S. C. Sanial was a prolific chronicler, preoccupied with a single subject: histories of Indian journalism.Footnote ¹ For four decades, marrying content to format, he published serially in the subcontinent’s monthly and quarterly magazines. Sanial’s earliest account dates to the 1895 “Dr. Sambhu Chandra Mukherjee” in National Magazine, an essay he expanded into the six-part “Story of an Indian Journalist” in the Journal of the Moslem Institute between 1905 and 1907. Sanial’s last essay, “The First Persian Newspaper in India,” appeared in 1934 in Islamic Culture. In between he published on Robert Knight, newsagents, press surveillance, and newspapers of the “later Moghul period” in periodicals as wide-ranging as Calcutta Review, Muslim Review, and Hindustan Review. Footnote ² Sanial’s twelve-part “History of Journalism in India” in the Calcutta Review between 1907 and 1911 is his most sustained project, a feat of sleuthing undertaken in the face of colonial policies that blocked access to archives. Though journalism seems to have been his subject, he made forays into Mughal architecture (Fatehpur Sikri, Itimad-ud-Daulah’s tomb), British subjects (William Jones, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Christmas), and, in an early publication, historiography. Aside from “What Should Be the Aims of a Historian”? (Indian Magazine and Review, 1896), Sanial does history rather than theorizes it.

Sanial is largely unintelligible to Victorian studies. His oeuvre lies at the edge of several axes Victorianists tussle over: dates, geographic reach, methods, genres. Jacob Romanow’s and Emily Steinlight’s essays take up these questions from the institutional origins of Victorian Studies in 1957 to efforts to lengthen, widen, undiscipline, presentize—my coinage for “strategic presentism”Footnote ³—or, in Romanow’s proposition, provincialize the field. Self-reflection is the name of the game, and both Romanow and Steinlight are insightful, erudite, and generous in their analyses of pushes and pulls within the field.Footnote ⁴ This essay is in conversation with them; its purpose is not to rehearse or repudiate their interventions but to ask related questions, in some cases amplifying, in others extending, in yet others highlighting what they—and our famously capacious fieldFootnote ⁵—remain impervious to. But first, cards on the table: though I avoid Victorian and cognates, I am a card-carrying Victorianist: many of the conferences I attend, journals I publish in, and service I render—I am currently president of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals—tend to have V in their names.

The goal of these two essays and of the myriad reflections of the field is to ask, Can the ills of Victorian studies be fixed? Underneath it lies the ur-question, What is Victorian studies? Debates of the last quarter century have been preoccupied with dates and geography—the long and the wide, as it were. Should Victorian studies be bounded by 1837–1901 (Victoria’s reign)? 1832–1914 (the First Reform Bill to World War I)? 1829–1922 (Thomas Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times” to the independence of twenty-six counties of Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony)? Should the “Victorian” start be pushed back to 1807 when the abolition of the slave trade unleashed a century of “civilizing missions”? to 1798 when Lyrical Ballads appeared? Why not 1789? Or 1776 when the thirteen settler colonies declared independence? If the date debate has been if not settled then at least set aside in favor of a workaday “x plus or minus,”Footnote ⁶ what about geography? Should we remain within (shifting) national boundaries? Britain and its colonies? What about former colonies? informal colonies? The “Anglosphere” is a convenient shorthand for some of those colonies, but it leaves out protectorates or “spheres of influence” where British power was considerable if not deeply penetrative and the English language not widely adopted. Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie make a strong case for the need to “widen” but also warn that “[i]n our efforts at widening, we do not view the nineteenth century as a container of endless possibilities” (2). My answer to “What is Victorian studies?” bypasses these temporal and geographic debates to argue that Victorian studies is bounded and constrained by our routes to reading through the archives we craft. My focus here is on texts from outside the “small island.” Victorian studies’ turn toward such texts to address what Nasser Mufti calls the “demographic homogeneity of its canon” (410) has been belated and not without hiccups. In what follows, I offer some notes on how we read—or don’t read—such texts by taking up a corpus that remains outside the ambit of Victorian studies. In doing so, I draw on an alternative institutional history to Steinlight’s, paths marked but not taken.

The Bengali novelist, essayist, and editor Bankim Chandra Chatterjee—universally referred to as BankimFootnote ⁷—is credited with birthing the Bengali-language novel. Bankim (b. 1838) published some fifteen novels, hundreds of essays, and a Strauss-inspired (though hagiographic) life of Krishna; he was completing a commentary on the Bhagavat Gita when he died in 1894. Bankim also founded and edited several journals, including colonial Bengal’s vibrant monthly, Bangadarshan. His prodigious literary activity occurred in addition to his day job in the colonial government, first as a collector, then a deputy magistrate. Though he wrote his first novel in English, after 1864, this man who was fluent in Bangla, English, Persian, Greek, and Sanskrit, who read and was conversant in Continental philosophy, wrote almost all his subsequent works in Bangla.Footnote ⁸ Of these, none is more famous than Ānandamaṭh (1882), the galvanizing nationalist novel that includes the poem “Vande Mataram.” (Set to music by Rabindranath Tagore, “Vande Mataram” became independent India’s national song.) Even this bare outline of Bankim’s literary life would suggest that he be exhibit A in Victorian studies’ efforts to expand its “demographic homogeneity.” A colonial subject who indigenized a European form (the novelFootnote ⁹); who adopted and adapted serial forms of publication; and who is credited with creating an appetite for essays in history, science, aesthetics, and more in Bangadarshan,Footnote ¹⁰ Bankim would seem fertile ground for Victorianists. While excellent scholarship on Bankim is to be had—including works by Jashodhara Bagchi, Sudipta Kaviraj, Julius J. Lipner, and Priya Joshi (full disclosure: my sister)—all are South Asianists, none a Victorianist.Footnote ¹¹ In Victorian studies, Bankim has been largely ignored.Footnote ¹²

My purpose is not to castigate Victorianists for this neglect; it is to ask why somebody like Bankim has not attracted the attention of Victorian studies. Some of the reticence is likely linguistic: Bankim’s writings are largely in Bangla and there remains wariness about producing scholarship on works in translation.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, such scholarship is scarce, I venture, because although Bankim engaged with Britons and British ideas all his life, they were never the audience for his writings. For Victorians who consumed the literary output of colonials, his novels read as melodramatic, poorly plotted, preoccupied with obscure mores. And from the perspective of Victorian studies, Bankim’s writings, particularly from the late 1870s, are uncomfortably conservative with regard to gender, religion, and communal relations and are Hindu revivalist if not supremacist and possibly anti-Muslim.Footnote ¹⁴ Worse, Ānandamaṭh , despite its rousing call to arms to defend the motherland, is curiously procolonial. Victorian studies, particularly in its postcolonial guises, has preferred Britain’s colonized subjects to be anticolonial; Bankim’s procolonial, Aryan-inflected nationalism is a hard sell.Footnote ¹⁵

The desire for pristine colonial subjects is not unique to Victorian studies. In Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (2001), the historian Tanika Sarkar expresses “fatigue with certain radical interpretive schemes that remain motionless between the two grand and stagnant narratives of domination and resistance” (6). She rejects both the premise—“a crude binary framework: whether the local assented to or refused the structures of colonialism” (23)—and accounts in which “the consciousness of the colonised is divested of all claims to an autonomous life and made parasitic upon the master discourse of colonialism” (24). Colonialism, Sarkar insists, cannot be the key to unlock nineteenth-century India. Similarly, Sumit Sarkar, a core member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, started to feel—notably, in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition—a growing “disquiet” (4) with scholarship in which

Sumit Sarkar’s critiques of method and of the manufacturing of innocent colonized subjects are echoed by Aijaz Ahmad in his rejoinder to Fredric Jameson, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Considering Jameson a “comrade” (4) and himself in sync with Jameson’s call to open the canon to texts from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Ahmad is nevertheless deflated by Jameson’s bald declaration that “all third-world texts are necessarily … national allegories” (5–6). Jameson’s grand claim, Ahmad writes, could arise only from the US academy’s diversifying needs. Worse is its metropolitan selectivity: “only those texts which give us national allegories can be admitted as authentic texts of third-world literature” (12). Ahmad’s calling out the hammer that sees nails everywhere remains pertinent to a consideration of texts that Victorian studies takes up and those that remain inscrutable to it.

Contra Jameson’s selectivity—and with what Banerjee, Fong, and Michie refer to as “knowledge of the particular” (5)—Ahmad introduces an alternative and expansive archive, one invisible to Jameson and other metropolitan cherry pickers:

Ahmad’s and the Sarkars’ critiques of binaristic frameworks that churn out innocent colonized subjects both remain relevantFootnote ¹⁶ and offer a plausible clue to Victorian studies’ avoidance of figures like Bankim. With neither innocence nor resistance in his favor, Bankim remains too niche at best, a third rail at worst. (For those who are not South Asianists, the waters of Hindu majoritarianism are murky, deep, and best avoided for the safer shores of a colonizer-colonized binary.)

The second reason Bankim is neglected is because Victorian studies—and perhaps every field—is a bit like a narcissist: it cares about others only to the extent they reflect it. The remit of Victorian studies, whether in its postcolonial or transnational, cosmopolitan or transimperial, globalizing or widening guises, is nineteenth-century Britain. Banerjee, Fong, and Michie categorically reject “a metropolitan positionality,” yet the metaphors they deploy for their alternative are telling: “to configure frameworks for studying texts, events, and places that are not funneled through British initiative” (3), or “Our efforts to widen the nineteenth century work precisely to lateralize the British point of view or experience, to situate it as one alongside and adjacent to other cultural moments and experiences …” (5), or “we use the frame of the nineteenth century to establish a coevality between Britain and its colonies, rather than view the colonies as ex-centric in relation to Britain” (23n10). As “funnel,” “alongside,” “coevality” suggest, while the thing called “Britain” may not be the center, Victorian studies requires it to remain in the picture. We may strenuously object to a metropolitan gaze, but the metropole, like Edward Rochester at the close of Jane Eyre, remains only dimmed in Victorian studies.

In “Victorian Studies and Decolonization,” Mufti fumes that “scandalous has been the field’s complete avoidance of the Subaltern Studies Collective” (405), though the group’s founder “Ranajit Guha has even published on Charles Dickens but remains obscure to the field” (415n1). Guha does take up Dickens’s Sketches by Boz in a 2008 essay, but it would be an exaggeration to say that he has “published on Charles Dickens.” Guha’s essay is about a volume of satiric sketches of urban life, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, by Kaliprasanna Sinha, that appeared in Calcutta in 1861. Dickens surfaces because Guha surmises that Sinha was alluding to the Englishman’s 1836 volume. An exemplary scholar, Guha discusses Boz briefly (mainly by way of J. Hillis Miller and Raymond Williams). While I am in alignment with Mufti’s indignation about the neglect of Subaltern studies, what he elides is central to my argument here: Guha does not approach Dickens—never mind Sinha—as a Victorianist. Dickens is not “coeval” to Guha’s analysis of Hootum; Dickens is, to use an old-fashioned term, merely backdrop. (Romanov might consider Dickens provincialized by Guha, but I prefer the more subsidiary “backdrop.”) For Sinha in nineteenth-century Calcutta and for Guha in the twenty-first-century academy, neither Britain nor Victorian studies is the frame of reference or the audience. The same could be said of C. L. R. James and other anticolonial thinkers who in Mufti’s brilliant reading “never had a problem with Victorianism” (407) and who drew on a plethora of nineteenth-century British texts and ideas “that they loved and relied on to theorize the project of decolonization” (407). Mufti’s is a crucial intervention, and I draw an adjacent lesson: James and others read the Victorians … but not as Victorianists.

Bankim, like the anticolonial intellectuals Mufti discusses, read eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons and Europeans extensively: Walter Scott, both James Mill and John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Ernest Renan. But he didn’t write to or for them.Footnote ¹⁷ Given our field formation, this is why Bankim cannot be “Victorianized” or readily absorbed into a “wide” Victorian studies canon. What would an altered field formation look like? Guha and Subaltern studies offer both a model and a caution. The collective’s core insight was that Indian subalterns were patronized, silenced, spoken for, ignored, and exploited in equal measure by colonial elites and systems and by indigenous elites (from zamindars or landowners to middle-class Indians to anticolonial nationalists) who mobilized and then abandoned them. Can Victorian studies approach nineteenth-century India from a “de-Victorianized” perspective, one that, first, short-circuits a colonizer-colonized dyad and, second, speaks to formations and relations to which Britain is secondary, even absent? If it were to, would it remain “Victorian studies”? The test may be not Guha’s essay on Hootum that mentions Boz but his article on Dinabhandu Mitra’s Nil Darpan, a play about indigo peasants that, if it is known to Victorianists at all, is known because the reverend James Long was brought to trial in 1861 by two Anglo-Indian newspapers for publishing a translation of the play. Guha’s essay mentions Long exactly once; Dinabhandu and the Bengali intelligentsia, however, come in for a drubbing for their “concoction of an inherited Indian-style paternalism and an acquired, western-style humanism” deployed to tamp down the peasants’ demands and revolt in the service of British order (3). Is such scholarship in Victorian studies’ wheelhouse? Romanow, in his reading of a Ghanian archive that absents the British (except for language and form), insists it must be. I would agree—but am less sanguine of its possibility in our current field formation.

In closing, let me return to Sanial, the amateur historian of Indian journalism. Sanial telescopes the limits of Victorian studies more starkly than Bankim, who, after all, yields seventy-eight hits in the MLA International Bibliography (most are by South Asianists). Sanial is undecipherable to Victorian studies for two reasons: he wrote on Indian questions and he never left the precincts of the periodical press. (A third reason, beyond the space I have here, is that he wrote neither fiction nor poetry nor Pater-style nonfiction essays.) Though a founder of Victorian Studies was also the founding president of the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals—Michael WolffFootnote ¹⁸—the impact of the study of periodicals on Victorian studies has been curiously circumscribed. The growing accessibility of the staggering archive of newspapers and magazines of nineteenth-century Britain (and, in some cases, its empire) has been a boon for periodical studies’ scholars. But in Victorian studies, this archive, when it is not ignored, is largely merely mined—particularly for bits on literary authors or travel writing—rather than treated as an object of study in its own right. There is a parallel between the field’s myopia about periodicals and its blindness to Bankims and Sanials.Footnote ¹⁹ In the periodicals archive, there are many Sanials who can, for a start, “provincialize” Britain if not provide alternative Victorian studies.