Creating Indian And British Selves: Life-Writing And Colonial Relations, 1794-1826

Abstract

This dissertation examines literary self-representations by authors who occupied various roles within the Anglo-Indian relationship of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In scholarship that examines the effect of colonialism on individuals’ subjectivities, critics often argue that colonizers and the colonized alike depict themselves as experiencing a fragmentation of the self. I argue, by contrast, that the early stages of Company rule produced specific social and political dynamics that led authors from a variety of backgrounds to represent themselves not as fractured literary characters but instead as consistent though nevertheless complex ones. This circumstance enables the authors I discuss to represent themselves as achieving limited but nevertheless real opportunities for self-determination within the imperial context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this era, the British East India Company gained political power in India. The early stages of this process, under the leadership of Warren Hastings, championed knowledge production as a means for cultivating asymmetrical, mutually constitutive relations among Indians and Britons. However, British attitudes toward India became increasingly restrictive as the nineteenth century progressed. As a result of these historical circumstances, the authors I examine view life-writing as a form that grants them–to varying degrees–opportunities to exert agency. My dissertation centers on four texts that exemplify a variety of literary genres and modes. These works include Dean Mahomet’s The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India (1817), and John Borthwick Gilchrist’s The Orienti-Occidental Tuitionary Pioneer to Literary Pursuits (1826). In putting these works in conversation with each other, I demonstrate that the creative drive to represent the self unites various literary forms. Mahomet and Fay engage with the discourse of travel, Hamilton deploys satirical techniques, and Gilchrist details his philological project for an audience of Company officials. The works I examine each depict their author’s experiences and subjectivity whether or not they announce themselves as autobiographies. In analyzing the selves that Mahomet, Hamilton, Fay, and Gilchrist present, I draw on postcolonial theory and South Asian studies. Engaging with these disciplines enables me to emphasize the distinctiveness of the selves that the authors I discuss construct within their specific colonial and historical contexts. This dissertation charts the gradual strengthening of colonial hierarchies as the nineteenth century progresses. Depicting the earliest stages of the Company’s transition from a mercantile to a governing body, Mahomet insists that his insider’s perspective on India has the potential to strengthen Anglo-Indian ties. Comparably, Hamilton believes that the field of knowledge production may produce mutual understanding among Indians and Britons. Eliza Fay, by contrast, demonstrates the emergence of high imperialist attitudes by projecting largely negative views on Indian people and culture. While Gilchrist joins Hamilton in promoting scholarship on India, he also amplifies the sense of increasing social stratification that Fay details. He promotes the study of Indian languages for the purpose of securing British dominance in India. By examining these authors together, I demonstrate that they represent the Anglo-Indian relationship as becoming more rigid and constraining between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.