In Another Country

Priya Joshi demonstrates how a paradoxical legacy has shaped the works of Indian writers such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Ahmed Ali and Salman Rushdie, a process she calls the “indigenization” of the English novel. Taken together, reading and writing reveal the complex ways in which culture was translated and transformed in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The novel first arrived in India over 200 years ago as a means and manifestation of British imperialism, quickly becoming a centre-piece of Indian print culture. “In Another Country” attempts to advance our understanding of this process by examining in detail the patterns of Indian readership, asking what Indians chose to read and why. It shows that despite the British novel’s great popularity in India, its consumption by readers there in fact highlights the limits of empire and Englishness in the subcontinent.

Author Biography

Priya Joshi is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley.