1 Robert Fraser, among other scholars, identifies Nathaniel Halhed’s A Grammar of the Bengal Language published in 1778, as the “first Indian book.” See Robert Fraser “A Tale of Two Cities,” in Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes (London, England: Routledge, 2008), 3–7. British colonial rule formally ended in 1947, with the formation of the two nations, India and Pakistan.

2 See especially the chapters by Tridib Suhrud, Dilip Menon, and Udaya Kumar on Govardhanram Tripathi, Potheri Konhambu, and Chandu Menon, respectively, in Meenakshi Mukherjee ed., Early Novels in India (New Delhi, India: Sahitya Akademi, 2002). See also Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Pilgrim Prose,” in Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India, (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1985).

3 I use English translations of all these texts: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Kamalakanta: A Collection of Satirical Essays and Reflections, trans. Monish Ranjan Chatterjee (New Delhi, India: Harper Collins, 1997); Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Anandamath, or, The Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Julius Lipner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, trans. Rabi Shankar Mishra, et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). Throughout this article I have used the new name “Odia” to refer to the language of the Indian state of Odisha. On September 6, 2011, the Indian parliament amended the national constitution to replace the colonial era names “Oriya” (language) and “Orissa” (land) to “Odia” and “Odisha.” This makes for some confusion. Most publications I cite were prior to this change, and thus this article contains both “Odia” and “Oriya.”

4 Throughout this article, I follow Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak’s critiques of Western academia’s reification of the “third world woman.” I am interested in examining novelists’ imagination of the same figure only to understand how print culture enabled such imaginations by constraining and liberating the ways that novelists could talk about women by talking about books. See Mohanty, Chandra, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12.3 (1984): 333–358 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Mohanty, Chandra, “Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28.2 (2003): 499–535 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies 8.4 (2005): 475–486 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

6 Darnton, Robert, “What Is the History of the Books?” in The Book History Reader, eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (New York: Routledge, 2006), 21–22 Google Scholar .

7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Literature,” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 113–97, esp. 191. Spivak refers to the last section of Coetzee’s Foe as a reading lesson, but the entire book interrogates the anti-colonial and philosophical and cultural implications of “reading” as a strategy in literature, history and philosophy. In her theorization of postcolonial reading publics, Ankhi Mukherjee follows Spivak in self-consciously worrying about the role of the “literary critic” who seeks to contextualize “singular acts of collective reading” and suggests that the postcolonial native informant who poses as a reader, too, must “die a little, too.” See Mukherjee, Ankhi, “Introduction: Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4.1 (2017): 8, 10 Google Scholar . I follow both Spivak and Mukherjee and remain mindful of the limits of an Anglophone critic reading vernacular Indian novels in English translation, and examining women characters who are clearly more spoken about than speaking.

8 Price, Leah, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) 16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Adejunmobi, Moradewun, “Native Books and the ‘English Book,’” PMLA 132.1 (2017): 136–137 Google Scholar . Bankim’s widespread reputation as the “Scott of Bengal” is one such myth. Beginning with one of Bankim’s nineteenth-century reviewers, this monicker has proved remarkably long-lived. Bankim wrote historical romances as did Walter Scott, and Scott was one of the many writers whose words appear as epigraphs in Bankim’s novels. Instead of fixing the correct line of influence from Scott to Bankim, I consider it more productive to compare the different ways in which Scott, among other writers, found themselves used in novels by writers from cultures different from Bankim’s.

9 Tanika Sarkar, “Nationalist Iconography: The Image of Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Literature,” in Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 265. Sarkar demonstrates how what Partha Chatterjee defined as the creation of women’s spaces as private, sovereign, and “already free” manifested in fiction. The evocation of women as goddesses and warrior-queens in fiction strengthened the confinement of women to the inner realm. As Sarkar puts it, “Kali reverts back to Durga, Durga becomes a household drudge (255).”

10 Rajeswari Sundar Rajan, “Death and the Subaltern,” in Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) 121–22. Rajan illustrates this point through the difference between Friday (from Foe), whose tongue has been cut off, and Bhuvaneshwari Kumari, the subject of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and suggested that despite his disenfranchised status as a slave, Friday is at best a “literal subaltern,” one who “cannot—but also will not speak,” whereas Bhuvaneshwari Kumari, the upper-caste Hindu woman, is the “figural subaltern,” one who “cannot—but in fact does speak.”

11 Such a claim could be made, given that Tilottama Misra has shown how similar were Senapati’s descriptions of Mangaraj and Dildar Mian to corresponding characters in Barua’s novella. See Tilottoma Misra’s chapter in Mohanty, Satya, Colonialism, Literature and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 118–122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . See also note 21 for a detailed engagement with Misra and other scholars who have examined the satirical narrator of Six Acres and a Third.

12 Boehmer, Elleke, “Differential Publics—Reading (in) the Postcolonial Novel,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4.1 (2018): 12, 25 Google Scholar . Equally inspirational for this article is Kortenaar’s suggestion that scholars examine how “literacy has been imagined by the literary imagination” in Kortenaar, Neil ten, Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press 2011), 21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

13 Udaya Kumar, “Unsteady Luminosity: Reading the World in Early Novels,” in Writing The First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala (Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black, 2016) 120–64; Sudipta Kaviraj “Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self Ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature,” in Modern Asian Studies 34.2 (2000): 379–406; and Baidik Bhattacharya, “Jokes Apart,” Interventions 8.2 (2006): 276–94.

14 See Kumar, “Unsteady Luminosity,” esp. 135–46. Kumar’s examination of “seeing” and “reading” in the early Malayalam novels directly inspires this article.

15 Bhattacharya, “Jokes Apart,” 282, 293. The scene is from Raj Shekhar Basu’s Ulat Puran (The Reverse Puran).

16 Sudipta Kaviraj “Laughter and Subjectivity,” 385–86. Kaviraj defines alankara as “literary or stylistic embellishment” and a “combination of rhetoric and poetics” (385). Being a babu himself, Bankim’s parody of education emerged from a “darkly ironic sense of history achieved through reflection upon the benefits and impositions of modernity (384).”

17 Anjaria, Ulka, “Satire, Literary Realism and the Indian State: Six Acres and a Third and Raag Darbari ,” Economic and Political Weekly 41.46 (2006): 4799 Google Scholar . Baidik Bhattacharya demonstrates the difference between parody’s European literary origins and its postcolonial implications in “Jokes Apart,” Interventions 8.2 (2006): 282. Bhattacharya’s deep commitment to a Saidian-Orientalist framework, however, forecloses a comparative examination of humor. Anindita Ghosh’s work, as cited later, opens that possibility, allowing us to compare Bengali with Odia.

18 Sarkar discusses how this community of “unsuccessful bhadralok” revered Ramakrishna Paramhansa, a Brahmin priest who claimed to not have read books. Ghosh examines how books aimed at this group described the ill-effects of reading. Middle-class housewives, upon reading novels, ill-treated their mothers-in-law and drove their husbands to economic slavery to earn money for their luxurious ways. Sumit Sarkar, “Kalyug, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times,” in Writing Social History (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 295–300; Ghosh, Anindita, “Revisiting the ‘Bengal Renaissance’: Literary Bengali and Low-life Print in Colonial Calcutta,” Economic and Political Weekly 37.2 (2002): 4329 Google Scholar ; and Anindita Ghosh, “The Battala Book Market,” in Power in Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

19 The literature on this subject emerges from a sustained engagement with Benedict Anderson’s causal link between “print capitalism” and “imagined communities,” and is too rich to be summarized in a footnote. Two recent publications that summarize that vastness and spell out its implications for “world literature” and “comparative literature” respectively are Aamir Mufti’s “Orientalism and the Making of Indian Literature,” in Forget English (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), and Sumanyu Satpathy’s “Wall of Words: Fakir Mohan Senapati, Premchand and Language Controversies in Colonial India,” Comparative Literature Studies 53.2 (2016): 246–71. Mufti traces the genealogy of the Hindi-Urdu conflict, with its association of language (Hindi or Urdu) with communities (Hindu or Muslim) to the philosophical and philological work of Friedrich Schiller and William Jones, to conclude that Orientalism set the terms for what was later termed Indian literature. Satpathy surveys controversies from a wider geographical range, and while admitting that the “discourse of linguistic discord” was derivative, calls for scholars to examine how the connections between these controversies found their way into the fiction of individual writers. I follow Satpathy directly by comparing how prose fiction by Bankim and Senapati accommodated attitudes to books and reading, and Mufti implicitly by suggesting that “reading” illuminates richer worlds in non-Anglophone texts.

20 Kaviraj, Sudipta, The Unhappy Consciousness (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1998), 27, 33 Google Scholar .

21 Pala was a folk tradition of performance, involving satirical sketches, and Tilottoma Misra has examined Six Acres and a Third in relation to an 1866 Assamese prose sketch by Hemachandra Barua. Misra, Tilottoma, “The Emergence of the Modern Subject in Oriya and Assamese Literatures: Fakir Mohan Senapati and Hemachandra Barua,” in Colonialism, Literature and Modernity: A View from India, ed. Satya Mohanty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 135–152 Google Scholar . The scholarship on the satirical voice of the narrator is vast. In their essay “Writing Peasant Life in Colonial India,” in Fakir Mohan Senapati: Perspectives on His Fiction, ed. Jatin Nayak (Jagatsinghpur, India: Prafulla Pathagar Publications, 2002) Jatin Nayak and Himanshu Mohapatra describe Six Acres and a Third as an “irreverent” re-creation of Lal Behari Day’s English novel Bengal Peasant Life. In his “Introduction” to the English translation of the novel, Satya Mohanty observed that the narrator can be likened to a “touter,” a “disreputable wit in Oriya culture” (6) and called Senapati’s “analytical realism” a contribution to “anti-colonial and demystificatory social thought.” In this same essay, Ulka Anjaria finds in Six Acres and a Third a kind of originary text of political satire, arguing that “Fakir Mohan set the stage for a further elaboration of the relationship between satire and politics by mobilizing the rich cultural history of humor” (4799). Following scholars who have examined Six Acres and a Third in relation to literary texts from Indian (Hindi, Assamese, Telugu) and global literary traditions (Spanish, English) I examine one aspect of the narrator’s “irreverence” by comparing it with book-talk in a contemporaneous, Bengali novelist. See essays by Mohapatra, Misra, Rao, Vargas, and Sawyer in Mohanty, Satya ed., Colonialism, Literature and Modernity: A View from India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

22 Sarkar, Tanika, Hindu Wife Hindu Nation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010)Google Scholar .

23 Shankar Mishra, Rabi, “Chha Mana Atha Guntha: The Language of Power and the Silences of a Woman,” in Early Novels in India ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee (New Delhi, India: Sahitya Akademi, 2002) 240–260 Google Scholar , and Anjaria, Ulka (“Why Don’t You Speak?: The Narrative Politics of Silence in Senapati, Premchand and Monical Ali,” in Colonialism, Modernity and Literature: A View from India, ed. Satya Mohanty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 153–170 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Mishra finds in Saantani, the silent suffering wife of the landlord, Senapati’s nostalgia for a pre-colonial time when landlords cared for their tenants, against which the fictional landlord, Mangaraj, represents how colonial rule commodified relations among villagers. Anjaria argues that Six Acres and a Third is “a feminist text” because it interrogates silence on social and narratological levels, by representing the social silence of women like Saria and Saantani and the problem of describing such silence in fiction (154).

24 The reason for this, according to Priolkar, is “the volume and variety” of the books printed at the Serampore mission. See Kakba Priolkar, Anant, The Printing Press in India: Its Beginning and Early Development (Bombay, India: Marathi Shamshodhana Mandala, 1958), 70 Google Scholar .

25 Sisir Das has a chapter on the foundational role played by Carey in Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (Calcutta, India: Papyrus, 2001). See pages 14–15 for Carey’s early life and 79–82 for the earliest printing, done in collaboration between the East India Company and the mission press.

26 Sisir Das, Sahibs and Munshis, 82.

27 Das, Sahibs and Munshis, 81–82 and Swapan Chakravarty, “Purity in Print,” in Print Areas: Book History in India (New Delhi, India: Permanent Black: 2004) 209–13. See Sudipta Kaviraj, “Two Literary Histories of Bengal,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 510–12, for an excellent and useful survey of the changing tatsama-tadbhav dialectic in early Bengali literature.

28 Several historians have described the lack of Odia printing, and many attribute it to the fear of caste corruption by upper-caste Hindus. J. K. Samal writes that even as late as 1860, there were only seven teachers in the Orissa division of the Bengal presidency. See Samal, J. K., History of Education in Orissa (Cuttack, India: Punthi Pustak, 1984), 237 Google Scholar , and Prasad Das, Jagananth, Chitrapothi: Illustrated Palm-Leaf Manuscripts from Orissa. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Arnold Heinemann, 1985), 29–30 Google Scholar . Das argues that Odia speakers continued to use palm-leaf manuscripts for many years after print had become accessible and common. For a brief historical overview of the Odia-Bengali language controversy, see Mohanty, Panchanan, “British Language Policy in 19th Century India and the Oriya Language Movement,” Language Policy 1.1 (2002): 53–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

29 Rangalal Mitra argued that there were not enough Odia readers to justify the expense of printing books in Odia, and Kanticharan Bhattacharya argued that Odia was in fact a dialect of Bengali, and thus it was in their own best interest for Odia readers to learn Bengali language and literature. See Boulton, John, Phakirmohana Senapati: His Life and Prose Fiction (Bhubaneshwar, India: Sahitya Akademi, 1993), 70–72 Google Scholar ; Satpathy, “Wall of Words,” 256–57; and Animesh Mohapatra, “The Local and the National in the Oriya Public Sphere: 1866–1948,” PhD dissertation, University of Delhi, 2016, pages 58–59, for a cogent summary of the various positions on the Bengali-Odia language controversy. For the importance of textbooks, and the economic stakes of this political controversy, see Mohanty, “British Language Policy in 19th Century India and the Oriya Language Movement,” 53–73. For different arguments about how the literary and linguistic conflict was fueled by and created new forms of political imagination, culminating in the formation of “Orissa,” an independent province, in 1936, see Rabi Shankar Mishra, “Introduction” to “Divided Loyalties: Citizenship, Regional Identities and Nationalism in Eastern India: 1866–1931,” PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2008, University of Minnesota Digital Consevancy. https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/99163, esp. 19–20.

30 Utkal Dipika translates as “The Lamp of Utkal.” Utkal is an archaic name for the geographical area today known as Orissa. It comes from “Uttar Kalinga,” or “the northern part of Kalinga,” referring to the king Ashoka’s Kalinga Kingdom from the third century BC.

31 Fakir Mohan Senapati, Fakirmohan Granthābalī (Trutiya Khanda or Complete Works), ed. Debendra Dash, vol. 3 (Cuttack, India: Granthamandir, 2008), 124.

32 Quoted in Chakravarty, “Purity in Print,” 212. The negative comment on the Vidyasagar book was made by Ramgati Nyayaratna, a renowned Sanskrit Bengali scholar.

33 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, Kamalakanta: A Collection of Satirical Essays and Reflections trans. Monish Ranjan Chatterjee (New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997) 134 Google Scholar .

34 Chattopadhyay, Kamalakanta, 136.

35 Sudipta Kaviraj in “Imaginary History” identifies the “seventeen horsemen” as the Muslim rulers who took over Bengal and lost it to the East India Company. The expression reflected a common perception of Bengali cowardice, as compared with, say, Rajput or Maratha resistance to colonial rule. Bankim’s novels revise this perception by describing the Bengali Hindu as an agent, not a victim.

36 Chattopadhyay, Kamalakanta, 143.

37 Explained in notes provided by Satya Mohanty, as “the eleventh day of every fifteen day lunar cycle.” See “Introduction” in Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, trans. Rabi Shankar Mishra, et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006) 4.

38 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 36.

39 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 82.

40 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 37, 82, 176. The other reference is present in chapter 1, immediately after the passage quoted earlier, about Mangaraj’s piety. Here, the narrator compares Jesus Christ feeding “twelve hundred of his flock with only two loaves of bread” (37). The second reference to the material book occurs in a later chapter of the same novel, titled “Cuttack Sessions Court,” where an English doctor swears by “the Holy Bible” before testifying in court (176).

41 Graham Shaw, “Early Oriya Printing,” 37, for more on the Mission Press and how it printed The New Testament, the first Odia book at Serampore.

42 The four sacred books of Hinduism are the Rig, Yajur, Sama, and Atharva Vedas. They lay down some rules regarding proper rituals corresponding to caste, including dietary and marital restrictions.

43 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 90. Not knowing Sanskrit myself, I have relied on Satya Mohanty’s footnote, which explains that this was from the Guru Gita.

44 The Odia Bhagabata was a vernacular re-creation of the Sanskrit Bhagavat Purana. This is one of the eighteen Puranas (histories) of Hinduism. Bhagavat Purana literally means “History of the followers of the Lord.” The poet Jagannath Das translated this into Odia in the fifteenth century, and in the centuries following, a vibrant culture of reading and writing developed around this text. Inscribing a personal palm-leaf manuscript with the text of the Bhagabata was considered an act of pious labor and inspired literacy because unlettered Odia-speakers learn the script simply to copy the Bhagabata for themselves. See Mansinha, Mayadhar, History of Odia Literature (New Delhi, India: Sahitya Akademi, 1962), 97–101 Google Scholar .

45 Mansinha, History of Odia Literature, 89.

46 Kamalakanta, A Collection of Satirical Essays and Reflections. Translated with comments from the original Bengali by Monish Ranjan Chatterjee (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 80.

47 Kamalakanta, A Collection of Satirical Essays and Reflections, 81.

48 Kamalakanta, A Collection of Satirical Essays and Reflections, 89.

49 Kamalakanta, A Collection of Satirical Essays and Reflections.

50 Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, 159.

51 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 58. Upendra Bhanja was a seventeenth-century Odia poet known for his verbal sophistry and eroticism. In the 1870s, at the height of the Odia linguistic nationalism, a bitter debate erupted between Odia nationalists, over the appropriateness of Bhanja’s erotic verses. Some argued that Bhanja should be studied as part of the Odia literary tradition, while others felt that the erotic content of his verses was inappropriate for nationalist and community-building purposes. For more details see Shankar Mishra, Rabi, “Fashioning Readers: Canon, Criticism and Pedagogy in the Emergence of Modern Oriya Literature,” Contemporary South Asia 20.1 (2012): 135–148 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

52 Mishra, “Fashioning Readers,” 59–60.

53 Mishra, “Fashioning Readers,” 60.

54 The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “A preparation of betel leaves chewed as a stimulant; spec. a mixture of chopped areca nut, slaked lime, and other ingredients wrapped in a betel leaf.” http://www.oed.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/view/Entry/135755?redirectedFrom=paan#eid. I am indebted to Satya Mohanty’s note in the English translation, which indicates that this translation is “literal, but the tone is not quite right,” and to conversations with the renowned scholar of classical Indian literature, Professor Velcheru Narayana Rao, who helped me unpack the difference between the Sanskrit of Kalidasa’s couplet and Senapati’s translation. Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 60.

55 Chatterji, Bankim Chandra, Anandamath, or, The Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Julius Lipner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 128 Google Scholar .

56 W. W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, qtd. in “Appendix C: History of the Sannyasi Rebellion,” in Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Anandamath, or, The Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Julius Lipner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 295–96.

57 Julius Lipner, “Critical Apparatus,” in Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Anandamath, or, The Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Julius Lipner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 253.

58 Lipner, “Critical Apparatus,” 253.

59 See note 44 above for the widespread religious appeal of the Bhagabata and how inscribing it was a pious act. Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 114.

60 Fakir Mohan Senapati, “Trayodasha Parichhed (Chapter 13),” in Chha Mana Atha Guntha, in Fakirmohan Granthabali, vol. 3 (Cuttack, India: Granthamandir, 2008), 172. The Odia original reads: “Jahara Pilajhila nahi/ sakalu tara muha dekhiba nahi/ tini pua ti sulakhyini/ banchha barudi gaan niuchhuni/ jahara ghare pua jhia na thae/ sei maikiniea bada dukha pae.”

61 Senapati, “Trayodasha Parichhed,” 115.

62 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 122–23.

63 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 176.

64 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third.

65 Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 177.