Colonial India and Victorian Storytelling

Abstract

Stay-at-home Victorian readers and novelists had access, through a rich and variegated repertory of writing in many genres, to more complex perceptions of colonial India than the marginal representations of the subject in the major “domestic” novels has been seen to suggest. This essay proposes to displace a reductive monolithic concept of colonial discourse by identifying competing modes of storytelling, which shift in their influence on the novel in response to the expansion of British imperial ambitions in the period. Before the traumatic Indian “Mutiny” of 1857, major Victorian novelists affirmed interiority as the sign of English civilized identity, while consigning both colonizers and the colonized to a paucity of emotional and moral consciousness. After 1857, ambivalence and anxiety about this hierarchy of values increase; imagery and plot arrangements featuring various forms of oblivion and moral confusion become narrative expressions of a diminished faith in moral consciousness, while fragmented narrative structures destabilize moral authority in the way that some earlier travel memoirs and reportage had already done. Examples from Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell to Rudyard Kipling, read in the context of selected non-fiction colonial writing, demonstrate how Victorian storytelling evolved in response to the changing historical circumstances of British colonial experience in the Indian sub-continent.