As we planned this special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, the editors of VLC and I engaged in a lively exchange – what title could capture such a sprawling arena of concern? Victorian India seemed short and sweet. And yet one must ask, which Victorian India? Whose Victorian India? Do we mean India and Indians in the British Isles? British traders, soldiers, and administrators in Britain or Indian subjects across the subcontinent? What about an imagined Britain in India? An imagined India in Britain? The essays collected here represent varied answers to these questions. They also chart the recent parameters of what Albert Pionke calls in his essay “the epistemological problem of British India.” Before returning succinctly to the baker's dozen articles assembled here – for readers will want to encounter them without unnecessary commentary – I turn to the conjoined issues animating both these essays and much recent work on British imperialism: issues of historiography and epistemology.

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888), the fifth volume in A. H. Wheeler & Co.'s “Indian Railway Library” series, “The Man Who Would Be King” may be the best and is almost certainly the last story that Rudyard Kipling wrote while still living in India. It is, then, the culmination of an annus mirabilis that saw its twenty-three-year-old author publish six books, albeit short ones, and achieve widespread fame in India. He also garnered sufficient acclaim in England that he would decide to resign his editorial position at George Allen's two Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, in favor of a literary life in London. In light of these biographical facts, readers might reasonably expect the story to offer a summative, even authoritative, conclusion about life and empire on the subcontinent that Kipling had represented so abundantly all year.

During his third expedition into the higher Himalaya in 1866, the most ambitious of his three journeys into the mountains, Samuel Bourne trekked to the Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganges. At that site he took “two or three negatives of this holy and not altogether unpicturesque object,” the first photographs ever made of the glacier and the ice cave called Gomukh, meaning the cow's mouth, from which the river emerges (Bourne 96). These words of Victorian India's pre-eminent landscape photographer, importantly, highlight the coming together of the picturesque mode and the landscape form through the medium of photography. In this essay, I focus on Samuel Bourne's images of the Himalaya, produced between 1863 and 1870, to query the ideological power of this triangulation to produce a specific image of the mountains in late nineteenth-century Victorian India. Situating Bourne's images in relation to contemporaneous material practices of the British within the space of the Himalaya, namely, the establishment of hill stations as picturesque locales in the higher altitudes of the Indian subcontinent, I argue that the landscape form, the picturesque mode, and the photographic medium, inflect each other to tame the sublimity of the mountains by representing them as similar to the Alps.

In The Empire of Nature John M. MacKenzie suggests there were “three animals in India with which the British had a special hunting relationship, the tiger, the elephant and the pig” (179). Of these, the tiger is the one most closely associated with Britain's imperial relationship with India. By the mid nineteenth century, as Joseph Sramek explains, “tigers . . . had become invested with several potent meanings” (659). Several critics including Sramek and Annu Jalais demonstrate how tigers were closely associated with Indian rulers, and, at the same time, with all that was wild and untamed about the subcontinent. Thus “[o]nly by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians” (Sramek 659). Through close readings of selected tiger images from the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper considers the way tigers were consistently used as visual signifiers of India in a series of stock-in-trade images which depict tiger hunts, white men protecting white women from tigers, and tigers menacing Indians.

The first English language newspaper in India began publication in 1780; by 1857, almost two hundred papers and periodicals had appeared – and many had quickly disappeared. An 1839 article in the Calcutta Literary Gazette partially attributed this high mortality rate to a lack of talented writers and to a desire among colonists for news from England:

The collision I explore in this essay is not a physical one, though it does emerge from a performance event that brought Ditchers (European residents in Calcutta) and Jack Tars (sailors in the Royal Navy) to the Calcutta Lyric Theatre on February 25, 1858. The collision actually manifests in print, as conflicting reviews of this event. Announced in the silk playbill pictured in Figure 19, the sailor amateurs of HMS Chesapeake offered a benefit theatrical to raise money for the Indian Relief Fund, a charity offering support to “widows, orphans, or other representatives of those who perished in the mutiny” (“Indian Relief”) (Figure 19).

The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814), an Evangelical tract, was published on the heels of the Charter Act of 1813, an act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced more regulation of the East India Company and legalized missionary work in India. The act implicitly rationalized expanding British dominance, invoking the moral mission to save the heathen. Little Henry captures this zeitgeist and was received enthusiastically by a readership newly interested in additional imperial expansion as a means of bringing civilization to the colonial world (Regaignon 89).

In the opening chapter of Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family, six-year-old Francis Temple, on first having “the pebbly beach, bathing machines and fishing boats” of the English seaside pointed out to him, judges it all to be “ugly and cold.” “I shall go home to Melbourne when I am a man,” he declares (53; ch. 1). This early and unfavourable contrast between England and one of its colonies exemplifies the novel's larger project of judging England and English society through values established in colonial locales, a project that reaches its apogee when Francis and his older brother Conrade judge the conduct of a cruel and duplicitous Englishwoman to be “as bad as the Sepoys” and thus hope that she will be “blown from the mouth of a cannon” (340, 342; ch. 18). While the narrator comments that here the children exhibit “some confusion between mutineers and Englishwomen,” the narrative in its entirety suggests that such “confusion” is founded on a reasonably astute appraisal of colonial history and contemporary English society (342; ch. 18). Published in 1865, with memories of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857–59 fresh in the public's mind, The Clever Woman of the Family is a critique of contemporary England and English values viewed through a colonial and military lens. More particularly, the novel records the after effects of the “Mutiny” – when sepoys were indeed “blown from the mouth of a cannon” – on early 1860s England, as characters shaped by the “Indian war” and bearing scars both physical and emotional flock home to the small English seaside town of Avonmouth (120; ch. 5). These characters, all associated with the British Army, were involved in some of the key events of the “Mutiny,” such as the siege of Delhi, and include in their number a young wounded war hero, Captain Alick Keith, winner of the Victoria Cross. The novel's older hero is Colonel Colin Keith, also recovering from wounds sustained in India. Under his protection is Lady Fanny Temple, widow of General Sir Stephen Temple, with her seven young children born, severally, in the Cape Colony, India and Australia. Together these characters – shaped by their experiences in the empire and the army – confront and then transform the England to which they return.

In a telling moment in the 1899 account of her life in India, Edith Maturin describes fighting off a potential attacker who attempts to enter her bedroom in the middle of the night. Because she is staying overnight in a remote cabin, she has only the nominal protection of “the Government-chosen khansamah [head servant] and chokey-dar [watchman]” (364). Lying awake, she looks up to find “a huge black man” peering in through the door with an “odiously fiendish expression” (364). Having anticipated such an attack, she is armed with her son's pop gun, and when she spots the intruder, she scares him away by firing it off: “I sat up, took the pistol, and pointed it at him. He saw me distinctly, and ducked as I fired. Then away he went! I put another cap in the toy pistol, and, running to the door, opened it, and fired again and again” (“Chamba Cinderella” 364) (Figure 21).

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94) is widely recognized as one of the preeminent novelists of nineteenth-century India. A literary forerunner of the much-celebrated Rabindranath Tagore, he authored fourteen Bengali novels which set the benchmark for Bengal's foray into novelistic territory. Bankim acquired national and international repute over the course of his lifetime, and not only were his novels translated into other Indian languages over the course of the nineteenth century, but translations of his work also appeared in Russia from as early as the 1870s (Novikova ii). While Bankim's fame rests on the strength of his Bengali writings multiply translated as they were, his first novel, Rajmohan's Wife (1864), was written in English. Interestingly, Rajmohan's Wife, usually considered the first Indian novel in English, is now seldom read, a neglect replicating the scant attention that the novel garnered when it was first serialized in the 1860s.

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

The oriental ballet is typically associated with modern dance, Russia, and the nonpareil dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova, and Ruth St. Denis. One of the most excerpted of all classical ballets and considered the first example of the abstract form in modern dance is the “Kingdom of the Shades” sequence in Marius Petipa's La Bayadère, featuring thirty-two ghosts of Hindu temple dancers dressed in white entering the stage one by one with a simple arabesque cambre. What people often forget is that La Bayadère was a huge sensation in Europe during the romantic ballet years – the 1830s and 40s – 50 plus years before the Ballets Russes and a full generation before Petipa's 1877 production, which most assume to be the ballet's original. This and other grand operas and ballets of its kind – Lalla Rookh, Les Orientales, Le Corsair, La Peri, La Paquita, Revolt of the Harem – took romanticism beyond the pale in terms of visual extravagance; elaborate water systems were installed to depict bathing scenes and shipwrecks, and live horses and elephants brought onto the stage to add verisimilitude to the Eastern spectacle.

Few topics connected to the study of colonial India have produced quite as much scholarship in recent years as the issue of colonial Indian education reform. The past decade alone has witnessed the publication of no fewer than eight English-language books on the subject, as well as a steady stream of journal articles. Part of the appeal of such research is no doubt a result of India's privileged place in the British Empire during the nineteenth century. In 1881, India's first complete census documented the existence of 253,891,821 Indian subjects living under the British Raj – or, to put it another way, a population nearly ten times the size of England and Wales's own population during the same period. For scholars, education offers a particularly fruitful site for understanding British colonial ideology. In addition, it provides an important glimpse into the lives of Indian subjects. An extensive print archive, manifest in sources as diverse as political speeches, bureaucratic files, periodicals, and memoirs, has greatly aided research into the development of colonial education. At the same time, the tendency for research to privilege particular regional focuses has left troublesome gaps in the historical record.

In her groundbreaking bookMasks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989), Guari Viswanathan established that “the discipline of English came into its own” not in England but in India, as an instrument of cultural colonization: “As early as the 1820s, when the classical curriculum reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum” (2, 3). Pausing to summarize the English literary curriculum fostered by “government schools in midcentury India,” she lists the following poetical works, gleaned from a report reprinted for the House of Lords in 1853: “Richardson's Poetical Selections (Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, Pope, and Shakespeare), Otway's Venice Preserved, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, Pope's Iliad by Homer, [and] Milton's Paradise Lost (the first four books)” (54). Although Viswanathan does not identify Richardson or his Poetical Selections, she is right to head the list with that textbook, which is mentioned in many other government reports of the period, and which was instrumental in establishing a classroom canon of British poetry in India before any such curriculum had been determined in Great Britain.

This essay examines the reception of Byron's work, and some responses to it, among the poets of the British community in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. The first section sketches some of the routes by which Byron's work and accounts of his life were circulated and read in India and demonstrates the impact of his work on the poets of British India. These poets co-opted Byronic texts into their own writings in the form of epigraphs and other citations and allusions, composed responses to Byron and his work, and imitated the tropes, formats and themes of Byron's poetry. The second section of the essay looks in more detail at selected examples of the many adaptations and imitations of Byron's work that proliferated during this period. In these poems, Byronic models are appropriated by writers whose chosen professions or relationships have the effect of aligning them with the colonial project of the East India Company. They re-imagined the encounter with the romanticized Orient that characterizes many of Byron's works in response to the specific political and cultural contexts of British India in the nineteenth century.

“When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song” (Dutt xxvii). This sentence is Edmund Gosse's famous final flourish to his memoir of Toru Dutt, which introduced her posthumous volume Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, published in 1882, five years after her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. But what would Dutt's page look like in the history of “our country,” by which Gosse means of course England? This question is a tricky one, because placing a late nineteenth-century Bengali who was a Europhile, a Christian convert, and an English-language woman poet within a British Victorian tradition is a simplistic, if not a problematic appropriation of a colonial subject into the centre of the British Empire. Where Dutt belongs has long preoccupied critics who try to recuperate her poetry for an Indian national poetic tradition, or for a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics. The issue of placing Dutt allows us also to press questions about the conception of Victorian poetry studies, its geographical, cultural, and national boundaries, not just in the nineteenth-century creation of a canon but in our current conception of the symbolic map of Victorian poetry. But, while recent critics have celebrated her poetry's embrace of global poetry as a challenge to the parochialism of national literary boundaries, Dutt's original English-language poetry also suggests an uneven, uncomfortable hybridity, and a wry, ironic interplay between distance and proximity that unfolds through her use of poetic form. This essay investigates what it means to “make something” of Toru Dutt, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, what is at stake for Victorian poetry studies in privileging Dutt and her multi-lingual writing, and whether her celebrated transnationalism might not also include a discomfort with hybridity that reveals itself through the relation between space and literary form in her poetry.