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. The version we put online is not just a corpus anymore; it's also now a kind of Anthology (with editorial commentary and context) as well as a Digital Archive.
Some of the work we have been doing as we've been creating plain text versions of primary texts on the site include creating contextual introductions 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 is to enable unpacking of the different constituencies in the collection. 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, who also lived in or wrote about Calcutta in their works.)