In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India

In Another Country is a cultural history of the consumption and production of the English novel in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. In a work of stunning archival recovery and interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi illuminates the cultural work performed by two kinds of English novels in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers and writers, empire and nation, consumption and production, this book vividly explores a process by which first readers and then writers of the English novel indigenized the once imperial form and put it to their own uses. Asking what Indian readers chose to read and why, Joshi shows how these readers transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. By subsequently analysing the eventual rise of the English novel in India, she further demonstrates how Indian novelists, from Krupa Satthianadhan to Salman Rushdie, took an alien form in an alien language and used it to address local needs. Taken together in this manner, reading and writing reveal the complex ways in which culture is continually translated and transformed in a colonial and postcolonial context. This insightful volume will be valuable to scholars of literature and cultural studies.