The Anglo-Indian Novel to 1947

This chapter explores the Anglo-Indian novel. The history of British writing on India stretches back almost as far as the Indo-British imperial encounter and includes travel writing, missionary letters, military memoirs, and scholarly accounts of Indian history and culture, all of which were published in great numbers in the eighteenth century. Literary texts followed, and included short prose narratives depicting Anglo-Indian life, missionary tales, descriptions of the landscape, and stories of native life. While all these forms were well received in their day, none was to prove as popular as the novel, which during the nineteenth century became the dominant form of Anglo-Indian literature. In the early nineteenth century, India was also used as an exotic setting for early fictions by a number of writers who would go on to rank amongst the best-known novelists of the Victorian period.