No Longer in the "Waiting Room of Literary History”: Accounting for Nineteenth-Century Indian Fiction

Long nineteenth-century Indian prose fiction—broadly demarcated here as works published between 1835-1920 and composed in multiple languages—has remained strikingly under-examined in comparison to fiction that emerged in later decades and post-Independence, both within South Asian literary studies and the broader discipline. Disparate senses of critical value and worth have also been assigned to those fictions—particularly novels—composed in the “vernacular” languages versus those that were written in English. Though early Indian novels shared many features that bridged linguistic divides (e.g., similar stories of origination and novelty in prose, formal complexity, thoughtful treatment of topics of the day), and though comparative literatures produced across the subcontinent intersected in complex ways, the ongoing neglect of this overall body of writing represents an especially remarkable critical omission and holdover from the colonial past. This, in turn, has limited scholars’ ability to connect and compare innovations in early Indian fiction to works and movements in global literature of the same era, inhibiting the full “widening” of nineteenth-century studies that Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan Fong, and Helena Michie (and others) have called for in recent years. Heeding this call to continue to expand the ambit of Victorian studies and to scrutinize received categories and narratives (Freedgood 2019; Chatterjee et al 2020; Eckert 2024), this panel provides a forum for scholars to take up this critical lacuna and its far-reaching implications. Purposefully broad, this panel invites papers on early colonial Indian prose fictions, short stories, and novels published in any language during the long nineteenth century. In so doing, we aim not merely to be reparative or restorative with respect to Indian literary and cultural studies, but to engage this overlooked literature more fully in ongoing conversations within Victorian, postcolonial, and novel studies. Papers may also address the following related topics: 

• The historic and ongoing obstacles that stymie the study of nineteenth-century Indian prose fiction
• Formal innovations (or compromises) Indian authors made in crafting their works
• How censorship concerns may have affected authors and whether these manifested differently in works written in English than those composed in vernacular languages
• Alternate/disparate theories of the novel instantiated by Indian authors’ use of realism (including “fringe realisms” or “peripheral realisms”), melodrama, sensation fiction, romance, etc.
• The particularly fraught nature of English literature penned by Indian writers as observed in unwieldy categories like “Anglo-Indian” and “Indo-Anglian” and how this conception transforms over the twentieth century
• How mainstream canons and conceptions of nineteenth-century, postcolonial, and world literatures change as this understudied corpus comes into view.

 This proposed panel is part of a broader scholarly project seeking papers on early colonial Indian fiction for a special issue of The Global South that is slated to be published in Spring 2028.