Forced bloom: Narrative and empire in colonial Bengal

This study concerns the appropriation and transformation of English aesthetic and historiographic forms by the native intelligentsia of colonial Bengal. Bengal is widely believed to have been the site from which modern Indian cultural production originated during the so-called "Bengal Renaissance" (1830-1900), a cultural movement deeply influenced by European ideas and forms of expression. Through an examination of English social and economic theory of the nineteenth century (including a detailed reading of educational documents), wide reading in literary histories and the literary monuments of the "Renaissance," a neo-Marxist and post-structuralist methodology is employed to define the function of English ideology and the unpredictable responses to it made by the colonial subject. The first chapter traces the conditions for the introduction and dissemination of English ideology in the colony through the offices of the English East India Company, including both the non-discursive practices (economics and land-reform) and ideological apparatuses (language and educational policy) through which ideology operates. Chapter Two concerns the Bengali appropriation of a unique mode of discourse, literary historiography, which attempts to explain the English influence in relation to traditional native forms of literature and history. Four modes of literary history are examined, which form a comprehensive picture of the practice of the genre from the early nationalist period (1870s) to the most contemporary examples of Subaltern Studies and post-structuralist irony. The third chapter discusses literary production generally in the three major figures of the "Renaissance": Michael Madhusudan Datta, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore. It is found that though Bengali cultural production owes a significant debt to the European influence, it is a unique and distinctive appropriation of European systems which often violates the norms and standards of European taste in politically enabling ways.