"Because Novels Are True, and Histories are False": Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860-1918

While visiting England in the early 1870s, the prodigiously talented teenage writer Toru Dutt met “Lord L.” – or Lord Lawrence, former viceroy of India. He asked her what book she and her sister Aru were reading. The book in question was a novel, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), by Dinah Maria Mulock. Lord L. replied, “Ah! you should not read novels too much, you should read histories.” While Aru did not reply, Toru answered, “We like to read novels.” On being asked why, she responded, smiling, “Because novels are true, and histories are false” (H. Das 23). Here, Toru Dutt was articulating and helping to constitute a kind of cultural modernity in which the truth of the novel, a particular form of fiction, was crucial. This truth was particularly seized upon by women, who were making strides toward fuller participation in the public sphere, including in the construction of knowledge. Fiction written by women in English and other languages in India, whether in the form of full-fledged novels or as shorter fiction, contributed to a renewal of language, identity, and history.

Already by 1875, quite a few pieces of English-language fiction had been written and published by Indians. Notable among these is Shoshee Chunder Dutt's “The Republic of Orissa” (1845). Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824–85) was a cousin of Toru's, and he, like Toru's father, had converted to Christianity. (Toru's father Govin Chunder, along with his brothers and nephew, published a collection of poetry titled The Dutt Family Album in 1870.) Meanwhile, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's novel in English, Rajmohan's Wife, had come out in 1864. Dutt was one of several Indian women novelists writing in the period 1860 to 1918, along with Krupabai Satthianadhan, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Swarnakumari Devi Ghosal. These writers, from a range of backgrounds – Hindu, Christian, Brahmo, and Muslim – also published in a range of genres, encompassing, for example, the Gothic novel (Toru Dutt), novels of sensibility (Toru Dutt), speculative and utopian fiction (Rokeya Hossain), the Bildungsroman (Dutt, Satthianadhan, Hossain, Ghosal), love stories (Ghosal, Hossain), and novels about religious conversion (Satthianadhan). The spectrum is thus wide, but the gendered voices of female agency are heard in all the fictions in question. Throughout their works, the authors express their visions not just of India but of the world, making wide claim to agency and articulation.