This is a rather different kind of project -- several years ago, I had already assembled a text corpus with some of these materials as a plain text folder on Google Drive. It seemed like something someone might need, though I myself didn't do very much with the corpus, and I didn't hear back from many scholars who appeared to be using it.
The present collection takes the basic idea of that corpus -- a collection of materials from the colonial period that includes both South Asian writers and Western writers who lived in India -- and presents it in a way that I hope will make the value of collecting these materials in this way a little clearer.
Some of the things we have been doing as we've been creating plain text versions of primary texts on the site include creating pages that focus on the following topics:
- Indian Writers in the West During the Colonial Period (1794-1947)
- South Asian Women Writers from the colonial era
- Fiction by Western Women in British India
- Writers associated with the Bengal Renaissance (and an overview of some key themes of the Bengal Renaissance)
- A collection of Rabindranath Tagore's short stories in translation
- Writers who responded to the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion (or Sepoy Mutiny)
- Writings dealing with interracial romance and the multiracial Anglo-Indian community
- Writers who described illness (cholera, malaria, etc.) and famine under the British Raj
- Writers who described emerging social movements and anti-colonial politics
- Indian Revolutionaries in the U.S.: The Ghadar Party and the Young India Movement
- Detailed summaries of select texts collected on this site.
The idea of these various pages was to enable unpacking of the different constituencies in the collection. However, as with other Scalar projects I've worked on, one can also use thematic and contextual tags to see links and connections that might not typically be visible. (For instance, the "Calcutta" tag is connected to a number of texts by Tagore and other Bengal Renaissance writers, but also texts by Western writers in India like Edward Money, W.D. Arnold, and Sara Jeannette Duncan.)
Classroom use: I would hope that the pages listed above might be helpful to folks in the classroom. For instance, I could imagine a really effective unit in classes on writing by women that could use the "South Asian Women Writers" collection as a starting point for students. Similarly, I could imagine a really profitable exploration of Tagore's writings through his short stories (which are world-class -- and generally underappreciated in Tagore's body of work).
Some of the materials on the site are admittedly carried over from previous projects (such as The Kiplings and India, and The Collected Writings of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio).
Centering South Asian perspectives: However, here we tried as much as possible to make the 'ontology' of the tag system we developed for the new site be based in writings by the South Asian writers, not so much Kipling and his peers. So both Kipling and Tagore wrote "Indian ghost stories" that are included on the site, but Tagore also has a category of stories that invoke something I call "ghostly reincarnation," where a deceased loved one related to the protagonist reappears in ghostly form -- slightly different than a conventional Western ghost story... (Though admittedly, Kipling does have at least one story that fits that tag.)
Decentering Kipling/Interracial romance: Even within the body of texts by Western writers in India, there are certain advantages to decentering Kipling. For example, Kipling was famously dismissive of interracial romance and uninterested in mixed-race ("Eurasian") communities in India; if you just read Kipling, you would think that was the generally prevalent view of all British colonials in India. However, if you center women who were his peers in many respects -- writers like Maud Diver, F.E. Penny, and B.M. Croker -- you see a pretty extensive array of texts that explore interracial romance and mixed-race characters in interesting ways.
Decentering Kipling/Interracial romance: Even within the body of texts by Western writers in India, there are certain advantages to decentering Kipling. For example, Kipling was famously dismissive of interracial romance and uninterested in mixed-race ("Eurasian") communities in India; if you just read Kipling, you would think that was the generally prevalent view of all British colonials in India. However, if you center women who were his peers in many respects -- writers like Maud Diver, F.E. Penny, and B.M. Croker -- you see a pretty extensive array of texts that explore interracial romance and mixed-race characters in interesting ways.
Summaries and the Great Unread: The summaries also seemed like an important innovation, especially for researchers looking for a way into new materials and authors. There is a pretty vast "great unread" of material from this period, whether it's the novels of F.E. Penny and B.M. Croker or Indian writers like Peary Chand Mitra or Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay). The summaries we developed, sometimes using help from NotebookLM (Gemini Notebook), might help researchers get a sense of some of these texts before diving in to read them in toto. (The tags and the pages listed above might also help readers find constellations of texts on certain topics of interest.)
There is more to come with this project -- for instance, I have some quantitative comparisons I want to work on -- but for now I just wanted to let people know the project is there & available to use.