Furnishing the Colonial Mind: Book Ownership in British India, 1780-1850
Matthew Adams, University of Hertfordshire
This paper seeks to explore the ownership, use and meaning of books amongst the British colonial elite in India.
Though the book was one of the most significant material objects in the maintenance and development of
knowledge and culture in Britain, attempts to develop accounts of ownership and readership that extend beyond
very short periods, or very narrow groups of individuals, have been frustrated by limited sources. A remarkable
series of probate inventories housed in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library, however,
makes an assessment of ownership patterns within the three Presidencies possible over a long period, while the
epistolary habits of the colonial population allow an early sketch of the social and emotional contexts that
informed reading practices to be made.1 While probate accounts are notoriously difficult sources of information
on consumer culture, disproportionately representing mature men of property, this is less of a problem in the
colonial context: the majority of the Anglo Indian population were men of property anyway, while high mortality
rates on the subcontinent ensured that these men died in substantial numbers throughout the life cycle.
Despite stereotypical representations of the British nabob, whose consumer habits were understood to extend
no further than the table, the bottle, his dress and the nautch, trade statistics suggest a vigorous market for
books within colonial India. This evidence is both supported and nuanced by examination of probate data. The
paper will seek to place this data within a British context: to a large extent, the market reflected the metropolitan
profile outlined in William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. 2 However, it will also seek to
demonstrate the particularity of the colonial situation, particularly in the development of a broad range of texts
dealing with Indian languages. Of course, language study already formed the core of education for men and
women of the British elite; this was inflected by an enhanced interest in the English language, as epitomised by
the popularity of Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), and by the fashion for Oriental knowledge and culture.3 In British
India, however, these existing influences were further inflected by the imperatives of colonial rule, the
peculiarities of the Anglo-Indian population, and the distinct natures of the three Presidencies. Essential to the
East India Company’s day-to-day functioning, these texts were an important element of the process by which
India was made legible to its new rulers, while also casting new light upon European languages and language
study.4 Perhaps most significantly, the vibrant second-hand market in books, and particularly language texts,
helped make British and European culture increasingly intelligible to propertied Indians, while the activities of
colonial printers helped stimulate a burgeoning literature in various Indian languages.
At once material texts and imaginative contexts, the books that furnished the Anglo-Indian mind under colonial
rule were integral components of British imperialism. They functioned as key sites of imperial sociability, helping
to form, consolidate and regulate the colonial elite while maintaining emotional and intellectual contact with kith
and kin in Britain. They provided mechanisms for the articulation of national identities, promoting particular
visions and narratives of Englishness, Scottishness and Britishness able to withstand and explain the experience
of Indian otherness. Finally, they were central to the British imperial mission itself, providing the ideological
weaponry required by colonialism.
This paper is based on the research done during an ESRC-funded project, ‘Colonial Possessions: Personal Property and
Social Identity in British India’, and is derived from an article, ‘Furnishing the Colonial Mind. Books and Their Readers in
British India, c. 1780-1840’, co-written with the Principal Investigator, Margot Finn, and now submitted for consideration to
The Historical Journal.
2
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004).
3
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language ... To Which are Prefixed, A History of the Language, and An
English Grammar (London, 1755), 2 Vols.
4
Bernard Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, in his Colonialism and Its Forms of
Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), pp. 16-56; Thomas R. Trautmann, ‘Dr Johnson and the pandits:
Imagining the perfect dictionary in colonial Madras’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 38, 4 (2001), pp. 375-97.
1