest that adab may or may not have been at the forefront when it came
to individuals living their lives in most periods of history. In fact, since adab
is frequently associated with a variety of professions, ethnicities, non-Islamic
social groups, or other ways of being Islamic, it appears that individuals could,
and did, perform the forms of behavior sanctioned by the concept without
being self-conscious about this performance, nor was there an emphasis
on coherence.
When looking at these moments in history when adab is implicit rather
than explicit, comfortable in its lack of unity, when individuals are indifferent
toward the technicalities of adab, what strikes one is the congruence of political
and religious stability. It becomes apparent that the meaning of adab and its
practice close ranks and shed their multifarious—often experimental—nature
during moments of crisis and change. Thus the social upheavals within Muslim
communities following the Abbasid revolution led to the need for articulating
an Islamic ideal, and its result was the Qabusnāmā (Mirrors for Princes, 1082)
advising princes on appropriate codes of conduct. This is also the period
referred to by historians as the Golden Age of Islam, during which the religion
encounters Greek philosophy. A consequence of this interaction is the founding
of the Mu’tazilah, a speculative school of Islamic thought, which along with
Greek philosophy poses a challenge to Sufism and its belief in an a-rational
relationship with divinity.39 This crisis leads Sufis such as Abu Nasr as-Sarraj to
compile the tenets of Sufism in his Kitab al-lumā (988), in which the principles
of adab are propounded to teach the believer the means of acquiring the

36
Michael Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature, 76 (2016).
37
For example in the Calcutta Madrassa College.
38
Daly, “Introduction,” Moral Conduct and Authority, 15 (1984).
39
Tanvir Anjum, “Sufism in History,” 235 (2006).
160 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

intuitive knowledge needed for reaching God. Here adab as practiced behavior
for an emotional understanding of God is made explicit so as to serve as a buffer
against the predominance of reason.
Little surprise, then, that adab would be expressed more and more
unambiguously over the course of the nineteenth century as the British
completed their dislodging of the Mughal Empire, plunging into crisis Muslim
communities across India. The first of Nazir Ahmad’s prize-winning novels,
Mirat al-arus, appears scarcely a decade after the first war of Indian independence
during which the Mughal Empire’s final claim is quashed, and it comes at a time
when the Muslim reader requires the articulation of something that is distinctly
Islamic. Adab satisfies this need by giving this reader not just a means to being a
good Muslim but the support of an epistemic structure. It is a means of knowing
and being in the world that is uniquely Islamic and bears the weight of literary,
cultural, political, and religious history, as made evident in classical Persian and
Arabic texts. That first Mirat al-arus and then Biśād Sindhu vernacularize the
aesthetic paradigm of Islamic classics becomes significant when read in light
of this history of articulating adab more forcefully during periods of crises.
Ronit Ricci’s work on the Islamicization of South India is particularly instructive
on this front. Ricci formulates the notion of “literary networks” that connect
“Muslims across boundaries of space and culture” that comprise a range of texts
“crucial to the establishment of both local and global Islamic identities.”40 Her
argument that literary works—however one conceives of the term “literature”—
helped foster a sense of belonging to a translocal community, allowing Muslims
in South India to feel part of both their local contexts but also the wider Islamic
ummā, can be applied to nineteenth-century Bengal as well. Bengal had always
been an outpost of the Mughal Empire, but Bengali Muslims, as part of the ruling
elite, had enjoyed considerable social and financial privileges till the Battle of
Plassey in 1757. With the loss of power at the hands of the East India Company,
Bengali Muslims now found themselves doubly marginalized, as the minority
community vis-à-vis Hindu domination, and as the dislodged ruling class vis-à-
vis the British. As I discuss elsewhere in this work, Bengali Muslims felt the need
to overcome the sense of alienation imposed upon them by the rising Hindu
intelligentsia, and one way to achieve this was to look outside Bengal to the
community of which they considered themselves to be an integral part—the

40
Ricci, Islam Translated, 1–2 (2011).
 Another World of Reading 161

Islamic umma. Adab as the repository of aesthetic and religious traditions, of

communal memory articulated as codes of behavior, and of Persianate literature
provided a connection to that umma, and with it, a sense of belonging.

III. Adab as a Window to the World

One of the signal qualities of adab literature is that the text be both informative
and entertaining. The roots of this combination can be traced back to some of the
earliest examples of the concept in Abd al-Hamid bin Yahya al-Kateb’s eighth-
century epistles or rasa’el. As a secretary to the last Umayyad caliph, Marvan
bin Mohammad (744–50), Abd al-Hamid is in a position to offer advice both
to the heir apparent, Prince Abdallah, and to future secretaries in the Caliphate.
The “Epistle of advice to the heir apparent” is an early instance of the “mirror
for princes” genre41 (of which Qabusnāmā is perhaps the best-known example),
while the “Epistle to the secretaries” is an advice manual for secretaries. In the
latter, Abd al-Hamid instructs secretaries to “[l]earn to write well, as that will
be an ornament to [their] letters” but to temper eloquence with thought as their
task is to “set up everything in its proper, customary form.” The goal for the
secretaries is to not only incorporate information—accounts, dates, land, and
tax deeds—in their texts, but to do so in a manner that transmits poetry.42 The
adab of the secretary thus emphasizes a particular use of language such that
the text is composed in beautiful language, regardless of the mundanity of the
subject matter conveyed by it.
This stress on linguistic charm is not reserved for the adab of secretarial
writings alone; it becomes evident in both literary and non-literary genres,
including histories, biographies, fantastical tales, and religious narratives. For
example, when Ibn Battuta returns to Fez in 1354, the Sultan of Morocco invites
him to write an account of his travels and pairs him with Mohammad ibn
Juzayy al-Kalbi who transcribes Ibn Battuta’s narrative. The text, Rihla (Travels,
1355),43 relies partly on Ibn Battuta’s memories and partly on Ibn Juazzy’s use

41
The function of the form is to provide academic, administrative, and moral guidance to princes
and rulers.
42
Abd al-Hamid bin Yahya, “Epistle to the secretaries,” translated from Arabic by Franz Rosenthal
(747).
43
Its full title is Tuffāt al-Nuzzār fi Ghara’ib al-Amsar wa Aja’ib al-Afsar which can be roughly translated
as “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling.” Ross E.
Dunn’s work on Ibn Battuta is of note here.
162 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

of other historical descriptions of those places visited by Ibn Battuta, and is a

complex mixture of travelogue, memoire, and history. Of interest to me here is
Ibn Juazzy’s addition of poetic language to ensure that the experience of reading
al-Rihla is a pleasant one. Ibn Juazzy inserts verses into the narrative in order
to elevate the language of text, thus beautifying it. A similar melange of form
and content is the basis of Abd al-Qadir ibn Umar al-Baghdadi’s Khizānat al-
adab wa-lubb lubāb lisān al-Arab (“Library of Literature and the Door of the
Heart of the Arab Language”), a seventeenth-century encyclopedia of Arabic
literary heritage. This list of texts underlining the importance of using language
beautifully to convey ideas and information could be endlessly proliferated,
signaling that adab “requires a knowledge of history, poetry, ideas, proverbs,
parallels, precedents, and the correct and pleasing use of language.”44
What this engagement with ornate language demonstrates is a continued
interest in Islamic texts in how the reader reads a text. If what a text contains
is significant, then of no less importance is how this content is made available
to the reader through the language used by the text. In both premodern and
modern Islamic texts, one notices a careful curating of language so as to make
the latter more beautiful and, often, poetic. The craftsmanship contained in
language serves a deeper purpose than creating a pleasant work—it positions the
reader as an adīb or a practitioner of adab. As an adīb, the reader appreciates the
civility conveyed by the text’s language, and through this appreciation cultivates
the proper mode of being in the world. The moral virtue of adab manifests
itself in the linguistic choices made by the author, and in reading these choices,
the reader, too, can learn or continue the process of being virtuous. During
moments of religious or political crises, the udābā (pl. of adīb) take on the task
of safeguarding cultural and behavioral norms such that on the appearance of
calmer times they can rebuild a cultural and morally just society based on adab.
The reader as an adīb is capable of such a social reconstruction because having
practiced adab through the act of reading, they are closer to the human ideal
than others who are be-adab or without adab.45 Thus beautiful language is not
merely a theme of adab literature but one of its intrinsic qualities which allow
the reader access to the correct moral path.
The role played by adab in shaping Islamic culture in South Asia is undeniable
as evidenced by numerous texts explicating this practice of piety. From the

44
Bray, “Adab,” Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, 13, emphases mine.
45
By no means are readers the only adīb; any Muslim who practices adab in any form, be it in art,
statecraft, devotion, or in other avenues of life, is an adīb.
 Another World of Reading 163

writings of sufi saints to those by muftis (experts on Islamic law) to literary

texts we see the repeated emphasis on adab’s linguistic element. One way to
understand the recurrence of ornate language is to understand the evolution of
adab in the context of South Asia where the concept comes to be associated with
Islamic values. By the time we get to the nineteenth century, the term’s semantic
polyvalence atrophies as it becomes attached with the idea that practicing adab
upholds values which are essential for social respectability. The move toward
respectability owes part of its origin to the elaborate adab of the Mughal court
as the codification of courtly etiquette comes to identify linguistic politeness
and dexterity as the hallmark of the adīb, and as a necessary prerequisite for
professional advancement.46
To add to this, one must also take into account the term’s journey from Arabic
and Persian into Urdu. In Urdu, adab morphs to mean “respect” or “regard,” thus
narrowing the concept from its Arabic meaning of “code of behaviour.”47 For
Bengali Muslims, adab (now with the rounded Bengali vowel) gets attached to
the word qaidā, roughly translated as sanctioned or authoritative norms, thereby
buttressing respect with authority. Not only does the importance of proper
language use remain unchanged through the process of semantic evolution, it
becomes increasingly indispensable to articulations of adab in literary texts.
Thus, for example, Nazir Ahmad opens Mirat with the need for a well-written
book of moral instruction for women “which should improve their ideas and
correct their habits […] and yet which should be in a form sufficiently attractive
to prevent their being discouraged or dismayed by its perusal.”48 A few decades
later, Mirat finds itself on the list of “harmful books” in Maulana Ashraf Ali
Thanawi’s didactic treatise Bahishti zewar (Heavenly Ornaments, 1905) because
Thanawi deems novels to be morally detrimental for all Muslims, and for
women in particular. However, despite this fundamental difference in approach
to literature between Nazir Ahmad and Thanawi,49 both authors emphasize the
intimate relation between form and content as necessary for the reader to be

46
For more, see J. F. Richards’ discussion of the hierarchies within the Mughal imperial system of
administrative and military officers in “Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers”
(1984) and Mana Kia’s “Adab as Ethics” (2014).
47
I borrow this semantic distinction from M. Khalid Masud’s “Adab al-Mufti: The Muslim
Understanding of Values, Characteristics, and Role of a Mufti” (1984).
48
Nazir Ahmad, Mirat, 2, translated from Urdu by G. E. Ward (1869).
49
These differences extend to the need for women to be educated. Nazir Ahmad is a proponent for
educating Muslim women, while Thanawi opposes the idea, citing the importance of only providing
religious education to women.
164 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

able to identify and thus learn from. Thanawai, for example, rejects most novels,
but retains Nazir Ahmad’s third novel, Taubā-an-nāsuh, because of its eloquent
articulation of morals suitable for women.50
At this juncture, I would like to reintroduce the remarks made by nineteenth-
century reviewers of Biśād Sindhu on the novel’s use of biśuddha or chaste Bengali.
They are right in noting the Sanskritic overtones in Mosharraf Hossain’s Bengali
which are present from the very opening of the novel. The novelist titles the
introduction with its Sanskrit name, upakramanikā, has his characters use the
Sanskrit vocative case—Prabho—when referring to the Prophet Mohammad, and
all of this happens on the first page alone.51 The gap between the text’s language
and its narrative, however, becomes apparent when the reader is introduced in
Chapter 2. Having learned of Ejid’s all-consuming desire for Jaynab, his father
Mabia consents to sending a messenger to Abdul Jabbar, Jaynab’s husband, to
lure him to Damascus. The narrator says,
Reader! Even though the kāsed is a messenger, don’t mistake him for a runner
(dāk harkarā) or a letter carrier (patrabāhak) from Bengal. A royal messenger,
but civilised and wise—that is whom great Muslim writers have referred to as
“kāsed” … But between a dūt and a kāsed there is but little difference, “kāsed” is
not as well respected as dūt.52

The narrative identifies the reader as Bengali and as someone familiar with
modes of communication prevalent in colonial Bengal, such as the runner or
the dāk harkarā who were tasked with conveying or “running” messages as part
of the British postal system. Similarly, the reader knows the Sanskrit/Bengali
word for emissaries (dūt), a term harking back to Hindu Bengali folk and fairy
tales. The unfamiliar term, and the one chosen by Mosharraf Hossain, is kāsed
and as the narrator suggests, the word suits this context because famous Muslim
authors used it. The subtle aligning of the narrator with Persianate terminology
via texts by Muslim authors is one of the first indications we get that while the
novel’s language may appear to be Sanskritized Bengali, its aesthetic affiliations
lie within the world of Islamic literature. At the same time, the narrative chooses
to use the Bengali form of the word kāsed rather than the Urdu qasid. This
technique of Bengalicization is evident in character names as well where the
novelist follows folk conventions in morphing the names to fit the sounds of

50
Behishti zewar, book 10.
51
Biśād Sindhu, 1.
52
Biśād Sindhu, 15, translation mine.
 Another World of Reading 165

Bengali vowels and consonants.53 With the first mention of the reader, then,
Mosharraf Hossain makes evident the juxtaposition of Bengali as mātribhāśā
(mother tongue, in this instance Sanskritized Bengali) and Urdu as bhrātribhāśā
(brother tongue).
Yet as a novelist in Hindu-dominant Bengal, he is aware that a significant
portion of his readers are Hindus, and to be commercially successful, the novel
must be legible to this population. Thus when we next meet the reader in Biśād
Sindhu, we meet Hindu readers in particular. Having reached the court of
Damascus, Abdul Jabbar is invited to divorce Jaynab and marry the princess
Saleha, an invitation which he readily accepts. The narrator interjects by adding
that “[h]ere I have something to say to the Hindu readers. If our wedding
rituals are not explained in brief, it will require some effort to comprehend this
present business of marriage.”54 Over the course of the next two pages, the text
provides a detailed description of Islamic wedding rituals before returning to
the narrative. The narrator provides a similar description of Islamic widowhood
and the process of re-marriage,55 and of funeral rituals when Mabia dies.56
These moments of disruption are anthropological, allowing the Hindu reader to
observe the community while firmly placing this reader as the outsider. Armed
with these explanations, the Hindu reader can understand the plot’s progression,
and the novelist can be confident of capturing the Hindu market. However, what
is important to note here is the division between “us” and “them” as insiders and
outsiders. It is the “us”—the “our” of the above quote—who does not require
explanations of fundamental social rituals, and who can read the text effortlessly
as an insider to its literary and cultural heritage.
This reader is a Bengali Muslim who can appreciate Mosharraf Hossain’s
interplay with Bengali and Urdu, and who comes to the text knowing the story
of Muharram. They are attuned to the profound religious significance of the
narrative while being attentive to the element of entertainment inherent in a
novel. The merger of information and pleasure is available to the Bengali Muslim
reader alerting them to the novel’s self-positioning as adab literature. The ornate
nature of Biśād Sindhu’s language, interspersed as it is with Bengalicized Urdu
and Arabic words, is a manifestation of a signal theme of adab rather than a
Muslim author merely mimicking his Hindu counterparts. The presence of

53
I discuss more of this folk influence in the section on jārigān later in this chapter.
54
Biśād Sindhu, p. 25, translation mine.
55
Biśād Sindhu, pp. 34–5.
56
Ibid., pp. 55–6.
166 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Sanskritized Bengali indicates the novelist relying on the most courteous or

refined form of Bengali available to him so as to compose in a language suitable
for conveying the respectability required of adab. Take, for example, one of the
epithets used to describe Jaynab as Abdul Jabbar formally divorces her:
Pen and paper were ready. Abdul Jabbar first wrote the name of God (parameśwarer
nām), then writing the name of the Prophet Mohammad (prabhu Mohammader
nām) he divorced (tālāk dilen) the husband-devoted (patiparāyanā) innocent
(niraparadhinī) faithful (satisadhwī) co-religious (sahadharminī) Jaynab.57

At first glance, there is nothing out of place in Jaynab’s description—the terms

used are typical referents for married Bengali Hindu women. Except Jaynab
is Muslim, her Islamic identity is highlighted by narrator explaining what a
talāknāmā is just before the quoted section. A parenthetical note informs the
Hindu reader that a talāknāmā is a “strīparityag patra”58 literally translated as
a letter of rejecting one’s wife. The phrase “strīparityag patra” rings awkwardly
in the ears of a Hindu reader as, conceptually, such a document is impossible
within the faith. The descriptor satisadhwī strikes an equally discordant note
because the idea of a wife as faithful as the goddess Sati comes from one of the
108 names of the goddess Durga. The phrase, used in colloquial Bengali, comes
from Shrī Dūrgāśtōttarsathanāmā Stōtram (Ode to Durga’s One Hundred and
Eight Names), and in referring to Jaynab as a satisadhwī Mosharraf Hossain is
consciously positioning her as one would a Hindu wife. The sense of discord,
however, disappears when one reads the passage as an example not of Hindu
adjectives being applied to a Muslim woman, but of the most poetic language
available to a Bengali novelist to describe a married woman who has been
rejected by her husband through no fault of her own. Mosharraf Hossain is using
the highest form of Bengali available to him not because of its explicitly Sanskrit
(read, Hindu) overtones, but because by doing so he can fulfill the dictates of an
aesthetic structure which is distinctly Islamic.
As the adīb, the reader’s role is to parse this ornate and interrelated language
as articulating the image of the ideal Muslim. The beautiful framework created
by the novelist serves as a vehicle for conveying religious exemplars, and it is
through the act of reading that the adīb can comprehend this ideal. For the refined
reader, descriptive scenes, such as the one involving Jaynab’s moral purity, act

57
Biśād Sindhu, p. 27, translation mine.
58
Biśād Sindhu, p. 27.
 Another World of Reading 167

as signals indicating that in perceiving Jaynab’s goodness through the beautiful

language, the reader is enacting moral transformation for themselves. Those
who read the language as purely superfluous would thus deprive themselves
of reaching the depths of the text, mistaking for mere surface ornamentation
the path to piety. In conceptualizing the relationship of reading and adab, I
draw on Mana Kia’s discussion of the ethical and social implications of adab
in Shaykh Mushrif al-Din Shirazi’s Gulistān (Rose Garden, 1258). Kia notes
that in the process of creating literature that would inform via entertainment,
writers of adab literature such as Shirazi, better known as Sadi, had perfected a
mode of composition in which “asthetics is ethics” [sic].59 A reader accustomed
to Persianate literature—whether in the Persianate languages or in translation
into the vernaculars—would anticipate moments of proper ethical behavior
to be couched in high literary language such that the text’s aesthetics is never
overwhelmed by the teachings contained within it. The adīb draws an ineluctable
relationship between the language of the text and the ethical message conveyed
by it, and in performing the reading thus, the adīb participates in the process of
virtuous self-transformation.
Thus in Biśād Sindhu, whenever one encounters instances of didacticism, one
notes a concomitant elevation of narrative language. Listing all such moments
would lead to a chapter nearly as long as the 500-page novel, so I will briefly
mention three of significant narrative import here—Hasan forgiving one of his
wives Jayda on his deathbed despite the latter poisoning him (pp. 126–30), Hosen
getting ready for battle following the death of his son, Ali Akbar (pp. 256–63), and
the description of the hellish prison in Damascus within which Ejid and fellow
sinners are incarcerated (pp. 503–6). Each scene is of heightened emotions with
characters in tears bemoaning the fate of those near to them while accepting
divine omnipotence and human beings’ limited understanding of the same. In
the first example, the bitter pill the reader must swallow is that even one as pure
as Hasan can be betrayed by one closest to him, in the second, accept that a
father may not be able to save his son’s life, and in the third, get a glimpse into
the punishment awaiting sinners in this life. The cue for the reader that one now
approaches a portion of the narrative from which one should draw an ethical
lesson is Mosharraf Hossain’s use of a string of adjectival phrases to describe
both atmosphere and emotion. The adjectives are frequently alliterative, and
often repeated with different words to create a series of related images. For

59
Mana Kia, “Adab as Ethics,” 289.
168 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

example, the noun structuring the prison scene is lōuha or iron and within a
single paragraph, it appears in conjunction with śringkhal (chains), perek (nails),
and śalakā (bars). The same paragraph then transitions to driśti (sight) as the
primary noun and verb as we are told of the prisoners’ sightless eyes.60 Finally,
the narrative voice tells the pāthak or the reader that these scenes are too cruel
to behold, returning us to the verb dekhā (to see) with which the narrator had
opened the passage, inviting the pāthak to see the prison in Damascus.61 The
passage guides the reader’s vision to scenes of torment, encases this vision
through a variety of iron chains before releasing the reader to continue with the
narrative flow. It is a masterful display of adjectival phrases trapping the reader
to pay attention to the fate of sinners while simultaneously providing the careful
reader with clues to see their way out of the prison.
It is worth noting the extent to which these scenes rely on the reader’s
active participation and willingness to read imaginatively. As Hasan lies on
his deathbed, he calls his brother Hosen to speak with him for one last time.
Hasan narrates his final dream in which he mentions seeing his grandfather,
the Prophet Mohammad, and through this dream takes the reader back to the
novel’s introduction and the vision had by the Prophet of Hasan and Hosen’s
death. That vision now appears as Hasan’s dream, thus enabling Hasan to foretell
not only his own death but that of his brother as well. As Hosen rages against fate
and repeatedly asks his brother for the name of the person who poisoned him,
Hasan invites him to abjure his anger and accept the divine plan. At the scene’s
closing, the reader learns of Hasan hearing again his grandfather’s call to join
him in heaven and dies. Through this lengthy section, the reader is presented
with several pieces of information—the cause of both Hasan and Hosen’s death,
even though the second event is yet to come, and Hasan revealing that he knew
Jayda was poisoning him all along. However, the narrative makes no distinction
between vision and fact. In the world of the novel, the reader has to imagine
a blending of the religio-fantastic with more tangible facts so as to accept an
alternate form of reality in which both coexist, and indeed shape each other.
Such a merging occurs several times in the novel, most notably when Hosen’s
dismembered head magically vanishes from Ejid’s court.62
The intermingling of the real with the fantastical brings me to two interrelated
genres of adab literature, the qissā and the dāstān, which are necessary to complete

60
“[S]ightless in every direction, sight set only on the wide-open sky,” 596, translation mine.
61
Biśād Sindhu, 506.
62
Ibid., 262–3.
 Another World of Reading 169

any discussion of Biśād Sindhu. Despite the novel being about the martyrdoms
of Hasan and Hosen, it isn’t typical of Maqatil (sing. Maqtal) literature which
focus on the Battle of Karbala and on Hosen’s death. Instead, Mosharraf Hossain
chooses as his primary theme Ejid’s fatal desire for Jaynab which allows him to
draw on the features of the qissa and the dastan. In Urdu, both qissā (Arabic) and
dāstān (Persian) mean “story” and refer to elaborate and long prose romances,
and by the middle of the nineteenth century become popularized in translation in
both Urdu and other Indian vernaculars such as Bengali, spreading from North
India to the rest of the subcontinent. The reach of dāstāns and qissās is attested
to by the plethora of texts which circulate both for pleasure and instruction
across Bengal, from Dāstān-e-amir Hamzah or the Adventures of Amir Hamzah,
to Qissā-e Gul-e bakavali, and to Qissā-e Hatim Tai.63 Such is the extent of their
presence in Bengal that qissā becomes Bengalicized to kecchā and incorporated
into folktale and prose narratives.
An essential element of the qissā and the dāstān is the blending of the fantastic
and the real and incorporating both as part of the natural world. As in the realm
of the dāstān so also in Biśād Sindhu, the reader comes to expect reality to be
elastic enough to include visions, angels, demons, and acts of magic, and the
text’s language to be capable of transmitting this flexible reality. Thus there is
no discord when the magnitude of Ejid’s sins dawns on him at the very moment
when Hosen’s severed head disappears from the former’s court. The verb used to
structure the scene is dekhā (to see), as the reader transitions from Hosen’s family
and followers calling on god to stop the spectacle of Ejid displaying Hosen’s
head and committing a sacrilege to its miraculous disappearance. As soon as the
head disappears, the only person expressing surprise is the villain Ejid, who is
dumbfounded at the power of divine intervention and terrified at the thought of
impending doom. Hosen’s loved ones—and by induction the reader for whose
moral edification the scene is narrated thus—exclaim prior to the fantastic

63
Dāstān-e-amir Hamzah finds repeated mentions in the Persianate periodicals coming out of Kolkata
throughout the nineteenth century such as Mirat ul Akhbar and Akhbar-i-Serampore, while Gulistān
was used as a Persian primer by the Fort William College. For more on the various translations and
iterations of these two texts, see Frances Pritchett’s work on qissā and dāstān, Jennifer Durbow and
Maryam Wasif Khan’s books on the Islamic cosmopolis in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India,
and Mana Kia’s work on Gulistān. The Urdu translation of Dāstān-e-amir Hamzah by Naval Kishore
Press published in six volumes between 1893 and 1908 coincided with the publication of Biśād
Sindhu, and for educated Bengali Muslims, both texts would have formed a part of their literary
world. For example, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, better known as Begum Rokeya, makes mention
of both in Syed Emdad Ali’s periodical Nabanūr, and we find references to Dastan in periodicals
such as the Mohammedan Observer which also carried advertisements for Biśād Sindhu, further
suggesting that Bengalis were reading both.
170 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

moment that they cannot watch this desecration any longer, disassociating
from the verb dekhā. The text attributes amazement to Ejid alone because only
for him is this divine act surprising and terrifying; documenting the response
of the rest of the characters is unnecessary because they have called on god
to perform precisely such a miracle and thus have no cause for astonishment.
In his characteristic way, Mosharraf Hossain indicates an edifying moment
through the use of elaborate adjectives. The adjectives describing this scene, tyej
(power) and jyōti (luminosity), are visual, in keeping with the verb dekhā and
Ejid finds himself blinded by this light. Standing at a safe distance, the reader
is able to appreciate the beauty of the language, even in a passage describing
a severed head, while learning of the fear felt by a sinner in the presence of
divinity. The aesthetic couches the ethical message even as the fantastic becomes
one with the real. As noted by scholars such as Julia Bray and Frances Pritchett,
classical Persian literature uses language so as to blur the boundaries between
the real and the fantastic, making both part of the Muslim individual’s lived
reality. Mosharraf Hossain draws on his readers quotidian familiarity with the
dāstān and the qissā as he situates Biśād Sindhu in a world where moral virtue is
presented in words that are aesthetically pleasing.
However, not all readers of the novel find the novel’s language satisfying
on either an aesthetic or an ethical level. Some Bengali Muslim readers accuse
Mosharraf Hossain of using language that is insufficiently attentive to the
sanctity of Islam. The novelist opens chapter four of the second part, “Uddhār
parba,” with a lengthy invective against those of his faith (swajāti) who have
taken offense at his use of “Bengali words” (“bāngālā bhāśāye byabahārja śabda”)
as prefixes to the names of the Prophet Mohammad, Hasan, and Husayn.64 The
implication is that as a Sanskritized language, using Bengali in the place of
Arabic defiles these invocations. Around the time of writing “Uddhār parba”
Mosharraf Hossain also faces criticism from Bengali Muslims for denouncing
the killing of cows for meat in his essay “Gō jīban” (“Life of Cows,” 1889),
but the particular emphasis on language makes criticism of the novel unique.
While he is forced to recant “Gō jīban” from his own magazine Hitakarī owing
to pressure from more conservative Muslims such as Reazuddin Ahmad,65 the
novelist is far more adamant in his response to the linguistic censure. In fact,

64
Biśād Sindhu, 302–3.
65
Who writes at length against both Mosharraf Hossain and the essay in the periodical Islam Pracārak.
I briefly discuss this in Chapter 1.
 Another World of Reading 171

he positions the linguistic criticism just before a long description of all the
heavenly hosts, including the Prophet Mohammad, Hasan, and all the saints
coming down to Karbala to mourn Hosen. In keeping with previous scenes, the
narrative identifies each saint with an elaborate description of their great deeds,
but retains the Sanskritized appellations for these revered figures. Thus, the
Prophet Mohammad is described as “Mahāriśī Prabhu Hajrat,”66 with the first
word meaning a “great saint” in Sanskrit, the second being a Sanskrit, and the
third an Arabic honorific. Similarly, Sakhina, Hosen’s daughter, is described as
“mahādebī” and “satī,” both terms being Sanskrit in origin.67 The juxtaposition
of the criticism with this scene reveals the novelist to be openly mocking his
critics, and continuing to use Sanskritized Bengali to convey Islamic beliefs.
That he considers this form of Bengali to not be the sole property of Hindus
becomes evident in his responses to letters criticizing him for tainting Bengali
with Persianate words.68 His conviction that Bengali and the Persianate languages
should be wedded so as to include the majority of Bengali Muslims into a larger
community as Bengalis ensures that despite the hostility, the language used in
Biśād Sindhu and his later works remains closer to Sanskritized Bengali. As he
suggests in those responses, and indeed in all his literary works following Biśād
Sindhu, Bengali is the perfect vehicle for communicating the principles of adab
because it is the most aesthetically pleasing form of the language available to the
Bengali Muslim author and reader, and a means to incorporate in Bengali the
aesthetic principles shared by the larger Islamic world.

IV. Incorporating the Familiar: Jārigān and Biśād Sindhu

If adab allows the reader access to the larger Islamicate world, then jārigān
provides a means of return to the familiarity of Bengal. As a genre, jārigān
owes its origins to azadari or the ritual mourning of the fall of Husayn during
the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. Azadari is the performance (Persian, dari)
of mourning (Arabic, aza), referring to the assemblage of Persian and Arabic
cultures, and to the ceremonies of lamentation enacted by pious Muslims—
primarily, though not exclusively, Shias—during Muharram. The practice starts

66
Biśād Sindhu, 305.
67
Ibid., 308.
68
See Chapter 1 for a detailed discussion of this question.
172 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

in Iran in the eleventh century before traveling across South Asia to Bengal
around the seventeenth century, and here, in the hands of the Sufi pirs,69 the
ritual of mourning becomes associated with folk poetic traditions.70 While
the early history of jāri is not well documented, one can deduce its formal
features from two texts. One of the earliest examples of the amalgamation of
the sacred with the folk can be found in Sheikh Faizullah’s poem “Jaynaber
Cautisā” composed sometime during the seventeenth century.71 The text of the
poem narrates the events of Karbala from the perspective of Zainab (or Jaynab)
who laments the fall of Husayn as a personal loss. While not fully realized as
a jāri text, “Jaynaber Cautisā” nonetheless explains how central the individual
character’s voice is in the folk perception of Islam in Bengal, and this focus on
the individual goes on to be one of the primary characteristics of jāri. Toward the
first part of the eighteenth century, the Sufi pir Heyat Mahmud recorded the
events of Karbala in his manuscript titled Jungnāmā (1723) to which were later
added the performative elements of jāri, and the name eventually morphed to
Jārijungnāmā.72 While Heyat Mahmud may not have intended his Jungnāmā
to eventually become part of the jāri tradition, it is indisputable that he used
the narrative to attract local inhabitants to Islam. The Battle of Karbala was
frequently chosen by early Muslim proselytizers based on the narrative quality
of the event which allowed them to present the tenets of Islam through a story
full of elements of adventure and pathos.
Following scholarly consensus, I would also argue that the story-like
rendition of religious history provided early Muslims with the ability to draw
on aspects of existing folk beliefs to explain Islam in terms that would be readily
comprehensible—and perhaps, attractive—to the masses being preached to.73
The resulting syncreticism becomes a cause for concern for nineteenth-century
Muslim reformers who are shocked by how closely intertwined Islam gets with

69
Spiritual guides instructing their disciples in the path of Sufism or a form of Islamic mysticism.
An extended description of Sufism is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting its
significance in Bengal, particularly as it allows for a syncretic version of Islam which moves away
from religious orthodoxy toward a more communal and heterodox approach to Islam.
70
For a detailed discussion of the history of jārigān in Bengal, see Epsita Halder’s “Reading the
‘Cheapness’ of Cheap Prints: Karbala Narrative in the Early Print Culture” (2015).
71
Historical Dictionary of the Bengalis, 185 (2013).
72
For more on the history of Jārijungnāmā, and on the jāri tradition, see Epsita Halder’s “Reading the
‘Cheapness’ of Cheap Print” and Mary Frances Dunham’s Jārigan: Muslim Epic Songs of Bangladesh
(1997).
73
Epsita Halder and Ronit Ricci both discuss the syncretic nature of Islam in India, albeit with very
different focal points.
 Another World of Reading 173

Hindu and folk religions.74 However, it is this syncreticism that leads to the
immense popularity of the Karbala story in its various guises as it appeals to both
Hindus and Muslims. Jāri performers continue the tradition of vernacularizing
the story of Hasan and Husayn by drawing on “Jaynāber cautisā,” “Jārijungnāmā,”
and a variety of pāncālīs75 with equal élan. The pāncālī, in fact, becomes the
form of jārigān as performers use the rhythmic patterns of reciting pāncālīs to
incorporate aspects of chanda (poetical metre) and tāl (musical measure).
As with other forms of Bengali folk performances such as kabigān, kirtan, and
pālā gān, jārigān also mythologizes Islam, and in this act, becomes a communal
performance. Thus jārigān performances were, and continue to be, seen as
belonging to the community, with both performers and audiences coming
from within a local group of people. This creates a sense of shared experience,
requiring the audience to contribute to the performance, sometimes by clapping
to the rhythm, sometimes by singing along, and in performing the ritualized
mourning of Hasan and Husayn. What one also discovers when looking closely
at jārigān is a lack of generic distinction. The audience and performers are less
concerned about the relationship between jārigān and other forms of elegiac
poetry such as the marsiya or the nauha—both of which are expressions of ritual
grief during Muharram—and more with the performance itself. Thus frequently
one finds the emphasis on personal grief, characteristic of the marsiya, to be
embedded in the long descriptive narratives that otherwise characterize jārigān.
Each of these three elements—the communal nature of jārigān, its investment
in lengthy descriptions of the Battle of Karbala, and the simultaneous ability
to individualize religious history through a personal relationship between the
audience and the characters in the story—is key to understanding Mosharraf
Hossain’s choice of source material for Biśād Sindhu. In the mukhabandha or
the preface to the first edition of the novel, Mosharraf Hossain elaborates on his
rationale for writing Biśād Sindhu and suggests what his source texts might be.
It is worth quoting at length:
Muharram is the name of the first month of the Candramās [lunar] year. On 8th
Muharram of the Hijri year 61, the king of Madina, Hosen, along with the rest
of his family arrived at Karbala following a sequence of events, and died on the

74
The Muhammedan Observer, for example, notes with horror the prevalence of stories such as “Kali
and Jummapeer were rivals, and that one day Jummapeer defeated the goddess and transplanted her
in the Kalighat” (“The Muhammedan Community Needs a Girl School,” April 26, 1894) in Sambad-
sāmayik patre uniś śataker bāngālī musalmān samāj, pp. 263–4.
75
A form of oral narrative, often used to tell the story of Hindu gods and goddess, but equally
frequently used to narrate Islamic hagiography.
174 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

battlefield at the hands of soldiers sent by Ejid. This tragedy has become famous
by the name of Muharram. What the origin of that event was, and why the terrible
battle took place, the profound facts of these are perhaps known to many. “Biśād
Sindhu” has been composed by taking the gist of the original event from Persian
and Arabic texts. To perfectly imitate classical kābya-grantha [lit. poetic texts]
maintaining the honour of the compositional skills of classical poets, and of the
shastras [religious doctrines] is very difficult. For a person like me, the desire
to properly preserve the majesty of these subjects is like “the dwarf reaching for
the moon” [referring to a Bengali idiom]. But my primary objective is to make
the original story of Muharram easily comprehensible (sahaje hridayangam) to
the dear readers [both male and female] who love the Bengali language.76

Mosharraf Hossain identifies his readers as those “who love the Bengali
language” further attesting to his desire to position Bengali Muslims as
Bengalis, a point I discuss in the previous section. Of interest here, however,
is the novelist’s description of his sources. These, he says, are Persian and
Arabic classics, and yet when one looks closely at the narrative itself, it appears
that the real sources are Faizullah’s “Jaynāber cautisā” and Heyat Mahmud’s
Jārijungnāmā. “Jaynāber cautisā” presents the events at Karbala in the form
of Jaynab’s lament for her husband and brother-in-law, and explains why a
novel—ostensibly about Karbala—opens with Jaynab, spends the first 275 pages
narrating the consequences of her marriage with Hasan, and places Ejid’s love
for Jaynab as the novel’s driving force. On the other hand, Jārijungnāmā provides
the narrative its structure as a jungnāmā or the tale (nāmā) of a battle (jung)
whose primary generic feature is to present the story of Muslim heroes defeating
armies of unbelievers. Jārijungnāmā, then, gives Biśād Sindhu the template for
imaginatively reconstructing history.77
That, despite Mosharraf Hossain’s claims, the novel’s sources might lie closer
at home comes through the novelist admitting to the difficulties of imitating
classical Persianate poets. His decision to include a Bengali idiom is an interesting
one here, even if one takes into account the display of modesty as an usual
feature of nineteenth-century texts. It reasserts two significant things—one, the

76
“Mukhabandha,” Biśād Sindhu, n.p. translation mine.
77
Here I follow the scholarly work of Anisujjaman, Sukumar Sen, and Munir Chaudhuri, among others,
who agree that Biśād Sindhu is more likely a work based on punthis or indigenous manuscripts
rather than on Persianate classics. Anisujjaman also cites Mosharraf Hossain’s autobiography in
which the latter confesses to knowing very little Persian and Arabic, as evidence for his novel not
being derived from classical texts. Given that most of these classics were not translated into Bengali
until later in the twentieth century, I am inclined to accept Anisujjaman’s explanation.
 Another World of Reading 175

novelist’s stated identity as a Bengali comfortable with elevating very common

Bengali sayings, and two, it connects with the later sentence invoking Bengali-
loving readers, placing both the author and the reader in the same context. The
first provides a clue that the sources, like the author, cannot dare do justice to
either the classics or their high religiosity; to aim to do either would be akin to
the dwarf reaching for the moon. All that the author wishes to do is to make the
story easily comprehensible, but comprehensible in a manner that appeals to
the reader’s heart as suggested by the word hridayangam (hriday = heart). The
implication is that the reader easily feels the story as much as they understand
it. The emotional appeal aligns the novel with other such works narrating the
Karbala events, not aspiring to be high literature but rather texts the average
Bengali would read and enjoy. Jārijungnāmā and “Jaynāber cautisā” would be
two such texts which had permeated Bengali Muslim imaginary and colored
its perception of Muharram from the seventeenth century onwards. Mosharraf
Hossain’s familiarity with punthi sāhitya or folk literature78—a category to
which both Faizullah and Heyat Mahmud’s texts belong—further attests
to the likelihood that the novel was based on the same texts used by jārigān
performers.79
This discussion of Biśād Sindhu’s sources allows me to make another
observation regarding the novel’s reader. This reader is positioned as Bengali
loving so as to enable Mosharraf Hossain to include all classes of literate
Bengali Muslims, many of whom, like the novelist himself, would have only
passing knowledge of Arabic through reading the Qur’an, and equally tangential
knowledge of Persian or Urdu. Those educated enough to have a reading
knowledge of Persianate languages—belonging either to the upper classes or to
more conservative families seeking to distance themselves from Bengali because
of its association with Hinduism—are also appealed to by the elevated nature

78
The translation of punthi sāhitya as folk literature is at best reductive. This is a rich and complex
body of literature dating back to early modern Bengal and the name owes its origin to the practice
of transcribing orally transmitted texts onto palm leaf manuscripts or punthis. The particular form
of Musalmānī punthi sāhitya or Islamic punthi literature grew up around the regions of Kolkata,
Hooghly, and Howrah where poets composed romances based on Islamic tales in a Bengali
mixed with Persianate languages called misrabhāśā or Mixed Language. The language came to
be increasingly identified with lower-class Muslims, and thus found little truck with highbrow
litterateurs, whether Hindu or Muslim. This, however, had little impact on the widespread
popularity of punthi sāhitya which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had turned into one of the
primary ways in which Bengali Muslims acquired knowledge of Islam if they did not read any of the
Persianate languages. Abdul Khaer Shaikh’s “Musalmānī” punthi sāhitya and Anisujjaman’s Muslim-
mānās ō bānglā sāhitya are excellent resources on this subject.
79
Mosharraf Hossain mentions the same at various points in his autobiography.
176 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

of the novel’s Bengali, but by including the former group, Mosharraf Hossain
is able to exponentially increase his reader base. These mostly middle-class
Bengali readers would have access to novels by Hindus such as Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay, but in Biśād Sindhu they would have seen their own religious
identity positively depicted for the first time in novel form.
In committing to print the Karbala narrative, Biśād Sindhu may have opened
the floodgates for a host of prose and lyric renditions of the story in formal Bengali
or sādhu bhāśā,80 but by no means did it occupy such a pioneering position
when it came to cheap battalā editions. Various versions of the Muharram story
had been in circulation in print from the early years of the nineteenth century
onwards, and as with popular Hindu mythological texts, these, too, were often
reproduced in print in their manuscript form. Thus Jārijungnāmā existed in
named and unnamed editions, often identified for the buyer with the publisher
or the printer’s name rather than that of the author. Another remarkably popular
adaptation was Garibullah or Yakub’s Jungnāmā, which continues to be in
print, the text still being based on the original punthi form. These texts went a
long way toward making the story of Karbala hridayangam to Bengali Muslim
readers, and while Mosharraf Hossain aimed for a reader more refined than the
one consuming Karbala punthis in Mishrabhāśā (see footnote 71), he certainly
sought to capitalize on the narrative’s popularity in the print market.
What is interesting to note in this proliferation of print texts telling the story
of Hasan and Husayn is the singular attention paid to two texts by the jārigān
tradition—Jārijungnāmā and Biśād Sindhu. Of all these works in circulation,
these two texts alone merge the world of print and performance as practitioners
of jāri add Biśād Sindhu to their repertoire in the same way that they take on
Heyat Mahmud’s Jungnāmā and personalize it by making it into Jārijungnāmā.
This bridging of modes of perception leads one to revisit the novel in light of a
performative text, and examine the ways in which aspects of this performance
are built into the narrative. A pre-condition of a performance as participatory
as jārigān is the audience’s familiarity with the narrative. As with most folk or
fairy tale-based performances, the audience is supposed to already know the
details of the story such that they know when to clap or chant or display the
pathos appropriate for the scene.81 From the preface to Biśād Sindhu, it becomes

80
Those published shortly after Biśād Sindhu are Ejidbadh kābya (1899) and Moslembadh kābya (1901)
by Matiur Rahman Khan, and Kāsembadh kābya (1905) by Abdul Ma’ali Muhammad Hamid ali.
81
This familiarity is a generic feature of most folk performative forms in Bengal, including jātrā, pālā
gān, and pāncālī.
 Another World of Reading 177

apparent that Mosharraf Hossain’s primary audience are Bengali Muslims

intimately familiar with the story of Muharram, and for whom the details of the
battle need little explanation. The novel, then, assumes a reader who not only
knows the story, but knows its details well. The novelist repeats this supposition
throughout the narrative, occasionally addressing the reader directly, and at
other points delegating this task to the characters themselves. For example, at a
critical juncture in the narrative, once Hasan has been killed, and Ejid’s chances
of marrying Jaynab are once again alive, the reader is taken into Ejid’s court
along with the traitorous Jayda and Maymuna, her co-conspirator. Ejid initially
rewards both women by marrying the first and paying the second more than her
promised share of gold, thus fulfilling his promise. At this moment, however,
there is an abrupt change in tone as Ejid alters his attitude mid-sentence; he
accuses Jayda of being a monster (“rākkhasi”) capable of killing her own husband,
and cuts her in half, dramatically spraying her blood all over his court.82 The
narrative does not stop to explain Ejid’s behavior as it details the punishment
meted out to Maymuna—being partially buried and then stoned to death—and
then addresses the reader by suggesting this to be an opportune moment to leave
the court of Damascus for Medina.
The untrained reader is left flummoxed. What happened to Ejid suddenly,
they wonder? Yet the novelist can effect such an abrupt shift in the narrative
without worrying about losing the reader because the novel’s primary readers,
those familiar with jārigān performances, have received their textual cues
already. As jārigān audiences, they are attuned to moments in the narrative
when generic feature peculiar to an oral performance takes over those of a
print text. Thus at the start of this scene, Ejid addresses the members of his
court twice, the first time when he reminds them that “all of you already
know that Hasan was [his] archenemy,”83 and next when, having invited Jayda
to share his throne as his queen, he asks the audience to “carefully listen”84 to
his words. The reader, familiar with jāri performances of the story, knows to
be attentive to calls to listen carefully or to moments when basic narrative
facts are repeated as those are clues telling them of what comes next in the
narrative. Thus when they are reminded of Ejid’s enmity with Hasan, they are
implicitly reminded of the reason behind this dispute, Ejid’s love for Jaynab.

82
Biśād Sindhu, 144–5.
83
Ibid., 142.
84
Ibid., 144.
178 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Given that knowledge, they know now to expect the overture to Jayda to be a
false one. Alongside this narrative reminder, the ploy of asking the audience
to listen carefully is one found frequently in oral performances to mark key
plot points, so the reader is also alerted that something significant is about
to take place. The shock of the execution, then, is lessened for the knowing
reader through these narrative techniques borrowed from jāri performers,
and the novelist can confidently transport the reader out of Damascus
toward Medina.
One finds this welding of reading and performance in the jāris themselves,
which begin to draw directly from the novel, capitalizing both on its popularity
with readers and on its narrative structure. Given the largely oral nature of
these performers, dating jāris is a particularly difficult task. To add to this, the
border between various folk performances is a porous one, with performers of
one genre not only singing other genres but building songs using elements of
multiple genres. Thus a jāri performer will also sing bāul songs and weave in
well-known bāul compositions into jārigān, and vice versa. The audience expects
this and usually knows the conventions of different genres, thus making this
melange a regular part of folk performances in rural Bengal. We have a sizeable
collection of jārigān thanks to the efforts of the Bangladeshi poet Jasimuddin
who first collated extant jāris in his work Jārigān (1968). He later collaborated
with a North American scholar of classical languages, Mary Frances Dunham,
as she recorded and published jāri performances in an effort to capture a folk art
form on the wane.85
Using the texts transcribed by Jasimuddin and Dunham, and comparing the
same with recordings of contemporary jāri performances offers us one way of
establishing when new material is added to existing songs. Jāri songs often begin
with an invocation in which the performer praises the various entities that have
aided in their success. The singer is called the boyati, the term coming via the
Arabic bayt or couplet, thus identifying the singer as a composer of couplets.
Jainuddin Boyati, a contemporary jāri singer, begins his 2008 performance of
“Śahidnāmār jāri” (“The jāri of the Martyr”) by first thanking God, then the
Prophet, and then his master or ustād, Meghu Boyati. The jāri itself depicts
Hosen’s son Ali Akbar dying of thirst, which leads Hosen to promise never to
drink till he has killed Ejid, and then finally being killed himself. In his final
moments, Hosen begs Simar to let him breathe before desecrating his body

85
Her compilation, both textual and aural, is titled Jārigān: Muslim Epic Songs of Bangladesh (1997).
 Another World of Reading 179

by beheading him.86 The jāri is interesting on two fronts here: the first, in its
use of the same sequence of events as that of Biśād Sindhu to narrate Hosen’s
encounter with Simar. While this is a common story, this particular ordering
of narrative events becomes consolidated in the nineteenth century based on
Heyat Mahmud’s Jārijungnāmā, which then finds itself in Mosharraf Hossain’s
Biśād Sindhu. The detailed description of Hosen’s death, and most notably
the language of this scene closely follows that of the novel. The novel and the
jāri song both begin the scene by describing Simar as jumping onto Hosen’s
chest to cut his head off. In Biśād Sindhu, the moment is described as “Simār
khanjarhaste eklamphe Hosener bakkher upor giyā basila,” while “Śahidnāmār
jāri” narrates it as, “ei lāph diyā uthilā Simār bakkherō upare.”87 The similarity
in language is remarkable, with both genres emphasizing lampha or its more
colloquial form laph (to leap) and Hosen’s bakkha or chest. The rest of the scene
is closely mirrored in both texts such that if one were listening to the song and
using the novel as its transcription, one would be able to follow not only the
song’s meaning but its words as well.88
This brings me to the second point of note, Jainuddin naming his ustād.
Meghu is one of the boyatis who gets transcribed by Jasimuddin in the 1950s
and 1960s as one of the most notable performers of his time. Meghu Boyati
begins his career sometime in the 1920s and performs “Śahidnāmār jāri.” In
this oral tradition, the task of the disciple is to hear and memorize the ustād’s
performance, and while the former will frequently give the song their own
touch, the basic narrative and its words will remain mostly unchanged. Thus
one can assume that Jainuddin learns “Śahidnāmār jāri” from Meghu, and even
though the former, as an established boyati himself, now adds elements to his
performance, he retains the core of the narrative. By tracing “Śahidnāmār jāri”

86
The recording of the jāri can be found here: http://www.thetravellingarchive.org/record-session/
ambikapur-faridpur-bangladesh-31-march-2008-jainuddin-boyati-and-team/. I base my comments
on the jāri on my transcription of this recording.
87
The line from Biśād Sindhu can be translated as “Carrying a sword, Simar leapt onto Hosen’s chest”
(p. 271) while in “Śahidnāmār jāri,” the line says, “With a leap, Simar got on [Hosen’s] chest” (17:30–
17.33). Both translations mine.
88
Another unnamed jāri is also of interest here given its use of the same introduction as that of the
novel. This jāri, though performed as part of a bāul repertoire by Selim Baul, begins with the Prophet
Mohammad revealing his vision foreshadowing Hasan and Husayn’s death to his followers, mirroring
the opening of Biśād Sindhu. Selim Baul replaces Mosharraf Hossain’s Sanskritized honorifics
for the Prophet and the Imams with their Arabic counterparts, but barring this substitution, the
structure remains the same. I place this discussion in a footnote because while a recording of
the performance is readily available (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUCZjeJH2i8&ab_
channel=AroundTvAroundTv), I have not been able to trace the original jāri or its affiliations.
180 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

to Meghu Boyati, then, one discovers that the influence of Biśād Sindhu was felt
on jārigān performances at least by the 1920s, and possibly earlier, assuming that
Meghu himself learned the song from his ustād whose identity we do not know
clearly. Thus within a few decades of Biśād Sindhu’s publication, the narrative
had made its way back into the jāri tradition which had originally served as its
own inspiration.
My argument here is not to suggest that either Meghu or Jainuddin came to
their version of “Śahidnāmār jāri” by a close reading of Biśād Sindhu—though
that remains a possibility—but to remark on the social context in which the
novel’s text permeates the oral performance. While jāri as an art is no longer a
living tradition in rural Bengal, in the immediate aftermath of Biśād Sindhu’s
entry into print it was still very much a part of Bengali village life, particularly
of Bengali Muslims. The novel’s late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century
reader’s contribution, though not documented, can be seen in the transference
of the text’s language and form into jāri songs. The world of reading the novel
runs parallel to that of watching jāri performances, and those moments when
they intersect are revealed in these examples of one genre profoundly influencing
the other. The exchange suggests that in places such as Kushtia, where
Mosharraf Hossain was from and where he wrote Biśād Sindhu, or Ambikapur
and Faridpur, where Jainuddin Boyati performs, neither the novel nor jārigān
supplanted each other as the preferred mode of telling the Karbala story. Rather,
through interactions between readers, performers, authors, and printers, they
complemented each other, allowing these individuals to comfortably transition
between genres. This network of people living within a shared context is integral
to the Perso-Arabic reading practice as removing any one element—whether it
is the jārigān performers, or the text of the novel, or a printer such as Kangal
Harinath straddling both world—would render the experience of reading Biśād
Sindhu incomplete. Thus regardless of how much the nineteenth-century urban
Hindu intelligentsia debated over the chastity of Mosharraf Hossain’s Bengali or
his ability to make accessible an Islamic narrative to the Bengali (read Hindu)
reader, it is the Bengali Muslim reader coming from the villages who is able to
fully appreciate the linguistic and narrative play enacted by the novel.89

89
It is also worth noting here the lack of distinction drawn between high and low culture by the
audience of Biśad Sindhu and of the jāri performances. As I document here, the language of both
freely intermingle, and even though Mosharraf Hossain uses a more refined (Sanskritized) form of
Bengali, in its references and cadences, this language finds easy affinities with that of the popular
oral performances.
 Another World of Reading 181

Writing nearly sixty years after Biśād Sindhu’s publication, the Bangladeshi
novelist Abul Bashar comments on the persistence of this merger of reading
and watching narrativization of the Karbala event in the context of rural
Murshidabad.90 The novel, Bashar notes while drawing on his childhood
memories, occupied a place in the cāngāri91 alongside religious texts, effectively
blurring the line between fiction and religious belief. While literate Muslims
read the text of the novel as building on the stories they had heard as children,
semi-literate Muslims read the book by relying on how they had heard oral
performers speak the lines. Bashar recounts an amusing moment when as a
child he corrected the local ketāb-pāthak92 while the latter was reciting a line
from the novel. Isa, the ketāb-pāthak, mistook the word “hānkiyā” (to call
out) for “hāntiyā” (to walk) resulting in him reading the line as the messenger
walked while riding his horse. Bashar as the literate young man pointed out
the impossibility of walking while also riding a horse, while Isa replied that he
was reading what was written in the text, and also that was how everyone had
spoken the lines when he had heard them. The printing error is soon resolved
by Isa scratching out “hānkiyā” and writing “hāntiyā,” and Bashar remarks “that
this was ‘Biśād-Sindhu’ of the semi-illiterate world.”93 What is interesting here
is that Isa as the reader does not rely on the printed text as his ultimate guide
but rather on his memory of the text’s performance. In those performances,
individual letters of words, or occasionally entire words and phrases, are
misplaced because tone and rhythm are of greater importance than lexical
clarity. As long as the performance’s rhythm remains consistent, the audience
comprehends the gist of the story. So, for Isa, reading the text is less about
the fidelity of the printed book and more about telāyat or recitation which
is faithful to a rhythm. That the wrong printed word creates a confusion in
meaning does not strike Isa because his relationship to the print text is founded
on his familiarity with oral performances, and it is the latter that turns his
reading into a performative act.

90
The following discussion is based on Bashar’s reading of Biśād Sindhu published as an online article
which can be found here: http://www.amarboi.com/2015/11/bishad-sindhur-bishadmoy-torongo-
abul-bashar.html.
91
A receptacle for sacred texts in a Muslim household.
92
The literal translation of the phrase is ketāb or book pāthak or reader. However, Bashar reminds us
that in this context the particular kind of book referred to by ketāb is a punthi or a manuscript.
93
Bashar, “‘Biśād-sindhur biśādmay taranga,” translation mine.
182 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Isa is far from being alone in his fluid interaction with texts and reading;
Bashar remembers his aunt Ashura Khatun94 who inhabited a world in which the
novel was indistinguishable from jārigān performances of the battle of Karbala,
and of going with her to these performances during Muharram to watch the
ritualized mourning commemorating Hasan and Husayn. The uniting factor for
Bashar is that Biśād Sindhu was not for the elites of either religion, but for the
Bengalis living in rural areas such as Lalbagh and Kapasdanga in Murshidabad.
What fascinates me is the time of which Bashar speaks in this article. He
mentions being fifteen or sixteen when he corrected Isa, and given that he was
born in 1951, this would have in the mid-1960s. As late as the mid-twentieth
century then, one finds examples of this porous relationship between reading
and performance, suggesting not just its longevity as a mode of consuming texts
but also how profoundly it had become a part of rural Bengali life from the
early nineteenth century onwards when jāri performers brought to life Heyat
Mahmud’s handwritten punthi of Jārijungnāmā.
Mosharraf Hossain’s investment in the rural Bengali reader attests to the
proximity of this knowing reader of Biśād Sindhu to jārigān performances.
In his essays, the agricultural news covered in the periodical Hitakarī which
he edited, and prose texts such as Gāji Miyār Bastāni, Mosharrah Hossain
demonstrates his continued interest in placing the rural Bengali reader over
their more urban counterparts from Kolkata and Dhaka. His familiarity
with this reader’s interests and tastes is well documented in his collaboration
with the Bengali reformer Harinath Majumdar, popularly known as Kangal
Harinath. As I discuss elsewhere in this work, Mosharraf Hossain had a close
professional and personal relationship with Harinath, the former beginning
his journalistic career in the latter’s periodical Grāmbārtāprakāśikā (Publisher
of Rural News). As the publication’s name suggests, both Harinath and the
novelist sought to highlight the realities of living in rural Bengal which were
often ignored by the urban Bengali intelligentsia, be they Hindu or Muslim.
They both wrote repeatedly about the plight of not just the agricultural
worker, but also of the middle classes living under tyrannical landlords, first
in Grāmbārtāprakāśikā which was one of the first investigative periodicals

94
Bashar reads the novel and the Karbala story as uniting Shias and Sunnis such that even a Sunni
woman would be named Asura after the tenth day of Muharram despite the festival and its religious
connotations being Shia in nature rather than Sunni.
 Another World of Reading 183

in Bengali, and then Mosharraf Hossain continued to dwell on the problem

at length in Gāji Miyār Bastāni. Coming from the same district of Kushtia,
Harinath and Mosharraf Hossain shared a similar socio-cultural context in
which folk performers such as jāri and bāul would have been part of their
quotidian life. Harinath was himself a bāul, and a friend and disciple of the
famous bāul singer Lalon Fakir, and arranged to publish Lalon’s songs from his
own Mathuranath press in Komarkhali in Kushtia, the same venue where Biśād
Sindhu was composed and later published.95 The fluidity of genres meant that
bauls would often sing jāri songs and vice versa, a tradition which continues
till date,96 and that Mosharraf Hossain himself was part of the folk performance
culture through his friendship with Harinath.
It is, then, of little surprise that as a man from rural Bengal, Mosharraf Hossain
would draw on those genres which were a part of his own life to create a novel
that would appeal to readers within his context. When conceptualizing the first
Bengali Muslim novel, he thus draws on not just a story whose contours these
readers would have known, but does so by incorporating elements of a form
through which the narrative returned every year. Hasan, Hosen, and their family
fought and bravely died in the songs of jārigān performers, marking the cyclical
passage of time for Muslims just as the āgōmanī songs marked the annual advent
of Durga for the Hindus. In integrating such a communal and familiar story into
the relatively new form of the novel, Mosharraf Hossain ensures that the Bengali
Muslim can navigate their way through the genre using these recognizable
markers. This reader knows the story, knows how the story is performed, and
thus in reading it in print, can rely on their knowledge of this shared performative
experience to approach a genre hitherto marked as belonging to the domain
of the Hindus and Anglicized Bengalis. What remains truly remarkable about
Biśād Sindhu is its ability to be read without any knowledge of its inner world,
but it is only when one returns to rural Bengal via the textual markers encoded
in it, that the novel’s relationship with its Muslim readers becomes apparent
through the vernacularized Perso-Arabic reading practice. It is here that Biśād
Sindhu’s existence as text and performance acquires special significance; the

95
https://www.thedailystar.net/country/150-years-old-press-still-works-1213822; also see Carola
Erika Lorea’s “‘Playing the Football of Love on the Field of the Body’: The Contemporary Repertoire
of Baul Songs.”
96
One such example can be found here: http://www.thetravellingarchive.org/record-session/
ambikapur-faridpur-bangladesh-31-march-2008-jainuddin-boyati-and-team/.
184 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Perso-Arabic reading practice requires not only a familiarity with the tenets of
Islam and a lived performance of the faith, but also an intimate relationship
with the context of its production in rural Bengal. The Bengali Muslim emerges
as a better reader of the Perso-Arabic practice than their Hindu counterpart
because the former comprehends the text as aestheticizing the ethical through
the concept of adab, and because this adab is presented in a text whose story is a
significant part of the immediate cultural life.
 Conclusion: The Novelty of Reading

I. The Novelty of Women Reading

What lies behind the remarkable popularity achieved by the Bengali novel by
the end of the nineteenth century when it had only been a part of the print
industry for a little over three decades? How did Bengali readers take to the
genre so quickly when few of them had access—material or educational—to
novels imported from England? What means did networks of authors, readers,
printers, publishers, distributors, and reviewers in Bengal use to popularize a
genre so far removed from its originary context in Victorian England? How did
existing aesthetic, linguistic, and ethical structures engage with Bengali novels
creating practices of reading unique to the region? And what does it mean for
the scholar to take the life of a genre and its readers on their own terms?
These are the questions I have sought to answer in this book, and in the course
of doing so, I’ve looked at the struggles over forming not just a genre but the
modern Bengali language itself. From the Islamicate world via Persian, Arabic,
and Urdu, to the debates between Sanskritists and Anglicists, this work has
traced the contours of multiple, often competing and frequently contradictory,
practices of reading. As I studied these conversations, they compelled me to
reflect on the male-dominated nature of the book market in nineteenth-century
Bengal, and to ask where were the women who were certainly reading and being
read to, if not actively producing Bengali prose? That they were active readers
becomes apparent in battalā satires such as Durgadas De’s “Miss Bino Bibi B.A.”
or the anonymous “Nabhel nāyikā” which bemoan the fate of women who read
novels, and assume this act to be widespread enough to be a cause for moral
concern. Their contribution to Bengali prose was not minor, especially when
one considers how many women were editing and writing in periodicals and
publishing monographs. Thakomoni Debi became the first woman to edit a
periodical when she began editing Anāthinī in 1875, and Kailasbashini Debi
186 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

published a book of prose titled Hindu mahilāganer hinabasthā (The Lowly

State of Hindu Women) as early as in 1863. The women of the Tagore family
including Swarnakumari Debi and her daughters Hiranmoyi Debi, and Sarala
Debi Chaudhurani were editors and contributors to the periodical Bhāratī,
highlighting the condition of women in Bengal. While there were fewer Muslim
authors, Faizunnesa Khatun or Nawab Faizunnesa was notable not only for her
narrative poem Rupjālāl, but also for her work on educating young Muslim
women in Bengali rather than in the Persianate languages, the latter being the
norm for Muslims in colonial Bengal.
Rich though this body of work is, there are few allusions to women as readers
not constrained by the dictates of social or religious morality. With the notable
exception of Binodini Dasi,1 discussions of women reading frequently merge
into conversations debating the benefits or ill-effects of educating women.
The didactic nature of documents both proposing and opposing women’s
education restrict the female reader to the role of a real or potential student,
and simultaneously position reading as primarily a pedagogical instrument. The
concept of the female novel reader, when it does appear, becomes associated
with the question of educating women such that aesthetic or ethical concerns
not related to education are rendered invisible.2 Thus either one finds examples
such as the satires mentioned above in which the act of reading novels serves as
the vehicle for remarking on the moral dangers of giving women the power of
literacy, or in a book of religious guidance such as Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s
Behishti Zewar where the author provides women with a curated list of books
they may and may not read so as to be educated as good Muslims.3 Yet other
examples are the various social treatises—Kailashbashini’s Hindu mahilāganer
hinabasthā being a prime example—in which reading as a means of educating
and thus ameliorating the domestic conditions of women is a recurring trope.
However, there is a handful of texts in which women engage with the act
of reading without entering into conversations about education, and in
these concluding remarks, I draw on two such works—Rassundari Debi’s
autobiography Āmār jīban (My Life) and Faizunnesa’s Rupjālāl, both published

1
See introduction.
2
The nuances of nineteenth-century educational debates as pertaining to women have been examined
at length by scholars such as Tanika Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, Ghulam Murshid, Sujata Mukherjee, and
Sonia Amin, to name only a handful.
3
Book 10 of Behishti zewar provides such lists. I discuss this with reference to the concept of adab in
Chapter 4.
 Conclusion 187

in 1876. I stage these two texts as sites of reading to demonstrate the range of
concerns women brought to the practice of reading. My aim in doing so is not to
provide an exhaustive overview of women readers across the nineteenth century
in Bengal, or to even suggest that Rassundari or Faizunnesa is representative
of their gender. Rather it is to highlight the improbable, messy, and impossible
ways in which these women practice reading knowing that it is an act first and
foremost forbidden for them. As these two examples show, women read and
misread, with Rassundari reading for divine solace, and Faizunnesa inviting
her reader to read so that the author may mitigate the effects of black magic
and heartbreak. Both women comment on the lack of a community that might
support them as readers, or even be able to condone their desire to read, and it
is through this profound sense of isolation that they express their relationship
to texts. The act of reading itself is presented as novel as each author positions it
as incompatible with the domestic space within which the woman is supposed
to remain confined. They pay little attention to generic characteristics, both
as readers and writers, and so the conclusion does not discuss the practice of
reading novels but rather aims at unearthing what reading looked like for the
few women who documented the process.

II. “Dayamadhav teach me how to read”

The predominant emotion structuring the first Bengali autobiography,

Rassundari’s Āmār jīban, is fear. The author narrates how this fear is instilled
in her at a very young age by her mother’s cautionary tale of cheledharā or
kidnappers who abducted naughty children. From then on, she recounts, she
lived in perpetual terror, even afraid of reporting bullies lest they be kidnapped
for being bad children. As she grows older, she learns from her mother the
efficacy of chanting the name of their household deity Dayamadhab in moments
of distress. Rassundari thus adds Dayamadhab to her narrative, calling on him
to protect her from the evils of the world. Growing up in the mid-1810s in an
affluent family running a school for boys, Rassundari has the rare opportunity to
not only be near an educational institution, but to be allowed to attend school, if
only to keep her out of the reach of village bullies.4 I say attend here, but the verb

4
Rassundari, Āmār jīban, 3–6.
188 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

must be taken quite loosely because while she sits near the mem or the English
teacher, she is not given any instruments of learning such as a stick which the
boys use to draw letters of the alphabet on the ground. She is merely allowed
to sit in the company of students as she recounts being terrified of even that
context. Through her fog of fear, however, she manages to learn the sound of the
alphabet, even though she does not learn to recognize the shape of the letters.
This mix of a girl child’s fear and reliance on divine protection creates an
intimate picture of domestic life in nineteenth-century rural Bengal, affording
the reader access to a world in which women are constrained behind layers of
physical and religious barriers. As she describes the school, she notes her lack
of agency in participating in the process of learning. Rassundari comments on
being taken to and from the school, placed there in the morning, taken inside
by relatives to shower and lunch at midday, and then finally taken back in the
evening when school closed for the day.5 She adds to this sense of helplessness
when she describes herself at age eight as a “sōnār putulī” or a golden doll who
would cry if anyone even spoke to her aggressively.6 It is within this discourse
of fear and vulnerability that she places her act of starting to memorize both
the Bengali and the Persian alphabet. Yet this learning happens in secret even
though she is publicly sitting in the schoolhouse, as Rassundari remarks, “that I
had learnt all these lessons in my mind (mane mane), no one else knew that.”7 As
a young Bengali Hindu girl, she knows well the stigma associated with women
even contemplating the act of reading, and while she presents her childhood
self as blissfully unaware of social norms, she nonetheless demonstrates an
acute awareness of reading as a forbidden act for women. Reading, for her, is
a practice that must be secreted away from even her beloved mother because
there is no room for it in the rigidly defined domestic sphere—the only space
allocated to her.
Yet that Rassundari wishes to make reading a part of her domestic life becomes
apparent in her description of how she learns to perform everyday chores such
as cooking and cleaning. She follows the same format of representing herself
as a frightened child living for a brief while in the care of her aging paternal
aunt (khurimā), and learning kāj8 without the knowledge of others. She does her
work in secret for the fear of being chastised—an unusual fear for most women

5
Āmār jīban, 6.
6
Āmār jīban, 6, translation mine.
7
Āmār jīban, 6.
8
Work in general, and in this instance, household work.
 Conclusion 189

given that they were expected to take up domestic chores at a fairly young age,
but more justified in Rassundari’s case as a thoroughly pampered child. Once
she is found out, the women in the household laugh at her irrational fear, and the
author is proud to have secretly learned something useful. That she represents
parā (lessons, but also the infinitive form of “to read”) and kāj using the same
narrative pattern9 suggests that she draws on the natural fit between the latter
and the domestic space to incorporate the former into her life as well. She learns
her kāj in the same way that she learns her parā, secretly and on her own, fearing
discovery and censure, and in this, she brings together both parts of her world.
The connection between household work and reading is reinforced as
Rassundari narrates the first time she comes across a book. By this time, she is
married to an affluent man, Satinath Sarkar, and the mother to several children.
As in her paternal home, so also in her marital home, Rassundari describes the
process of learning to not only perform domestic duties, but also assume the
responsibility of running her household. Initially, she is spared the task of doing
anything by her mother-in-law who, according to the autobiography, treats her
like her own mother, shielding her from the pressures of domesticity. Once
Rassundari’s mother-in-law dies, however, the burden of running a sizeable
household falls entirely on her. Even if one leaves aside the focus on reading for
a moment here, one cannot help but be amazed at the detailed description of a
Bengali home provided in Āmār jīban. From waking up before dawn to cook
meals for the household deity, to looking after her husband’s needs, to tending
to the children and the many servants and dependents, the Bengali housewife
frequently has no time to eat, let alone time to read.10 At the same time as
Rassundari begins charting her increasing domestic duties, she reintroduces her
desire to read. She recounts the pressure of work being such that she had no
idea of the passage of time, and yet in the midst of this she reminds us that her
“desire to be educated so as to be able to read punthis became uncontrollable.”
The author rails against the fate of her gender being confined to an animal-like
state, so far removed from learning that even the sight of a piece of paper was
seen as “biruddha karma” or unnatural.11 To counter the unnaturalness of her
desire, Rassundari relies on divine protection again as she calls on god to teach
her how to read. During this time, she dreams of reading Caitanya Bhagabat, a

9
Āmār jīban, 15–17.
10
Such descriptions appear frequently in Āmār jīban, notably on pages 34–6 and 56.
11
Āmār jīban, 39.
190 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

hagiography of Chaitanya written in Bengali by Brindaban Das Thakur in 1535.12

Her dream overjoys her and as if by coincidence, she overhears her husband
instructing her oldest son Bipin that he was leaving his copy of the punthi in a
place from where she then manages to steal a page. She completes her collection
of texts by stealing a page from her son’s tāl pātā or manuscript on which he had
practiced the alphabet.13
This, then, is the first moment when we see Rassundari trying to read.
She begins by consoling herself that she must remember some elements of
the alphabet from her rote memorization days, but immediately follows this
assertion with a plea unto god who must take the responsibility of teaching her
because no one else will. The back and forth between human agency and divine
intervention positions reading as an act guided as much by human endeavor as
by divine agency. Her first instance of reading occurs not when she is awake but
rather in her dream, in what is ostensibly a vision, given that she chances upon
the same text soon after. The act of dream reading is a profoundly embodied one:
One day I dreamt while sleeping—that I was reading the book Caitanya Bhagabat.
On seeing this dream, I woke up. Then my mind and body were simultaneously
filled with a joy (ānandarase) … I kept thinking, how strange! I have never seen
this Caitanya Bhagabat book and I don’t even know it; nonetheless in the dream
I read that book. I don’t know how to read or write at all, and on top of that this
is an important (bhāri) book. That I could read this book is impossible. Anyway,
that I read this book in my dream filled me with gratitude.14

Reading, here, occurs as an act that is both real and unreal. She claims to be
pleased with reading it in her dream, which she takes to be a fact, but at the
same time, she admits to the impossibility of her reading the book outside the
dream. It is this moment of reading so secret as to be possible only in one’s
dream, coupled with the presence of the divine, that I take to be emblematic
of women practicing reading. As a householder, the only space available to
Rassundari where she can be truly outside the purview of social constraints
is either in her dreams or in her relationship with god. In Āmār jīban, she
brings both these spaces together to allow her access to not just a text but to
the act of reading itself. Divine sanction, both in the form of god answering her

12
The text is sacred to the Vaishnavas who, as members of a reformist Hindu sect worshipping Vishnu,
take Chaitanya as their spiritual leader.
13
Āmār jīban, 39–43.
14
Āmār jīban, 40–41, translation mine.
 Conclusion 191

prayers through her dream, and in the sacred nature of the text, legitimizes her
otherwise aberrant desire to read. As a woman striving to read in the nineteenth
century, Rassundari needs to remind her reader of not just force of her passions
but of their chastity as well.
Outside her dream, the other two spaces left for her where she can continue
to realize her ambition to become a reader are under her veil and beneath her
kitchen pantry. She takes a leaf out of her husband’s copy of the manuscript—
which she recognizes as being an old-fashioned punthi with a wooden spine—
but then becomes unsure of where to store this contraband object.15 She hides
it under her pantry, with the narrative reverting to her fear of reproach (katū
kathā) and discovery, and reminding the reader of her previous attempt at
learning to read as a child. When she finally presents herself as reading the page,
she does so in the guise of a heavily veiled housewife, holding the page in her
left hand under her veil while cooking with the other. At this point, she cannot
recognize the letters, so her act of reading is one of looking at the page without
comprehending the text. She begins to compare the punthi’s page with her son’s
tāl pātā—still under her veil, still while cooking—and gradually teaches herself
to make sense of the marks on the page. This is a scene of reading unique for
many reasons, not least of which is the window it opens into the world of the
housewife. What further interests me is the marriage the author effects between
learning to read and preparing meals for her family. The latter is a quotidian
task, one which she feels enchained by, while the former is both aspirational and
titillating in being outside the bounds of the permissible. The veil which isolates
her from others here becomes the refuge within which she can begin to decipher
letters, and she reads as she cooks. Reading, which is the domain of the educated
man, enters not only the domestic sphere of the woman, but the very intimate
space within her veil.
Rassundari thus instantiates a practice of reading that belongs exclusively
to the woman, while removing the man from even the position of the teacher
by according that role to her personal god. The men in her life are presented
as agents of god, helping her achieve a power that god has decided to give her.
Thus her husband coincidentally leaves a copy of Caitanya Bhagabat within her
reach, and her son’s tāl pātā is there for her taking. It is worth noting here that
she does not claim to want to read for a higher purpose; this is not a narrative

15
Āmār jīban, 42.
192 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

of self-improvement. The author continues to be frightened of censure and of

overstepping her social role even as she expresses her wish to become a reader.
Rassundari wants to read for the sake of learning to read, not because she
associates reading with a higher sense of self. That she develops as a person
is presented almost incidentally in the text, independent of her activities as
a reader. She does not shy away from remarking on the social condition of
women,16 but she positions reading as her own aspiration unconnected from
the narrative of the benefits of educating women. Having eventually taught
herself to read, she gathers around her a secret group of women to whom she
reads, always in a low voice, and always fearing the intrusion of others. In
describing this, she remarks on people both suggesting women should read,
and on those condemning it, but ultimately exclaims that all this discussion
made her terribly afraid, so she continued to read secretly.17 Once she reveals
to her sisters-in-law that she can read, they try to learn from her for a little
while, but are mostly content with letting her read to them.18 The emphasis for
her, then, is on being a reader as a reader; not as a social reformer, not even as
a tireless teacher of other women, but as an individual capable of discovering
the few loopholes within a housewife’s life wherein she can practice reading on
her own terms.
As the first Bengali autobiography, Āmār jīban occupies a significant space
in literary history. For the scholar of reading practices, Rassundari’s work is one
of the few texts documenting the entry of reading into the life of the average
Bengali woman, and into the inner chambers of the house via religious punthis.
In her description of how she learns to read we find traces of a practice of reading
unique to women across the nineteenth and a major portion of the twentieth
century. Mundane objects such as lids in the pantry, and the veil extending to
the woman’s chest leaving her free to look only at her own feet, become key
to fashioning oneself as reader, as the punthi gets secreted into these spaces in
disjointed parts. A page here, a pause while cooking there—Rassundari strings
her practice of reading onto these elements creating something that does not
aspire to be either perfect or whole but reflects instead the multifaceted and
creative existence led by women inside ordinary Bengali homes.

16
We find several examples of this in the text, in particular at the start of Chapter 6 before the narrator
begins to describe reading in her dream.
17
Āmār jīban, 56–7.
18
Ibid., 56–7.
 Conclusion 193

III. The Magic of Reading

Faizunnesa’s Rupjālāl tells the story of Prince Jalal and Rup Banu’s romance,
drawing on Hindu and Islamic fairy tales and folklore. The text, a combination of
verse and prose, mythologizes the author’s life, reimagining her as the chaste but
helpless woman at the mercy of the brave man frequently ensnared by monsters
and other women. The narrative brings together a wide array of genres, from the
novelistic to jārigān, as well as Faizunnesa’s knowledge of at least five languages,
including Persian, Urdu, Arabic, English, and Bengali. In narrating Jalal’s
adventures, Faizunnesa frequently relies on misra bhāśā or a language born of
mixing Persianate languages with Bengali, creating a text that is a repository of
all three reading practices—Sanskritist, Anglicist, and Perso-Arabic—discussed
in this book. Yet that is not the reason why I chose Rupjālāl to be the final text I
mention in my work. My interest lies in the brief preface Faizunnesa provides at
the start of Rupjālāl, giving her readers a brief autobiographical sketch through
which she explains her rationale for writing her text. It is this preface that I wish
to examine as a site of a reading practice exclusive to women in the nineteenth
century, and in order to do so, one needs to follow her direct addresses to
the reader.
The text begins with an invocation to Allah and his prophets, a convention
followed by jārigān as well, and like the jāri performers, Faizunnesa saves her
final set of thanks for her mentor or ustād Tazuddin Mian. She gives credit to
him for having taught her to be “patient, pious and wise” before begging the
reader’s indulgence, excusing “the ignorant mistakes of a novice.”19 From the
very opening of the narrative, then, the reader is invited to be a part of the
creative process, and to see its inner workings. Doing so allows Faizunnesa to
alert the reader to her unorthodox upbringing—as a Muslim woman, she is
an exception in having not only having access to education, but doing so via a
male tutor. Well before the narrative begins, it is already intimated to the reader
that Faizunnesa is not only a competent reader herself, having been taught by a
man, but also confident enough to assert her identity as an author. Thus as the
reader transitions to the author’s family history, they are primed to expect the
exceptional, and that is what Faizunnesa appears to initially deliver. She traces
her family back to the court of the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam, who ruled in

19
Rupjālāl, 42.
194 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Delhi from 1761 to 1805. During this time, her ancestor Agwan Khan is sent by
Shah Alam to Bengal where the former then establishes his household.
The royal connection foreshadows the narrative’s own engagement with
royalty even as it positions Faizunnesa as someone who would plausibly know
of the inner workings of a courtly family. Her own happy childhood under
parents who let her be tutored and play with friends continues to anticipate the
romance and its happy ending, but the author interrupts this positive depiction
of family life to abruptly transition to her own unhappy marital life. As soon as
this transition occurs, the reader is invoked once again as Faizunnesa exclaims,
“Now dear reader, listen to my sighs.”20 From being the distant audience
addressed at the end of the opening invocation, the reader is now placed as the
narrator’s confidante; they are no longer the judge who will forgive the novice
author’s mistakes, but rather a sympathetic entity whom Faizunnesa can call on
to narrate her troubles. These troubles arise because an older man, Mohammad
Gazi Chowdhury, becomes besotted with Faizunnesa when she is a mere child,
and offers to marry her. Mohammad Gazi’s proposal is rejected by Faizunessa’s
mother, leaving the man to suffer from a broken heart which even his first
marriage cannot cure. He returns once Faizunnesa is older and her father has
died leaving her mother as the sole guardian of both Faizunnesa and the estate.
The repeated proposal from Mohammad Gazi leads the mother to finally give
in and assent to their marriage, “easily overlook[ing]” her “doomed future” and
sacrificing her “in the name of marriage.”21 The sympathetic reader is made
aware of the mother’s failure—a trope which returns in the opening sections of
Rupjālāl when Jalal’s mother fails to find him a suitable bride—gradually moving
into the intimate space of Bengali family life and into the zenānā.22
Having invited the reader into a private conversation, the author pours her
heart out, asking the reader to “feel the pain [she] went through” when after a
few short years of being happily married, she has to endure losing her husband’s
affection.23 Faizunnesa blames her co-wife, Chowdhary’s first wife Nazmunnesa,
for conspiring to break her own marriage out of jealousy. As Faizunnesa
describes how Nazmunnesa effected this break, the reader is drawn into a world
in which black magic and the work of tāntrics24 can disrupt material reality

20
Ibid., 45.
21
Ibid., 45.
22
The women’s quarters.
23
Rupjālāl, 46.
24
Practitioners of esoteric Hindu rituals using chants or mantras.
 Conclusion 195

through spells and mantras. This is a place where the rational and the magical
cohabit in comfort, causing no dissonance to those called on to believe that a
marriage can be broken by casting spells from afar. As the author’s confidante,
the reader is assumed to share not just in the former’s pain and heartache, but
to also assent to this piece of information provided by here, that the marriage
was broken unnaturally by another woman. Within a few short paragraphs, we
have moved away from the world of Mughal emperors and the world of men in
general, to that of women, gossip, and a sharing of emotional trauma. This space
is reminiscent of the secret community to women to whom Rassundari reads
punthis in that it involves those matters deemed feminine by nineteenth-century
social norms. Both women position reading within concerns of raising children,
keeping one’s husband happy, and performing the task of a good housewife.
Rassundari steals moments within her happy domestic scene to learn to read,
while Faizunnesa has the misfortune of inviting the reader into her broken
home, but in either case, reading is aligned with the practice of sharing and
understanding a woman’s fate.
The intervention of the supernatural or the divine—and the two are frequently
conflated—is a necessary part of the domestic sphere as it is only through such
interruptions that the woman can find moments of escape from rigid social
expectations. While for Rassundari, god alone can help her learn to read and
have access to reading material, Faizunnesa needs to invoke the supernatural
to explain the reason behind the outrageous act of a woman not just reading
but writing a text and addressing the reader directly. Thus the reference to
black magic and tantra achieves a threefold purpose. The first is to incorporate
the reader into a space that is exclusively feminine in which this magic has a
material impact on the woman’s prospects of domestic bliss; the second is to
undergird the act of reading and writing by entities beyond human control
and thus outside even the scope of patriarchal regulations; and finally, to serve
as a bridge the preface and the narrative through magical spells and mantras
which acts as the conceptual foundation for both. Reading Rupjālāl, then,
happens as an act located in the inner quarters of the home, where women have
relative freedom to share their troubles with others of their gender, and to seek
supernatural explanations for such womanly events as heartbreaks and unloving
husbands. Invited into this space, the “dear readers” addressed by Faizunnesa
are made privy to stories that can only be shared within its intimacy, and as they
learn of the author’s sorrows, they also learn to read the tale of Rup and Jalal as
allegorical of her own life. To transmit the pain she feels, she offers the reader a
196 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

brief poem narrating her heartbreak and unhappiness at losing her husband to
another woman, asserting that the reader’s “heart will ache, and [the reader] will
shed some tears after reading the following poem.”25 The happy ending to Rup
and Jalal’s love story becomes Faizunnesa’s wishful projection of a closure denied
to her, which the reader now knows to read as such because they too have felt
the author’s pain.
The final section of the preface is the abovementioned poem in which the
author bemoans the fate of an abandoned wife, suggesting that black magic
turns her life into an unnatural one as she cannot be with her mate unlike “[a]ll
beasts and birds [who] have their mate/ to share the joys of nature.”26 Her final
confession to her reader is that her husband has made her “a miserable mother”
by taking with him their oldest daughter to live with his first wife.27 What one
is reading is no longer a justificatory piece but an expression of deep personal
grief which Faizunnesa can share with her reader having placed reading as a
domestic, womanly practice.
I should note that this intimate form of reading is far from the only one
advocated by her. Having reconciled herself to her family life, Faizunnesa goes
on to establish a school for Muslim girls in 1873 in Comilla where they are
taught in Bengali, so the education they are provided is tellingly not religious.28
She also enters into long discussions with the colonial government, going as far
as petitioning Queen Victoria to demand that she be awarded the title of Nawab
(an honorary title accorded to male zamindārs or landlords during the colonial
period) rather than the politically insignificant title of Begum which is what she
was granted originally.29 Faizunnesa wins her petition, becoming one of the very
few women to be accorded the title of Nawab and the concomitant prestige of
having her rule of her estate be officially recognized. Yet the practice of reading
instantiated in the preface to Rupjālāl is worlds away from these more public
forms of reading. It is familiar and personal, placing the reader in a position
of being both receptive to, and affectively affiliated with, the vulnerability

25
Rupjālāl, 46.
26
Ibid., 46.
27
Ibid., 47.
28
Woman, if at all educated, would have been taught the basics of Arabic, providing them with enough
literacy to be able to read the Qur’an. Thanawi’s Behishti zewar, for example, advocates for teaching
women only Arabic so that they can read religious texts alone. Given that most Islamic religious texts
such as the Qur’an and the Hadīth did not exist in Bengali translation till the end of the nineteenth
century, the choice of teaching students in Bengali suggests the desire to provide a secular rather
than a religious education.
29
For a detailed discussion of this event, see Fayeza S. Hasanat’s English translation of Rupjālāl (2009).
 Conclusion 197

Faizunnesa expresses. Like Rassundari, Faizunnesa also relies on the mundane

to achieve this relationship with her reader, but since she has the relative luxury
of not having to account for her own progress toward literacy, she can condense
it into a short preface, leaving both the reader and the author free to enter the
world of the story they have come together for.

IV. The Practice of Reading

I have been concerned in this book with practices of reading which occur within a
network of people and institutions, each entity seeking to define the relationship
between the individual and the text. In doing so, I have focused on what it means
to read, be a reader, and consume a genre as newly arrived in colonial Bengal
as the novel. My goal has been to highlight the many life worlds subtending
these practices while consciously avoiding the logic of the colonial as the site
of hybridity and multiplicity. Instead of celebrating difference, I have tried to
be attentive to the lived realities of the book market within which readers exist,
largely to demonstrate how aesthetic, linguistic, and religious affiliations create
points of reference for producers, distributors, and consumers of the novel. Each
chapter has sought to map the contours of particular practices of reading using
as guides the literary and non-literary material produced by those seeking to
define these practices.
The readings I have offered in this chapter are two examples of the real
conditions within which reading happened, conditions which the scholar has to
parse with and through the text. There is a certain irony in this—my only access
to nineteenth-century reading practices has been through the act of reading
material produced therein. But as I have made my way through this book’s
argument, I have found this irony to be a productive one; for one thing, it has
heightened my awareness of my own practices of reading and, along with it, it has
enabled me to question what it means to read literature. In my mode of analysis,
then, I have tried to suspend categories such as the literary, being literate, and
the reader of literature, to investigate instead reviews, critiques, opinions, and
literary history as sites struggling to produce and fix categories relevant to them.
The process has been necessarily circular, often messy, requiring me to revisit
the same set of texts with different questions, from the perspective of the various
dramatis personae in the book market. Yet this circularity has also revealed the
literary myopia inherent in any practice of reading which normalizes its own
198 The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

peculiar points of reference to the extent that all others are either made invisible
or incomprehensible. Thus the reading of literature performed by Rassundari in
which the divine is not just the procurer of texts but also of literacy requires the
twenty-first-century reader situated in the Anglo-American world to reorient
her perception of what it means to read, and to ask how the material and cultural
reality we live in impacts our experience of engaging with a text. The Novel in
Nineteenth-Century Bengal asks us to step away from the certainties we hold as
readers about reading, and to truly examine where these beliefs originate and
what they implicitly and explicitly require of readers.
In concluding with Rassundari and Faizunnesa, I have attempted to highlight
that reading is not a universal faculty, capable of being transported, even from
one domestic space to another. This is not to make a claim for radical relativism
but to prioritize the experiences of the reader as they begin to conceptualize the
shape of the verb “to read.” How these two women participate in their practices
of reading is representative of how other nineteenth-century Bengali readers
learned to read the novel—hesitatingly, looking over their shoulder for those
who would object, looking around for guides and mentors, and ultimately
making sense of it all using what they had around them.
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Smith, George. The Life of William Carey, D.D. Shoemaker and Missionary Professor of
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 Index

Abraham, Thomas 2 Ahmed, Moulvi Sirajuddin 76

adab 43 Aina-e-Sikander 76, 156
aesthetic structures of 156 Ajimuddin, Sheikh 149
Biśād Sindhu, reading practice 152–61 ākhyāyika 43, 122, 139–45
concept of 158–9, 167 ākhyāyikābarnita kāl 124
ethical and social implications of 167 alamkār (ornaments) 131, 144
informative and entertainment 161 al-Baghdadi, Abd al-Qadir ibn Umar,
Islamic classics 160 Khizānat al-adab wa-lubb lubāb
literariness of 158–9 lisān al-Arab (Library of Literature
literary examples 157 and the Door of the Heart of the
moral virtue of 162 Arab Language) 162
principle of 150 Ali, Rajab 77
in shaping Islamic culture 162–3 Allan, Michael 28, 29
technicalities of 159 almanacs 17, 24, 55, 91
as window to the world 161–71 Āmār kathā 33
ādālatī bhāśā 11 Ānandamath (The House of Bliss) 43, 120,
Adam, William 53–4, 92 122, 139, 142, 143
on practice of reading 54–6 Anāthinī 185
reading, memorizing, repeating andarmahal 14
formula 57 Anglicist reading practice 32, 37, 40–4,
Reports on Vernacular Education in 90–4, 96–9, 103–5
Bengal and Bihar 41, 52, 54–5, Anglo-centric education 96
57–8, 75 Anisujjaman 50 n.12
textbooks 55–8 Muslim-manas o bangla sahitya 51 n.14
translation of European works 58 Anjaria, Ulka 5 n.13
vernacular school books series 56 Ansari’s Mukhtasar fi adab assufiyya 158
Ādarinī 156 anti-novels 25
adīb 162, 163, 166, 167 Arabic bayt 178
Adventures of Amir Hamzah 18, 169 Arabic language 49–50
agricultural community 61, 64, 82, 182 Āryadarśan 108–9
Ahmad, Muhammad Reazuddin 75–81 Association of Publishers in India 1
Islām Pracārak 15 n.38, 78–81, 149 Avadh Punch 76
Sudhakar 149 azadari 171
Ahmad, Nazir 155–6, 164
Banat-an-nāsh (Daughters of the Bier) Bagal, Jogeshchandra 119
155 Bāhabā cōddō āiyin (Kudos to the
Mirat-al-arus (The Mirror of the Bride) fourteen laws) 19
24, 155, 156, 160 Banabhatta’s Kādambarī 110, 126
Taubā-an-nāsuh (The Repentence of Banat-an-nāsh (Daughters of the Bier)
Nasuh) 155, 164 155
Ahmad, Rafiuddin, The Bengal Muslims “Bande Mātaram” (“I bow to thee,
51 n.14 Motherland”) 142–4
 Index 213

Bandopadhyay, Bhabanicharan 17, 24, 68 Bengali language 7–10, 74

Kalikātā kamalālay 45–7 British intervention in 7–13
Bandopadhyay, Indranath, Kalpataru 25 and literary history 11
Bangabāsī press 15 n.38 manuscripts in 10–12
Bangabhāśār Lekhak 107 textbooks 12, 64–5
Bangabhāsi 83 transition to 49–52
Bangadarśan 53, 69, 83, 117, 148 Bengali literacy/literature 10–11, 13, 19,
“Banga o Bihār bijay” (“Conquering 23, 24, 47, 65–6, 71–3, 89, 92, 118,
Bengal and Bihar”) 81 148
“Banga o Bihār biśay” (“On the Subject of Bengali Muslims 48–53. See also Muslim
Bengal and Bihar”) 81 reader
Bangiya Mussalmān Sāhitya Samitī Muharram rituals 151
(Bengali Muslim Literary Society) Bengali novel/novelists 4, 5, 27, 87,
78 90, 119–20, 145–9, 166. See also
Bangiya Sahitya Parishat (the Bengal Durgeśnandinī (The Chieftain’s
Academy of Literature) 98 Daughter)
Bānglār pāthak parāna brata 72 national literature 6
Basak, Bhubanchandra 22 in nineteenth century 6, 185
Basak, Nilmani, Nabanāri nay nārir jīban reader 27, 88, 93, 96, 104 (see also
carit (Lives of Nine Women) 23 reading practice/readers)
Bashar, Abul 181 Bengali primer 12, 74–5
Basu, Jogendrachandra 15 n.38 Bengal Library Quarterly Report 1875 16
Model bhaginī (Model Sister) 25 Bengal Renaissance 12, 65, 74 n.77
Basu, Ram Ram 11 bhāb 33, 34–5
Līpimālā (Collection of Letters) 24 Bhadra, Gautam
Pratāpādityacaritra 23 Bāngāli pāthak ō tār bānglā boi parā
battalā publications 14–15, 15 n.38, 63, 65 65–6
n.47, 118, 119 Nyara battalāy jay k’bar? (How Often
access to rural Bengal 16 Does Nyara Go to the Battalā?) 118
Battle of Karbala tales 18 bhadralōk (gentleman) 13 n.35, 14, 18, 19,
Bengali reader and 15 25, 52, 63–5
book industry 63 bhasha texts 1, 153–4
Hindu and Muslim presses 17 Bhaskar press 63
Islamic works 18 Bhattacharya, Amitrasudan 118
languages 17, 19 Bhattacharya, Gangakishore 17–18, 47
and literacy growth 23 Bhattacharya, Tithi 18 n.52
naksās (sketches) 24 bhāva 34
paper quality 16, 19 bhrātribhāśā 155
reading practices 21 Bidyabhushan, Jogendranath 92
satires 18–20, 185 biraha 126
textbooks 22 Biśabṛksha (The Poison Tree) 33, 43,
trading 16, 17 109–10, 122, 137–8, 141, 142
Vidyāsundar 17–18 Biśād Sindhu (Ocean of Sorrows) 43, 82,
woman’s reading practice 23–5 84, 147–8
Battle of Plassey 6, 9, 10, 48, 160 concept of adab 152
bāul 178, 179 n.88, 183 didacticism 167
Bengali folk performances 173. See also Ejid badh parba of 152
jārigān jārigān performance and 148, 150,
Bengali Hindus 14, 48–52, 85 171–84
214 Index

Muharram parba of 152, 153 bankimī novels 14, 121

mukhabandha 151 Biśabṛksha (The Poison Tree) 33, 43,
narrative of 151–2 109–10, 122, 137–8, 141
practice of reading 149 152–3 and British pedagogical approach 53
public imagination 155 commitment to rasa aesthetics 122–3
qissā and dāstān 169–70 Durgeśnandinī 13, 32–3, 38, 41–3,
rasa, aesthetic principles of 153 67 n.54, 87–94, 115
reading as performance 150–1 encoding future events 141–2
Sanskritist reading practices 15. Kapalkundalā 33, 109
self-identified Islamic Bengali novel Kṝśnacaritra (The Life of Krishna) 24,
149 102, 120
source texts of 173–4 “Lalita,purākalik galpo, tathā mānas”
Uddhar parba of 152, 170 106, 119 n.8
upakramanika 152 model reader 123–34
book(s) Mrinālinī 33
market 2, 48 as novel reader 88–90
usage of 45–6, 67–8 novels and essays 115–16
boyati 178 pāthak’s perception of 128–9
Bramho Samaj 92 Rajmohan’s Wife 119, 145–6
Bramho woman 25 rasa in prose 128–34
British intervention in Bengali language on reading and culture 64–75
7–13, 52 revolutionary politics 143
British novel readers 94–6, 102–3, 119, Sahaj Racanāśikkhā (An Easy Guide to
145–6 Composition) 74–5
British pedagogical approach 53–62. See sahṛdaya pāthak 134–8
also Adam, William Sanskrit as lived experience novels
Brouillette, Sarah 28, 29 117–23
Burra Bazar Family Literary Club 95 and Sanskrit pundits 105–13
Byron, Lord, Complete Poetical Works 74 as Scott of Bengal 89, 94–105
use of verse 140–2
Caitanya Bhagabat (The Life of Chaitanya) uses rhyming ideophones
23, 189–90 (dhyanātmakśabda) 133–4
Calcutta Gazette 16 n.39 works and modern Bengali literature
Calcutta Public Library 95 118
Calcutta Review 153, 157 writing for sahṛdaya pāthak 134
Calcutta School Book Society 21 Chattopadhyay, Purnachandra 88
Carey, William 9–12, 10 n.24 “Bankimcandra o Dinabandhu”
charit (life narratives) 23 (“Bankimchandra and
Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra 4, 6, 21 Dinabandhu”) 87
n.60, 25–6 n.78, 53–4, 87, 150 Durgeśnandinī review 87, 106
Akshaychandra’s criticism of Bankim’s Cheah, Pheng, What Is a World 28
prose 106–8, 111, 112 cheap popular presses 13 n.35, 14–16, 118.
Ānandamath (The House of Bliss) 43, See also battalā publications
120, 122, 139, 142, 143 Chowdhury, Ali 78
“A Popular Literature for Bengal” Collins, Wilkie
69–70, 73 “The Unknown Public” 19 n.54
Bangadarśan 15 n.38, 69, 117, 120, “Unknown Public” 96
154 Colonial Library series 115
 Index 215

colonial pedagogical policies 52, 104, 119, Anglicist 90–4

121 Aurobindo’s review of 103–4
commercial publication 3, 6, 7 financial and literary success 88
compounding words (samās) 144 Kalinath’s review of 100–2
cookbook, Pākrājeśwar 63 of modern Bengali literature 123–6
Coombe, George 13 national identity, representation of
couplets 178 97–8
Rameshchandra’s review of 98–100
Daly, Barbara Metcalf 159 rasa aesthetics 122
Dames, Nicholas, The Physiology of the reading practice 87–9
Novel 26 n.80 Sanskrit grammar 107–8
Dasi, Binodini 33–4, 186 Sanskritist reader 105–13
dāstān (Persian) 169 Sanskritized Bengali 144–5
Dāstān-e-amir Hamzah (Adventures of Scott’s Ivanhoe and 97–9
Amir Hamzah) 18, 169 śṛngāra rasa in 123, 127–30, 142
Datta, Kalinath 100–2 Western influence in 100, 105
Datta, Michael Madhusudan 103 Duti bilās 24
Datta, Rameshchandra 98 Dutta, Akshay Kumar, Cārupāth 13,
review of Durgeśnandinī 99–100 13 n.34
Debi Chaudhurāni 139 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 119 n.7
Debi, Kailasbashini, Hindu mahilāganer Śarmiśthā 33
hinabasthā (The Lowly State of
Hindu Women) 185–6 East India Company 6–9, 50, 52, 160
Debi, Rassundari education
Āmār jīban (My Life) 44, 186, 187 agricultural community 61
autobiography 187–90 debate over 57
on girl child’s fear 188 Indigenous Books 59–60
parā and kāj 189 native institutions 54–6
process of learning 188 print text books 55–8
reading practice 188–91 prison curriculum 60–1
religious punthis 192 reading practice 54
Debi, Thakomoni, Anāthinī 185 schooling systems 53–5
De, Durgadas 32 vernacular education in Bengal
Miss Bino Bibi. B.A. Honour in a 61–2
Course 35, 185 The Education Gazette 148, 152 n.14, 153
Derasulla, Mohammad 17 Ekei bale pole 19
Dhananjayan, V. P. 128 English Education Act of 1835 22, 49, 50
didacticism 167 English language
dissemination of Christianity 9, 12 literacy 4 n.10
Drain-er pāncālī (Song of the drain) 19 readers 95
dramatis personae 25 transition to 49–52
Dubrow, Jennifer 51 European printer-publishers 7
Cosmopolitan Dreams 26 n.80
Dunham, Mary Frances 178 Faizullah, Sheikh, “Jaynaber Cautisā” 172,
durbyabahār (bad behavior of readers/ 174, 175
subscribers) 79 Faizunnesa, Nawab 149
Durgeśnandinī (The Chieftain’s Daughter) 87 Federation of Indian Publishers 1
as ākhyāyikā 139 fictional works 94–6, 99, 115, 140–1
216 Index

filter down education 53, 72 literary celebrities 63–4

folktales 148, 175 n.78, 178 literary merit 69–70
Fort William College 7–13 literary revolution 66–7
Bengali text book 14, 49 print texts 63
funds, publication 6, 22 reading practice 64–5
future events, encoding of 141–2 Hindu nationalism 6
Hindu newspapers 79
Gada,Yusuf, Tuhfa i nasaih 158 Hindustani Press 11, 17
Gagging Act 77 Hitakarī 78–9, 81–4, 154, 156
Gāji Miyār Bastāni 182, 183 Hossain, Mir Mosharraf 4
Ghosal, Ashutosh 16 Basantakumārī 157
Ghosh, Anindita 18 n.52 Bengali Muslim writing novels 149
Power in Print 26 n.80 Biśād Sindhu 43, 82, 84, 147–8
Ghosh, Aurobindo 90, 102–4 Gāji Miyār Bostāni 157
Ghosh, Girishchandra 32–5 Hitakarī 78–9, 81–4, 154, 156, 182
Ghosh, Kashiprasad 91 Mirat-al-arus 158
Ghosh, Kshetramohan, Kākbhuśundir Musalmani bhasha 154
kāhinī 24 Ratnabati 30–1, 35, 153, 156
Gilchrist, John 11 reading practice 149–50
Gītgōvinda 73, 126, 144–5 Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat, Sultana’s
Gō jīban (Life of Cows) 170 Dream 149
Gopalchandra De of Puran Prakash Press Hussain, Golam 149
16 hussainiya 151
government funds 22 Hutam. See Singha, Kaliprasanna
Grāmbārtāprakāśikā (Publisher of Rural
News) 31, 182–3 Ibn Battuta 161–2
Gray, Louis H. 130–1 Ibn Juazzy 161–2
Gunanidhi, Narayan Chattaraj, Imperial Library (National Library of
Kalikutuhal 24 India) 115
Gupta, Abhijit 5 n.12, 6 n.15, 7 indexical of literary 28
Gupta, Iswar 70, 71 n.67 Indian book market 2, 48
Gyanratnākar Press 22 Indian nationalism 142, 143
Indian vernacular languages 1 n.1
Hachette India 2 India Today 1
Hadith 151 Indigenous Books 59–60, 62
hagiographic texts 23 indigenous presses 7
Halder, Radhabinod, Pās karā māg Islamic Bengali 14, 16, 17, 43
(Educated Woman) 25 Islamic rule 7, 8
harmful books 163 Islamic tales 175 n.78
Hastings, Warren 10 Islam Pracārak 78–81, 149
Hemlatā-Ratikanta 118 itihās 140
Hindu- and Muslim-run newspapers 75–6 Ivanhoe 90, 96–8, 100
Hindu Bengalis. See Bengali Hindus
Hindu epics 64 Jamidar Darpan (A Mirror Held to the
The Hindu Intelligencer 91 Landlords) 153
Hindu intelligentsia’s critique 62 jārigān 43
Bengali primer 74–5 azadari 171
British-inspired institutions and 64 and bāul 179 n.88, 183
good reading, pleasure/worship 68 Bengali folk performances 173
 Index 217

and Biśād Sindhu 171–84 languages 7, 9–10. See also specific

folk music performance 148, 150 languages
jāri performers/singer 178 debate over 52
jāri text 172, 173 lower/upper class 14
marsiya/nauha poetry form of 173 Lavandier, J. 11
pak panjatan 150 Leavis, Q. D. 96
pāncālī form of 173 Lewes, G. H. 133
reading as performance 150–1 libraries 95, 115
Śahidnāmār jāri 179 literary history 4, 6, 13–15, 42, 89, 92, 93,
Jārijungnāmā 174, 175 118, 197
punthi of 182 literary language 4 n.10, 7, 108, 114, 167
jāri performers/singer 178 literary reading. See reading practice
jāri text 172, 173 literary revolution 66–7
Jasimuddin 178 literature’s power 28
Jayadeva’s Gītgōvinda 73, 126, 144–5 Long, James 41, 52, 62
Jaynaber Cautisā 172, 174, 175 A Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali
Jones, William 10 Works Containing a Classified
Joshi, Priya 7, 94–6 List of Fourteen Hundred Bengali
Books and Pamphlets, Which Have
Kalidasa Issued from the Press during the
Abhijyanaśankuntalam 110, 121 Last Sixty Years, with Occasional
Śakuntalā 135 Notices of the Subjects, the Price,
Kalikātā kamalālay 24 and Where Printed 3, 3 nn.8–9, 7,
Kaminīkumār 118 62–3
Kangal Harinath 31. See Majumdar, Quarterly Reports 17, 18
Harinath Returns 15, 17, 18
kanyālābha/kanyāharana 140 lower/upper class languages 14
karuna (compassionate) rasa 154 low rhymes 19
Kashifi, Husain Waiz, Maqtal Rawzat al-
Shuhada 148 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Minute on
kathā 43, 122, 139–45 Indian Education 11
Kaviraj, Sudipta 118 Macmillan 115
kāvya (poetry) 117, 139 madhyabartinī bhāśā 107
Kāvyalamkāra (The Ornaments of Poetry) madrasās 50, 55
139–40 Mahāriśī Prabhu Hajrat 170
Kerāni purān 47 Mahfouz,Naguib, Palace of Desire 29
Khan, Maryam Wasif 51 Mahmud, Heyat 182
Who Is a Muslim 26 n.80 Jārijungnama 150, 174, 179
Khan, Muhammad, Maqtul Husayn 148 Mahmud, Sufi pir Heyat, Jungnāmā 172
Khan, Shamsuddin 77 Majumdar, Harinath 31, 182, 183
Khatun, Faizunnesa Malatī-mādhava 110, 112
biography of 193–5 mangal kābyas 17, 41
jārigān 193 manuscripts 10–12, 45. See also punthis
mentor (ustād) 193 marginalization 48
on misra bhāśā 193 Marshman, John 9–11
reading practices 193, 195–7 mātribhāśā 155
Rupjālāl 44, 149, 186, 193–6 Meredith, George, The Egoist 103
kirtan 141–2 middle-class intelligentsia 79
Kṝśnacaritra 120 milan 126
218 Index

Mirat-al-arus (The Mirror of the Bride) Nobhel nāyikā 20

155, 156, 160 novels. See also Bengali novel/novelists
Mirza Ghalib, Gul-e-Raana 76 libraries 95
misrabhāśā (mixed language) 175 n.78, reading 88–9, 96–7
176 writing 4 n.10
Mission Press 6–13, 49
Mitra, Pyarichand 71 obscene literature 65, 67, 70–3
Ālāler gharer dulāl 118 online reading 2
modern Bengali 7–9, 7n.17, 12–14, 41
n.116, 72 Paine, Tom, Age of Reason 74
Mohammadi Press 17 Pākrājeśwar 63
Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English palm-leaf manuscript. See punthis
Dictionary 128 pāncālī 20
moral ramifications 23 pandit/guru mahāśay 55
Mouat, Frederic J. 60 pan-Indian reading community 80
Muharram rituals 151 panjikās 24. See also almanacs
Muir, William 155 Pare, Bireshwar, Adbhut swapna bā strī
Mukhopadhyay, Bhudeb 154 purusher dwanda (A Strange Dream
Mukhopadhyay, Rajiblochan, or a Battle between the Sexes) 25
Mahārāj Kriśnacandra Rāyasya pathapustak/hetochorā 19
Caritram (The Life of Maharaja pāthśālās 22, 55, 64, 68
Krishnachandra Ray) 23 paurānik kāhinī 17
munshis 12 n.32 Permanent Settlement of Bengal 50
Musalmani bangla (Islamic Bengali) 14, Persian language 8, 14, 17, 22, 37, 49
16, 17, 153–4 Perso-Arabic reading practice 37, 40–4,
Musalmani katha 154 149, 152, 153, 158, 180, 183–4
Muslim Bengalis. See Bengali Muslims pleasure/worship, good reading 68
Muslim intelligentsia 47, 48, 51, 78 poetry, composition of 139–40
Muslim presses 17 Portuguese missionaries 8–9
Muslim reader 75–85. See also tabula rasa Postal Act of 1854 16
pōurānik 33
Nababābu bilās 24 Prabadh candrikā 66
Nababibi bilās 24 Pradip 101
Nabaīiban 65 prahaśan 18, 19. See also satires
Nabhel nāyikā (The Novel Heroine) 4, 135, Press and Registration of Books Act of
185 1867 16 n.39
naksās (sketches) 24 Price, Leah, What We Talk about When
nātak-nabel (plays, novels) 139 We Talk about Books 26 n.80
native institutions 54–6 Print Areas 6 n.15
Nātyaśastra 33, 126–9 printed books 46, 62–3
Nawab Faizunnesa 186 arrival of 6–7
newspapers 75–6 battalā publications 14–16, 63
Nielsen India Book Market Report: in Bengali language 7–12
Understanding the India Book Bengali readers and 13–14
Market 1–3 college and press 7–14
nineteenth-century Bengal, British commercial publication 6, 7
colonial rule 3 dissemination of Christianity 9, 12
N.L. Shil’s press 22 East India Company 6–9
 Index 219

Portuguese missionaries 8–9 battalā presses and 15, 21

technology 7 Bengali Muslims 43, 51–3
textbooks 55–6 Bengali novel and 4–6, 27
printing press 31–2, 62–3 Biśād Sindhu (Ocean of Sorrows) 149
prison curriculum 60–1 book trade 32
Prophet Mohammad 170–1 British colonial rule and 3
prose 23, 24, 138 British novel 94–6
ākhyāyika 43, 122, 139–45 concept and method of 27, 29, 32,
Bengali 66, 71, 103–8 47–8, 51–2
forms of Sanskrit 114, 139 dramatizing the novel 32–4
as inferior art form 139 Durgeśnandinī novel and 87–90
kathā 43, 122, 139–45 intelligentsia’s 64–5
poetic composition of 139–40 literary reading 29–30, 68–70
writing 140 magic of 193–7
publishing industry 1–3, 6, 76 nineteenth-century readers 26–7
punthis (manuscripts) 17, 18, 45, 47, 69, paper quality and 16, 19, 31
148, 174 n.77 Perso-Arabic 37, 40–4
punthi sāhitya 175, 175 n.78 pleasure/worship, good reading 68
Puruś parikkhā 66 postcolonial novel 36
printing press and 31–2
Qabusnāmā (Mirrors for Princes) 159 rasik pāthak 134, 135
qissā (Arabic) 169 Rassundari’s reading practice 187–92
Qissā-e Gul-e bakavali 18 readers experiment/investigation 28,
Qissā-e Hātim Tāi 18 36
qissās and dāstāns 18 reviewer identities 30–1
Qur’an 49, 50, 151, 175, 196 n.28 Sanskritist 37, 40–4
social and gender categories 38
Rahasya Sandarbha 153, 156 symptomatic reading 40
Rahmani Press 17 twenty-first-century reader 31
Ramāyana and Mahābhārat 17, 18, 64, 109 UNESCO and world literature 28
rasas 110, 117, 120 n.9, 122, 126–34 women readers 44
Bande Mātaram 143 realism 5 n.13, 13
bankimī style of 144 Reynolds, G. W. M. 96
of kathā 141 rhyming ideophones (dhyanātmakśabda)
sahṛdaya and 134–8 133–4
rasik pāthak 122–5, 133–5 Ricci, Ronit 160
rasik sahṛdaya (empathetic) 134 Rihla (Travels) 161
Ray, Bharatchandra 49 romantic fiction 140, 141
Annadāmangal 5 n.12, 17, 66–8, Royal Asiatic Society 10
109–10 Roy, Rammohan 11, 12
reading practice/readers 2, 13–14, 15, Roy, Tapti, Print and Publishing in
25–6, 26 n.79, 27 n.81, 54, 197–8. Colonial Bengal 7 n.17
See also Durgeśnandinī, reading Rupjālāl 149
practice; Muslim reader
as adīb 162 sacred texts 47–8, 99, 151
Anglicist 37, 40–4 Sādhāranī 65, 106, 148
animating theory 30 sādhu bhāśā 11
bad readers 47, 53–62, 68 sahānubhūti 72–3
220 Index

Śahidnāmār jāri 179–80 Hutam Pyāncār Nakśā (Sketches by

Sāhitya 107 Hutam, the Owl) 24, 71, 118
sahṛdaya pāthak 134–8 singular knowledge system 38
samās 144 Śiśubōdhak 22
Sambad Prabhākar 70 Śiśusebadhi Barnamālā 22
Sāmya 120 śiśu (child) textbooks 22
Sanskrit 8, 11, 13, 17, 31, 37 sketches. See naksās (sketches)
Bengali and 117–19 Smith, George 11
compounding words (samās) 144 social aspiration 22
as lived experience 117–23 Sōmprakāś 156
poetic composition 139 Sripantha 24
prose narratives 139–45 Battalā 118
word meanings 117 sṝngāra (erotic) rasa 43, 110, 122, 123,
Sanskritic/Sanskritized Bengali 51, 138–45 126–31, 140
Sanskritist reading practice/readers 32, 37, sthayibhāva 127, 136
40–4, 89–94, 146 Stone, setta 29
Āryadarśan show 108–9 street books 19
Durgeśnandinī and 105–8 Subandhu’s Vasavadatta 126, 130–1,
Sanskrit Press 15 n.38, 22, 66–7 139
Sanyasis (ascetics) 143 Subramani, Vijaya 135
sarasa vastu 140 Sudhākar 75–7, 149
Saraswati Bandana 55 Sufi pirs 151
Sarkar, Akshaychandra 91, 150 Sufism 159, 172 n.69
criticism of Bankim’s prose 106–8, 111, Sultan ul Akhbar 77
112 sundar (beautiful) 128–31
“Pitā-putra” (“Father-Son”) 65–8 Sundarkānda 131
śāstras 17
satires 4, 16–20, 18 n.52, 24, 35 tabula rasa 9, 78
Saxena, Akshya Vernacular English 5 n.14 Tagore, Debendranath 15 n.38
schooling systems 53–5 Tagore, Rabindranath
Scott of Bengal, Bankim 89, 94–105 Bankim Prasanga (On the Subject of
Scott, Walter 13 Bankim) 122 n.17
Ivanhoe 90, 96–8, 100 prose experiments 42, 72 n.69
Sensation novel 133 “Viswa sahitya” (“World Literature”)
Sen, Sukumar 18 n.49 104 n.45
Bānglā sāhityer itihās (The History of tangled genealogy 37–8
Bengali Literature) 118 Tarkaratna, Tarashankar, Kādambari 67,
Battalār chapa o chabi (The Prints and 129–31, 139
Images of Battalā) 118 tatsama/tadbhāva 145
shādhāran (average) Bengali reader 52 Tatwabodhinī Patrikā 92
Sharashar, Ratan Nath, Fasana-e Azad 76 Tatwaboōdhinī Press 15 n.38, 22
Shaw, Graham 7 Taubā-an-nāsuh (The Repentence of
Shil, Benimadhav, “grihinir guide” 24 Nasuh) 155
Shirazi, Shaykh Mushrif al-Din, Gulistān textbooks 11–13, 21–2
(Rose Garden) 167 Adam’s 55–8
Siddiqi, Shamsuddin Mohammad, Uchit battalā publications 22
Sraban 149 Bengali language 12, 64–5
Sikdar, Ayen Ali 149 printed books 55–6
Singha, Kaliprasanna 14, 71 William’s 55–8
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Thakur, Brindaban Das, Caitanya vernacular school books series 56

Bhagabat 189–90 verse compositions 139–42
thākurmā’r galpa (grandmother’s tales) Victorian novels 95–7, 100, 115, 118
156 Victorian texts 5
Thakur, Tekchand 71 Victoria Press 16
Ālāler Gharer Dulāl (The Pampered Vidyalankar, Mrityunjay 12
Brat) 71 Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra
Thanawi, Maulana Ashraf Ali Barnaparicay 12, 13, 13 n.34
Bahishti zewar (Heavenly Ornaments) Caritābali (Collection of Lives) 23
24, 163–4, 186 editorial interventions 66–8
Thomason, James 59–60 Vidyāsundar/Kālikāmangal 7 n.17, 16–17,
trading 8, 16 19, 67
Treveleyan, Charles 92, 111 vir (heroic) rasa 154
On the Education of the People of India
111 Walker’s experiments on prison
on learning languages 112 curriculum 60–1
Ward, William 9
ucchvāsas (pauses) 140, 141 Warwick Research Collective (WreC) 28
Unitarian Press 11 Wednesday Review 98, 100
upakramanikā 164 Wellesley, Richard 10
Urdu literature 155–6 women readers 23–5, 35, 44, 185–6
Urdu-Persian literary community 81 education and restrictions 186
lack of community 187
Vaishnava poems of Vidyāpati 41 practice reading 187
Vasavadatta 126, 130 social treatises 186
vernacular education 22, 54, 60–2 Tagore family, women of 186
vernacular languages 1 n.1
Vernacular Literature Society 91 yellow pages 17
Vernacular Press Act 77 Young Bengal 74
vernacular presses 3 n.9, 12–13 Young Bengal Khudra Nabab 46
of battalā 15, 21 Yusuf-Zuleikhā 18
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