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TROUBLING CONJUGAL LOYALTIES: THE FIRST INDIAN NOVEL IN ENGLISH AND THE TRANSIMPERIAL FRAMEWORK OF SENSATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2014

Sukanya Banerjee
Sukanya Banerjee*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 42 , Issue 3: EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN INDIA , September 2014 , pp. 475 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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