7

Cosmopolitan Exchanges

Scenes of Colonial and Postcolonial Reading

ELLEKE BOEHMER

This essay contends that scenes of reading staged within the postcolonial novel connect with practices of reading that colonial newspapers encouraged. These scenes and practices both call up ideas of cosmopolitan exchange, and at once appeal to and investigate transnational and cosmopolitan values. Turning to colonial India in particular, I suggest that late nineteenth-century Anglophone Indians were shaped as cosmopolitan travelers by their initial social formation in Indian cities, in particular by their colonial education and by their newspaper reading. They wrote and they read as self-conscious Westerners, in much the same way as the reading characters we find in postcolonial novels such as by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) or Manju Kapur (India) read as Westerners also.

Research I have undertaken on colonial newspaper reading has shown that readers in colonial contexts, broadly conceived, for example in British India, generally saw themselves as forming part of an international reading public.1 In other words, they were intercultural travelers even before they themselves set out traveling. They were encouraged in this approach by the forms and mode of colonial journalism, which tended to address itself to readerships at once at home and abroad, and so bolstered colonial readers’ sense of their world citizenship. The same two levels of reading activity, and of self-perception, located at once at home and abroad, can be distinguished in the postcolonial novel.

Whereas colonial reading is generally seen as ideological, controlled, and regulated—we might think of Thomas Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian Education” (1835)—it is often assumed that postcolonial reading is subversive. My question here is to what extent this was so, and relatedly, whether colonial reading was not a great deal more uneven and layered than it is given credit for?2 Colonial reading often produced a sense of proximity and fellow feeling, in a situation where hierarchical separation was part of everyday life, whereas scenes of reading in the postcolonial novel identify strongly across cultural and national borders, but at the same time assert a difference from local communities and contexts.

Writing in all forms, not forgetting journalism, allowed colonial Indians, especially those who were migrants, not merely to articulate their experiences of migration but also to give these journeys imaginative shape.3 Journals and letters home, the more retrospective forms of the travelogue and the memoir, but also the colonial newspaper, provided effective forms through which colonial travelers, including from India, could reflect on the modern imperial world that they themselves were making and remaking in the process of moving through it. For instance, the linear and denotative forms of the travelogue allowed Indian migrants to plot familiar day-to-day patterns within unfamiliar spaces.4

The newpaper and the periodical, too, provided the colonial migrant imagination with the interpretative tools through which to make sense of the pell-mell and cosmopolitan contingencies of their experience, especially given the stark juxtapositions of geographies and social worlds their layout made possible wherever in the world they were published.5 Therefore if, as Benedict Anderson contends, the world was conceptualized, reconceptualized, and consumed on a daily basis by way of the nineteenth-century newspaper’s format and its mass production, this was something that happened not only in London or New York, but in Bombay and Calcutta too.6

Equipped with these powerful ways of imagining the modern world, late nineteenth-century Indian travelers, when they reached the imperial metropolis, inevitably read its public spaces through a standardized vocabulary of everyday city life acquired as part of their experience in India, which included their newspaper reading. And though London was generally seen to be far larger and more crowded than their home cities, it was still the case that the features these travelers singled out for comment, had already been formalized as codes of a global city life drawn from what they knew of urban India, or from what Partha Mitter calls their “virtual cosmopolitan” know-how.

Importantly, therefore, late nineteenth-century colonial travelers, in encountering the capital of the modern world, did not tend to see themselves as secondary or belated in relation to it. Rather they mapped and decoded the city’s streets with reference to a ready-made index of preexisting images, geographical coordinates, and spatial terms acquired as part of a colonial education and from the pages of colonial newspapers. Urban dwellers themselves, citizens of Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore, or Delhi, self-consciously modern inhabitants of a rapidly expanding imperial world, they met the world’s largest metropolis on relatively equal terms, even while conceding that its bustle, traffic, and sheer scale were matched nowhere else on the planet.7 Far from being unintelligible, London to these colonial travelers was not only cosmopolitan but comprehensible and readable in its cosmopolitanism.8 Like Calcutta or Delhi, as Partha Mitter again writes, London was a hybrid cosmopolis that operated as a crucible for lateral modernist and global formations.9

The replication of an urban imaginary through print technology and through cosmopolitan reading, is persuasively illustrated in the example offered by the relatively unknown yet for all that representative provincial paper, the Indian Mirror, the weekly journal of the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj.10 Like the later Modern Review (1907), the Calcutta monthly associated with Bengal’s modernist art movement, the Indian Mirror was broadly liberal, nationalist, and reformist, much concerned with the measure of “Indian loyalty to the Crown.” Its four-page broadsheet featured short reports on foreign news (often relating to India, such as Irish Home Rule developments) and civic notices (concerning temporary closures of the Hooghly Bridge, for example), alongside reviews of local cultural events: a performance of the Mahasheta at the Opera House, for instance, where “a well-written English synopsis of the piece” was “placed into the hands of those who could not follow it in the original.” As in other metropolitan as well as regional newspapers of the day, these notices and reviews were juxtaposed with advertisements concentrated in the side columns and on the back page. Some of the ads interestingly featured businesses (publishers, opticians) with outlets in London and Bombay as well as Calcutta. So Lawrence and Mayo opticians, who advertised their “perfect pebble” spectacles in the Indian Mirror’s pages, boasted offices at 1A Old Bond Street in London, Rampart Row, Bombay, and 3–4 Hare Street, Calcutta.11

Thinking of virtual cosmopolitanism, perhaps the most interesting articles in the 1886 Indian Mirror were its almost daily reports on the Government of India’s Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, which highlighted both insignificant and important features and events. The detail lavished on, for example, a description of the installation of the display cases, or an address by the Prince of Wales, created a striking effect of close yet transnational focus, certainly when compared to the same paper’s far briefer, broad-brush reports on Calcutta-based events. From the point of view of the Indian Mirror (or indeed of other Indian regional newspapers, such as the Bombay Gazette), it was as if the Exhibition were taking place not thousands of miles away, but in a parallel world proximate to Calcutta.

As this suggests, the imperial communications networks that sustained colonial newspapers created so dynamic a connectivity between the empire’s cities that, in local readers’ imaginations at least, the colonial periphery could be regarded as less distant from the metropolis than the latter’s elevated status implied. Within these lively networks, Indian tourists writing on the Exhibition in London might overnight convert their travel notes into newspaper columns for Calcutta or Colombo newspapers (and subsequently into guidebooks for later travelers), and Thomas Cook and Sons set out to reinforce existing intercultural links by arranging regular tours from India to the Exhibition via the Suez Canal.

Within the “mirror” worlds of the Indian Mirror, therefore, the India being staged abroad could be placed cheek-by-jowl with the India being lived at home, within the time frame of a single day. The interconnected narrative world implied in the repackaged and juxtaposed reports found no gap between these different cosmopolitan Indias, just as the London-based newspapers too were conjuring into being an increasingly globalized world through intercutting stories from the colonies with reports on Britain.

The serial generation of modern meanings in the newspaper, therefore, far from moving outward from the single source of the metropolis, is more accurately described as a two-way or even multidirectional process.12 As Indian migrants moved across the world and mingled with strangers—as did other modern travelers—their relatively stable local and regional identities and belief systems brought over from home were thrown into new, unpredictable, and quintessentially cosmopolitan mixes. In interpreting these experiences, it could not but be helpful that processes of confronting and then convening a heterogeneous world were encapsulated in the very pages of the newspapers and periodicals which they consumed, and to which some contributed.13 Through their engagement with these pages, Indian newspaper readers became involved participants in, as well as observers of, Britain’s public culture. The situation represents an interesting expansion of Benedict Anderson’s largely monadic model of newspaper reading as nation making, where the primary reference is to the metropolitan reading population.

Turning now to the postcolonial novel, I would want to propose that the scene of reading often conjured within its pages (especially in the case of the Bildungsroman), retraces but also exceeds the pell-mell heterogeneous worlds called up on the pages of the colonial newspaper. The represented scene of reading in the novel could therefore be seen as world making, that is, as assuming the existence of cosmopolitan readers, or a cosmopolitan reading public, and so as forging transnational links. Drawing on the work of K. Anthony Appiah, by cosmopolitan readers and reading here I refer to the democratic consumption of texts from across cultural boundaries, and to the processes of identification that such reading encourages. Such processes are facilitated, however, by the values and also the structures that a colonial education lays down.

In Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, the scene in which the character Nyasha reads D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and then has her book confiscated by her father, is justly celebrated in postcolonial literary studies as a resistant postcolonial act which is thwarted by conservative authority in the form of her father (75, 81, 83). By choosing to read Lawrence’s once banned book, Nyasha is kicking against her own culturally mixed identity (78) and her and her parents’ Anglicization (74), as symbolized also in their bedclothes and rose-patterned tea set. Yet elsewhere in the novel, and certainly when it comes to the more compliant and grateful Tambu, reading, though it involves socially subversive choices, is safely circumscribed by the Anglophone syllabus of children’s and young women’s reading. Taking in the colonial newspaper alongside Blyton, the Brontës, and Alcott as she does (33, 93, 117), Tambu’s obedient reading backlights Nyasha’s. Neither young woman in fact reads as anything other than a Westerner and a would-be or virtual cosmopolitan, identifying cross-culturally and straddling different “English” cultural worlds, while at the same time increasingly cutting themselves off from their immediate family and local context.

As to Kapur’s Difficult Daughters, central to this generational novel of Indian coming into being is the protracted and often painful relationship of an English teacher, called the Professor, and his student Virmati. The one reads for pleasure, and returns to India from his education in England with a trunk full of English books, “bringing as much of England as he could” (33). The other reads to improve herself, to seek a vocation rather than take her mother’s route of marriage and childbirth.

In many ways, reading draws the couple together and cements their relationship. The Professor teaches Virmati about Shakespeare and English poetry; she admires his ambition and his devotion to his books, his Keats and Alfred Austin. At the same time, however, their investments in reading are quite divergent. He reads in a purposeless way, as part of his quest for “the beautiful.” She reads to educate herself, so that she may be useful as a teacher outside of marriage. Both read in order to find their own ideal self-image projected back at them, an image to which they then mutually hope their lover will correspond. But though both modes of reading are profoundly egotistical and parochial, they both also involve assuming the existence of a community of like-minded Western-educated people, readers of English literature, in which the lover figure will be centrally involved.

Reading characters within these in many ways representative postcolonial Anglophone novels by Dangarembga and Kapur make an appeal to a shared cultural and literary repertoire, much as readers of colonial newspapers related to a common vocabulary of cultural and geographical reference points. The reading public to which the writers of these novels appeal, therefore, is necessarily always across the border and so in principle cosmopolitan, just as the public “called out” by the colonial newspaper was intercultural, urbane, and globally informed—or, in short, cosmopolitan. The scene of reading in both cases refers beyond national borders and as such becomes an important form of cosmopolitan self-consolidation and identity making.

NOTES

  1  Elleke Boehmer, Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), especially chapters 2 and 3.

  2  See, most recently, Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Francesca Orsini, ed., The History of the Book in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2013); Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia, India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006); Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty, eds., Founts of Knowledge (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2015); Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty, Moveable Type (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008); Swapan Chakravorty and Abhijit Gupta, Print Areas: Book History in India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).

  3  Boehmer, Indian Arrivals.

  4  Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (London: Faber, 1987); Mary Louise Pratt, Under Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). See also J. M. Coetzee, White Writing (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  5  See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1993), chapter 1, in particular in this context his discussion of Martin Delany’s identity as formed through a “process of movement and mediation.”

  6  See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991); and his The Spectre of Comparisons (London: Verso, 1998).

  7  See Sumit Sarkar, “Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past,” in V. C. Joshi, ed., Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1975), 63.

  8  Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism (London: Reaktion, 2009), in particular 10–11, 229. Indian cities, Mitter writes, were dynamic sites where Western capital and the forces of global modernity most forcefully impacted on the subcontinent, and where, in consequence, fruitful interactions between near and far, global and local, the Western avant-garde and home-grown anticolonialists, took place. Bombay, in particular, was from its outset a cosmopolitan even more than an imperial city, its early settlement in the late 1660s having involved different diasporic communities seeking commercial opportunities, not least Gujerati Parsis, the Malabari community, and Baghdadi Jews such as the Sassoon family. Bombay’s Sarasenic Gothic architecture, for example, drew influences from several different cultural sources, most prominently the Mughal Empire and the Victorian neo-Gothic. See also Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (New York: Vintage, 2015), 60–61.

  9  See Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

10  The following commentary is based on the 1886 copies of the Indian Mirror held in the Asutosh Collection, National Library of India, Kolkata, read in March 2009. Brahmo Samaj-leaning, the Indian Mirror was at the time of the 1911 Durbar still going strong, at which point Satyendra Nath Sen, subeditor from 1886, became chief editor.

11  The May 4, 1886 issue carried an advertisement for Thacker, Spink and Co., now perhaps better known as the publishers of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in India. See Josephine McDonagh, “Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette,” Victorian Studies 55. 3 (Spring 2013): 399–424.

12  RozinaVisram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002) lays particular emphasis on the relative multiplicity and diversity of early Indian presences in Britain, and Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) on the many contingencies through which their cultural identities were shaped.

13  See Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, eds., Creating an Imperial Commons: Books that Shaped the Modern British Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).