The Novel Market: The Commoditization of Indian Culture by Novelists

Abstract

The novel in the eighteenth century was still an emerging literary mode of lowbrow cultural status in comparison to classics or verse. Yet, between 1780 and 1823, a steady rise in prestige for the novel and the novelist occurred, and a shift took place with the sentimental genre being displaced by the gothic as the dominant genre. This transition had implications for the way the subcontinent was portrayed. While previous authors retreated from direct criticism of colonial governance and played out their dislocation from their texts in the very form their narratives adopted, later metropolitan novelists were less shamefaced about critiquing colonial policy, often tackling it head-on. Moreover, while authors in the late eighteenth century saw India within a universalistic framework, assimilating it into a travelogue and equating colonial Calcutta with metropolitan London, nineteenth-century authors were more prone to seeing India and its inhabitants as the culturally “other,” or the transgressive and darker side of the European self.