In keeping with character - early encounters with ethnography in Os Brahmans

Abstract

This essay suggests that instead of seeing the early novel in India as a secondary development to empirical representation, or as a flawed imitation of European literary models, studies can profitably trace how these influences generated structures internal to the novel, as it emerged simultaneously with other genres of writing and representation. Os Brahamanes by Francisco Luís Gomes marks an encounter between the early colonial novel and ethnography, before realism became the dominant manifestation of empirical description in the novel. The novel absorbs and anticipates the work of ethnography in petrifying conceptions of an Indian polity and opens up the possibility of examining a continuum of narrative strategies between the report and the novel.