Reading Benjamin Franklin’s life story in Bareilly

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay follows the print history of Benjamin Franklin’s life story. It appears first in William and Robert Chambers’ The Moral Class Book (1839) in Edinburgh and later in the Bareilly Tattvabodhini Sabha’s Niti Pradip (1870). As we juxtapose the English Franklin alongside the Hindi Franklin, it becomes possible to see the pliancy and polysemic character of a life story that emerges at the intersections of history and literature. It absorbs different meanings for readers separated by race, nation, language and gender and becomes an unpredictable vehicle for contradictory aspirations among male and female readers. At times illuminating a commitment to entrepreneurial and working class aspirations, particularly those of printer-publishers, it signals an interest in modernity and its institutions. At the same time, the themes of publicness and statesmanship make Franklin’s life an unusual pedagogical device for women readers in late colonial India. As we trace the Franklin life story through shifting linguistic and interpretative frames, it calls attention to the fraught dynamic in cultural and educational debates of the late colonial period in north India.