Processing genre: Indian adventure fiction and New Imperialism, 1880-1914
Creators: name: Jenkins, Robert
Publisher: name: University of Tasmania
Year: 2024

description: During the New Imperial period, 1880-1914, works of Indian adventure fiction were texts that combined the literary forms and themes associated with adventure in British print culture at the time, with the contemporaneous idea of India in British culture. That idea was the translation of British experience in the region known as India, from the lure of mystery and promise of riches, to the trauma of 1857 and its subsequent impression of supremacy and self?righteousness, through British print culture. If, as has been suggested, adventure fiction reflected the dreams of imperialism, India was British adventure’s epicentre. Yet, Indian adventure fiction has attracted little critical attention beyond a few of Rudyard Kipling’s works that are routinely included in surveys of Victorian adventure, and some studies of George Alfred Henty’s boys’ books. Historical romances set during the Indian Rebellion have been included in studies of the impact of the conflict on British culture and the portrayal of the events and major figures of the Rebellion in print culture, but there has not been a systematic study of them as a class of texts, or how they related to other works of Indian adventure fiction. My investigation into Indian adventure fiction as a genre, therefore, fills a hole in the scholarship by highlighting both the importance of India as a site for imperial adventure, and the affect the idea of India and the legacy of the 1857 Rebellion had on the genre. Furthermore, I demonstrate the way the genre is processed through the cycle of production, circulation, and reception, by examining select moments within that cycle.<br>I first establish the literary forms and themes most associated with Indian adventure fiction by examining contemporary critical discussions about romance and adventure, and analysing the forms most employed in short works in the genre published in British periodicals. I then argue that the illustrations accompanying the genre’s participating texts act as a visual overture, forcing readers to process the texts in relation to images that homogenise and concretise the genre in readers’ minds. I then turn to Kipling, who was not read as a writer of adventure, but whose connection to India in the British public’s opinion was so strong, his idea of India became an essential element within the genre’s architext. Finally, I investigate how writers, publishers, and critics interact with the genre, and how their positions within New Imperial British print culture informed and shaped the production of the texts, paratexts, and metatextual commentaries required by their role in the cycle of production, circulation, and reception of print objects. That part of my investigation culminates in an examination into some of the works of the critically neglected Indian-English writer Sarath Kumar Ghosh, who wrote several works of popular fiction for British periodicals that used the forms associated with Indian adventure fiction to challenge the British idea of India. Ghosh’s idea of India was too different from the one perpetuated in the genre, however, and his works were processed as fantastic tales by a fantastic Other. The idea of India was changing, however, and I conclude my study with a consideration of how the increasingly violent tactics of some Indian nationalists, and the horrors of the First World War made the processing of Indian adventure fiction change beyond recognition.