Mediating Indian Literature in the Age of Empire: Blackwood’s and Orientalism

Abstract

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s ambitions to shape public opinion in the political arena and to voice a distinctively Edinburgh-based regional critique of British letters were underpinned by its consciousness of the spectacular growth of empire in India during the period of its emergence. Commenting on ‘The East India Question’ in Blackwood’s, in the context of the impending renewal of the East India Company’s charter in 1833, Archibald Alison held up for general admiration the imperial achievements of the EIC: ‘The British empire in India forms, beyond all question, the most extraordinary spectacle which the political world ever exhibited’.¹ However, the scale of this empire, and the odds against which it had been acquired, he commented with asperity, were not fully appreciated by the public. Comparing Britain with imperial Rome, it became clear that whereas Rome had secured its empire through massive military engagement over three centuries of growth, Britain had not only vanquished a far more extensive and opulent dominion, but that this vast empire had been acquired ‘in less than eighty years, at the distance of 8000 miles from the parent state... by a Company of British Merchants, originally settled as obscure traffickers on the shores of Hindostan’. Citing an impressive array of statistics, Alison goes on to observe that, despite this staggering achievement, all too often the British public was uninterested in the development of its empire ‘with which we are too familiar to be able to apprehend the wonder, and which must be viewed by mankind, simplified by distance, and gilded by the colours of history, before its due proportions can be understood’ (776).