Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media Jeffrey L. Spear (bio) Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, edited by David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers; pp. xi + 285. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, £55.00, $75.00. Like most scholarly anthologies, Negotiating India is an incomplete mosaic of individual studies with an introduction by the editors outlining a larger project, the representation of India in nineteenth-century media both in Britain and in India itself. Despite the title, [End Page 113] there are few references in the essays to any publications before 1850, and only Javed Majeed's study of two Urdu periodicals of the 1870s treats vernacular Indian publications. Majeed's essay generally supports the assumption that journalists addressing the Indian public in Urdu were nevertheless working within such Western categories as the narrative of progress and the immutability of caste even as they tried to resist or qualify them: "The concern with stereotypes has much to do with the typologies on which European notions of race rested...but it is also connected with the hierarchy of rank in India itself. All this is part of an attempt to defend Hindustanis against colonial strictures while redeploying a language of difference to shore up Hindustani society itself" (153). Studies of the ways Indians represented both the English and themselves in their own languages during the colonial period are crucial to discussions of the degree and kind of subaltern agency, so it is a shame that there could not be other English-language essays here dealing with the frames and terms of Indian discourse in, for example, Bengali or Tamil. The only journal discussed in Negotiating India devoted to representing Indian views to readers of English in both India and Britain is The Indian Magazine, the subject of Antoinette Burton's "Institutionalizing Imperial Reform." This magazine, which ran from 1870 to 1914, was the organ of the National Indian Association, which promoted educational and social reform in India. Burton is particularly skillful in weaving quick sketches of personalities into her account of the magazine and the Association, and of their impact on such major reform issues as child marriage and enforced widowhood. Two essays address the handling of specific topics in the Victorian popular press: A. Martin Wainwright examines coverage of the technology of the Raj in Victorian periodicals; Glenn R. Wilkinson analyzes the treatment in the "yellow press" of the 1897 Pathan uprising at Tirah in the Northwest Frontier. Following the lead of Robert H. MacDonald in The Language of Empire (1994), Wilkinson treats the frontier as an "imagined space," that allows contradictory perceptions of India and the Pathans to coexist. Seeming at once to be well-equipped, natural fighters and undisciplined, superstitious fanatics, the Pathans could be cast simultaneously as worthy opponents and as essentially inferior to the rationally organized and more technologically advanced British. The remaining essays by historians include accounts of race and caste in boys' papers; the army in India and the military press; and the representation of scientific and Indian traditional medicine in the medical press. There are three essays by literary scholars. John McBratney's essay on Rudyard Kipling's From Sea to Sea (1899), while not changing our understanding of Kipling's views, does have the virtue of paying detailed attention to his journalism, which is usually brushed aside in a rush to get at the early short fiction. Laura Peters on Charles Dickens and the Indian rebellion, and Hyungji Park on 1857 and the serialization of The Moonstone (1868), go over material that is well known to specialists in Victorian literature, but will prove helpful to readers from other fields. Some details in these essays may mislead readers without specialized knowledge. Wainwright, for example, refers to George Birdwood as "a former professor of botany at Bombay University and a well-known proponent of Indian culture" (196). While it is true that early in his career Birdwood held professorships in anatomy, physiology, botany, and material medica at the Grant Medical College, his lasting influence was not in science but as a champion of Indian arts and crafts. These he made sure were prominently displayed when, after returning to...