New Project: Literature of Colonial South Asia

I've been working on a new project, and it seems time to announce it publicly for a kind of soft-launch. Last summer, I was fortunate to work with a graduate student collaborator, Srishti Raj, on a project on Adivasi Writers. This summer, I've been working with another student, Sana Asifriyaz, on a project called Literature of Colonial South Asia. (Both projects were supported by internal English department grants that allowed the student to be paid a small stipend while working on the project.)

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.) 

The Heart of the Collection: Tagore's Short Stories. In some ways, the heart of the current collection might be Tagore's short stories. Putting together this collection of nearly 50 short stories in translation started out as what we were calling a "mini-project," but soon became something bigger. Only around 35 or so of Tagore's nearly 100 published short stories could be found in translations that were out of copyright. Others were available in some form in old magazines like The Modern Review. And a few we decided to translate ourselves using Generative AI (while comparing the versions created by the LLM against published translations by translators like Carolyn Brown or William Radice). The tag system we developed to show the relationships between these stories became a kind of "ontology" that shaped our thinking about other texts on the site. (See the Tag Cloud and Network Visualization here.)

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: As mentioned, here we tried as much as possible to ground the 'ontology' of the tag system we developed for this project in writings by South Asian writers, not so much Kipling and his peers. If you center writers like Kipling and B.M. Croker in your account of colonial South Asia, you have a sense of Indian life dominated by summers in the Hill Stations, lots of big-game hunting ("Shikar"), and occasional encounters with Indians in service roles ("Syce," "Mahout," "Khitmutgar," "Ayah," etc.). On the other hand, if you center the experience of writers like Tagore or Pandita Ramabai, you get a very different picture -- and you might make different choices regarding site architecture, conceptual and thematic categories, and so on. 

For example, both Western writers 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.) Again, see the Tag cloud and network visualization to get a sense of how our ontology shaped up in developing this project. 

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. 

Notes on MLA 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has already put up some stories about MLA 2013, including this article covering the growing attention payed to "Alt Ac" (Alternative academia) career tracks, and this one focusing on the general theme for the conference, "Avenues of Access," which was explored by the MLA's President, Michael Berube in his address, as well as in numerous presidential forums interspersed throughout the conference that focused on facets of "Access" broadly construed. (The panels on that theme were on everything from "Open Access" journals, to questions of access and diversity in the Digital Humanities, to disability studies.)

I would recommend the above Chronicle links (not paywalled, I don't think) for anyone looking for a general sense of the MLA this year. (Update: or check out this link at Inside Higher Ed, on the MLA's Big [Digital] Tent.)

Below are my own particular notes on the panels that I ended up attending, starting with the one I organized. My goal in writing these notes is not to "opinionate" about the papers or evaluate them, but rather to simply give some thumbnail sketches, and maybe offer up a link or two for people interested in these topics who weren't able to attend. The notes and links are also, needless to say, for myself -- there's lots of "further reading" for me to do in the links and references below.

In general, I attended three "Digital Humanities" panels, two panels related to South Asian literature, one panel on modern Anglo-Irish literature, a panel on "Public Poetry," and a panel on Modern British Literature and the State. I also branched out a bit from my core interests and saw a panel on 19th century American literature ("Secularism's Technologies"), which featured both Michael Warner and Amy Hollywood -- two scholars I admire -- talking about secularism.

Click on "Read More" to read my notes on the panels I attended.

"I Wanna Be Like You": The Jungle Book, Revisited

Being a parent gives you a chance to go back over the children's stories you grew up with and even, in some cases, learn about new ones. The following post consists of somewhat scattered thoughts on "The Jungle Book," including a 1967 Disney animated film version, as well as Kipling's original book.

I did not grow up with Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" -- either adaptations or the original story -- but my son has really gotten attached to the 1967 Disney animated film version of the story, and it's gotten me interested in both it and Kipling himself.

The biggest attraction for us initially were the great jazz/swing songs that were made for this particular version: Bare Necessities, Colonel Hathi, and I Wanna Be Like You (with the great Louis Prima on vocals).

My wife grew up in India, watching Indian television, and she says she has fond memories of the Hindi animated version of "The Jungle Book," which you can also see on YouTube here. It's a cartoon serial meant for kids, which means the story kind of branches off on its own. Still, it made me curious: do readers know whether Kipling's "The Jungle Book" is popular in South Asian languages? Are there readers who grew up in South Asia hearing the Kipling stories about Mowgli, Bagheera, Bhalu, Shere Khan, etc.? (Or, growing up abroad, did your parents tell you these stories in a "desi" context?)

I somehow didn't know about the Disney songs growing up, and it's too bad, because both my son and myself are now thoroughly addicted to them. Looking at the music a bit critically, I was earlier a little put off by "I wanna be like you," where I initially thought the singer was Louis Armstrong. The idea of a monkey-king, who liberally throws around African-American slang, kidnapping the "man cub," in order to learn the secret of being human, seemed a little uncomfortably like an allegory of race relations in the real world:

Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, man-cub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

Oh, oobee doo
I wanna be like you
I wanna walk like you
Talk like you, too
You'll see it's true
An ape like me
Can learn to be human too

It's hard not to think of the analogous human race-mimicry situation: "I wanna be like you/ I wanna walk like you/ Talk like you, too" could be the voice of an under-class minority asking the "man" for access to privileges (here, embodied in the technology of "man's red flower," fire) that make him supreme over the rest of society. It's a little better that the singer is Italian-American rather than African-American, but there's still a slightly off-putting race angle here if you're looking for it. (I'm sure some readers will think I'm reading too much into this.)

Also, just to be clear, I still play this music for my kid all the time, and have no qualms about doing so. I also don't mind that "The Jungle Book" is a good excuse to teach him a few Hindi words: Bagheera, Akela, Shere, Bhalu, Hathi, Bandar, etc. As I riff on the stories with my son, I'm also trying to sneak in some new ones, which Kipling doesn't use: Gainda (rhinoceros), Bheriya (wolf), Magar-much (crocodile).

Some of the race stuff, of course, comes directly from Kipling's other writing. As people who know his other works are already aware, Kipling was obsessed with race (this is the guy who invented the term, "white man's burden," among many other things). He was born in India and spent his first few years there, before being sent to England for boarding school, as was the norm in late Victorian British India. Though he hated his experience in boarding school, he still always thought of England as "home" -- and strongly supported the British Imperial project in India.

As a young man, Kipling returned to India to work as a journalist, and lived mainly with his family in Lahore. He published his first short stories (mainly on the Anglo-Indian community in India) in the newspaper he wrote for, and frequently used material related to his journalism work as fodder. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the principal of the art school in Lahore for many years, as well as the curator of the Lahore Museum (Lockwood Kipling is the model for the museum curator in the opening chapters of Kim, incidentally). Some part of Rudyard's interest in animals in India -- which would later nourish one of the best-selling children's books of all time -- probably came directly from his father, who drew and wrote about India's animal life himself in a beautifully-illustrated early book, called "Beast and Man in India". (And Rudyard Kipling's original published version of "The Jungle Book" has great illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling.)

Kipling's own The Jungle Book is a little different in structure from the Disney adaptation of his story. For one thing, the Disney version only uses material from the first three chapters of Kipling's book; "The White Seal," "Servants of the Queen," and "Rikki-tikki-tavi" go in different directions. "The White Seal," for instance, isn't even based on an Indian jungle, but rather involves seals in a northern ocean.

Even in the "Mowgli" chapters, there is a big difference in the fact that, in Kipling's story, Mowgli actually meets his mother and lives in the human village for a time, before being excommunicated because of his ability to talk to wolves ("Tiger-Tiger"). Disney doesn't get into this potentially dark situation (i.e., the boy being forced to separate from his mother by a mob of angry villagers who are ready to stone him to death), and rather chooses to end with just a hint of Mowgli's repatriation into human society and inevitable future adulthood preoccupations -- as he ogles a village girl getting water from the river.

There are other differences too. Kipling's story is more unabashedly violent, and the most dramatic story arc in Kipling's version in my reading is the battle against the monkey-people, which ends with hundreds of dead monkeys. The killing of Shere Khan via a strategically arranged stampede of cattle in Kipling is somewhat anti-climactic by comparison to the stormy fight sequence between Bhalu and Shere Khan in the Disney film.

In Kipling, the society of the Jungle has several different respectable species who adhere to the "Law," including Bagheera the panther, the wolves, Kaa the snake, Balu the bear, and Chil the kite. Shere Khan, the Tiger, behaves a little like an Oriental despot, whom the other people of the Jungle are right to want to depose.

By contrast to the animals who follow the law, the Monkey-people ("Bandar-Log") are sociologically anarchic:

"Listen, man-cub," said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. "I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log till today?"

"No," said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now Baloo had finished.

"The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads."

He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches; and they could hear coughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.

"The Monkey-People are forbidden," said Baloo, "forbidden to the Jungle-People. Remember."

"Forbidden," said Bagheera, "but I still think Baloo should have warned thee against them."

"I—I? How was I to guess he would play with such dirt. The Monkey People! Faugh!"

Because they have no social hierarchy, no memory, and above all, no "law," the other animals treat them as "outcasts" (loaded choice of terms!). The Bandar-log themselves treat the other animals with contempt. (I don't see an obvious "race" angle here, incidentally, though it does seem like there is a rationale for Imperialism: the people who follow the Law are justified in either excluding or attacking those who do not.)

When the Bandar-Log kidnap Mowgli, they take him, interestingly, to an abandoned, formerly human-occupied city in the middle of the jungle. Their reasons for kidnapping him are given as follows:

They never meant to do any more—the Bandar-log never mean anything at all; but one of them invented what seemed to him a brilliant idea, and he told all the others that Mowgli would be a useful person to keep in the tribe, because he could weave sticks together for protection from the wind; so, if they caught him, they could make him teach them. Of course Mowgli, as a woodcutter's child, inherited all sorts of instincts, and used to make little huts of fallen branches without thinking how he came to do it. The Monkey-People, watching in the trees, considered his play most wonderful. This time, they said, they were really going to have a leader and become the wisest people in the jungle—so wise that everyone else would notice and envy them. Therefore they followed Baloo and Bagheera and Mowgli through the jungle very quietly till it was time for the midday nap, and Mowgli, who was very much ashamed of himself, slept between the Panther and the Bear, resolving to have no more to do with the Monkey People.

The motivation parallels, roughly, the "I wanna be like you" song in the Disney version of "The Jungle Book," except here the focus is not so much on the "Red Flower" of fire, but on adopting Mowgli as a king who would bring "civilization" to the Bandar-Log.

(It's hard not to think of Hanuman and the monkey-warriors of the Ramayana when reading Kipling's description of the "Bandar-Log." In the Ramayana, of course, they are loyal servants of Rama and brave warriors; in Kipling they also seem to have anthropomorphic qualities, but have none of the positive attributes one sees in the Hindu epic.)