Before the Raj

Book excerpt: In this history of colonial literary production, James Mulholland argues that the East India Company was a central actor in the institutionalization of anglophone literary culture in India. as the EIC employed people from a variety of ethnic and national origin, it also expanded its cultural infrastructure, from presses and newspapers to poetry collections, letters, papermaking and selling, circulating libraries, an amateur theaters. Recovering this rich archive from a network of authors, reading publics, and corporate agents, Before the Raj shows how regional reading and writing reflected the knotty geopolitical situation and the comingling of Anglo and Indian cultures at a moment when the subcontinent's colonial future was not yet clear. The "translocal" links among Madras. Calcutta, Bombay, and settlements surrounding the Bay of Bengal demonstrate that anglophone literature adapted itself to geographical politics and social circumstances rather than being simply imitative of the works produced in the English metropole. Book jacket.