Quantitative Method, Literary HistoryAuthor(s): Priya JoshiReviewed work(s):Source: Book History, Vol. 5 (2002), pp. 263-274Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30228193 .Accessed: 09/10/2012 19:33

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QUANTITATIVE METHOD, LITERARY HISTORY

Priya Joshi

Amassing statistics is sometimes regarded in the academy as viewing Inter- net pornography has been in this prurient age: an indulgence than can only be permitted-and enjoyed-in solitude. Robert Darnton's essay, "Book Production in British India, 1850-1900," takes the particular indulgence of some book historians and makes it thoroughly enjoyable, widely beyond the preoccupations of the initiate. Not only is his attempt to document the proliferation of print in India in the second half of the nineteenth century a major archival achievement; the account of vistas opened by quantitative methods is a particularly inspiring one. Darnton is right early in the essay to caution the use of statistics; he is equally right, however, to charge ahead as he does. As he notes, "[H]owever flawed or distorted, the statistics pro- vided enough material for book historians to construct a general picture of literary culture, something comparable to the early maps of the New World, which showed the contours of the continents, even though they did not correspond very well to the actual landscape" ("Book Production," 240).

This essay was written while I was grieving the untimely death of my beloved friend Michael Rogin, to whom I dedicate this piece. Both it and the intellectual world would have been far better were he still here.

I have benefited greatly from Orfeo Fioretos's penetrating intelligence and from generous readings by Ian Duncan and Jonathan Rose: my warmest thanks to all three.

264 BOOK HISTORY

The analogy with maps is a cogent one and made advisedly: quantita- tive methods expand literary history and make all sorts of discoveries pos- sible, much the way that early maps did in the dissemination of knowledge about "new" worlds. Statistics, like maps, are indeed lies to some extent, but-to borrow Claire Connolly's keen formulation-they are the lies that tell a truth that would not otherwise be evident. One can only hope that literary studies, which has for so long regarded quantitative analysis with suspicion bordering on contempt, will come to be persuaded by Darnton's evidence that quantitative data allow a general picture of a literary culture to emerge that might otherwise be obscured by more conventional quali- tative methods of textual analysis. Certainly "Book Production in British India" (and the companion piece published last year in Book History) should go a long way toward winning the quantitative methods of book history sympathy among many who remain hostile to them.

Yet it is wise to be cautious about the distortions and shortcomings of statistical research, particularly when the origins and sources of that data are difficult to verify or to retrace. This is especially the case with the material preserved in the vast and generally understudied archives of print associated with the British Empire in India. Partly because the abstract, production- based paradigms of postcolonial theory have so marked the study of empire, it is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to turn their attention to what these archives might yield. Darnton's essay participates in the effort to plot a social narrative of print during the height of the British Raj and to understand the relevance of Indian print production to Enlightenment cat- egories of public culture such as censorship. Eventually, his findings may help other scholars interested in Indian agency to determine patterns of consumption from the archives of print production and circulation. The broad book statistics that Darnton records by category, in aggregate, and in comparison with figures from Britain, France, and Germany for the years 1875 and 900oo could become a starting point for subsequent inquiry. However, as he warns, these figures are themselves quite evidently flawed and inconsistent even within the very capacious archive that contains them.

Starting in 1867, the colonial bureaucracy, "stuck in overdrive" as Darn- ton dryly puts it, produced a quarterly list of every title published in British India. The lists were variously entitled Appendices to the Gazettes or Cat- alogues, and they came to be used extensively by librarians at the British Museum and the India Office for book accessions in London. Perusing the catalogues at the British Library today, one still encounters librarians' marginalia penciled in next to titles that had been or were to be purchased. But the catalogues presented more than just the names of books and serials: they also included information on purchasing price, print runs, publishers,

QUANTITATIVE METHOD, LITERARY HISTORY z65

number of pages, and putative summaries, some brief, some quite lengthy, on the content of each work published.

From this raw material in the catalogues, a considerable sociology of the print culture of nineteenth-century India can be gleaned. The history of Lucknow's legendary Newal Kishore Press appears in these pages, from its origins as a printer of colonial educational titles to its becoming a publisher of novels and newspapers that, some claim, wrote the modern Urdu public sphere into being even as the press became renowned for its contribution to the preservation of Islamic and Indo-Persian literary culture in India. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, so-called father of the Indian novel, appears repeatedly in the pages of the catalogues, where the anticolonial rhetoric of his famed novel Anandamath (i88z) is curiously muted by those who can only be considered collaborators when they describe it as "a story of a highly epic cast.... [The insurgents] perceive the necessity and whole- someness of the English regime in India, and in the spirit of true patriots, break up their armed league."' Scholars such as Tapan Raychaudhri and Anil Seal have noted that Bankim's anticolonial writings might have cost him the one promotion on his professional horizons as deputy magistrate in Khulna; he was certainly put on notice by colonial authorities when Anandamath, with its descriptions of an armed anticolonial movement against the British, was serialized in the pages of the journal Bangadarsan. Yet this spirited, militantly nationalist, anti-British novel is described in the most uncontroversial terms in the 1883 colonial catalogue.

Another key example of what the catalogues may or may not reveal is one that Darnton uses in his earlier essay on Indian print. He quotes a striking summary of an 1878 play, Sabhyata sopan, Drishya Samajchitra, or Stepping Stone to Enlightenment, from the Bengal catalogues:

The work embraces a variety of topics, such for instance as the utter hypocrisy of many Christian missionaries who ... treat the natives of the country in the most cruel manner and do not shrink even on the slightest provocation to murder them. Their style of preaching, their pronunciation of the Bengali, the abuse they pour upon Hindu gods and goddesses and the wicked and hypocritical character of the native Christian converts are all powerfully satirized. The writer throws much ridicule on the manner in which trials of Europeans accused of murdering natives are conducted in the law courts. How a European beats to death an unoffensive native servant, for instance ... how suborned witnesses are procured.... It is an alto- gether mischievous production, calculated to foster discontent and mislead ignorant people.2

266 BOOK HISTORY

For some readers, this may appear to be a dutiful report of a particularly outspoken work with the requisitely stern dismissal from colonial author- ities at the end about the "mischievous production calculated to foster discontent." For these readers, the summary might underscore both the scrutiny Indian print was subjected to and the low esteem it enjoyed among British officials. But the lengthy transcript also invites another reading. The records and the summary assessments in the catalogues were assembled by an army of Indian scribes under the supervision of a keeper or librarian, sometimes European but increasingly often Indian. His name appeared at the end of each quarterly catalogue, as did that of Chunder Nath Bose, Haraprasad Shastri, and Rajendra Chandra Sastri, who prepared the Ben- gal catalogues between 1879 and 1907. The commentary on the play above indicates that the recorders in the catalogues were evidently using the pre- tence of "reporting" extensively on texts to alert readers (probably British authorities overseas) of the real abuses practiced by the colonial state, in- cluding the "utter hypocrisy" of missionaries and the travesty of legal trials against Indian defendants. In a reading such as this one, the commentaries reveal the preoccupations not only of the British (about "bad" Indian prose) but also of the Indians, who insert themselves and their concerns about an oppressive administration for purportedly sympathetic eyes higher up the colonial hierarchy by manipulating cracks in the massive textual machinery.

My aim in invoking these examples is threefold. First, it is to suggest that a very particular optical illusion emerges if one reads this archive as only revealing British interests. A fuller and more dramatic one comes into focus, as it does in the summary of the 1878 play above, if one allows that Indians too were subjects, agents, and actors visible in these catalogues, whose self-insertions into the flow of "European" assessment thicken the contest over ideas and identities that are contained in the colonial archive. In short, the data in the catalogues not only speak about the Indian social world through a record of its print; they also appear to have been spoken by Indians and to have been spoken about by Indians in their own fabri- cation of a "modern" public sphere and civil society, as we will see shortly in the case of Bankim.

Second, and perhaps more crucial, the catalogues purvey an account of Indian print that is directly verifiable by literary history. Not only can the summaries of Bankim's novels be "checked" against the novels themselves; the dissonances between commentary and text, as in the Anandamath exam- ple above, reveal narratives of interest and agency that complicate, even possibly challenge, the extent of British authority over Indian print.

Finally, the qualitative assessments in the catalogues, in their raw and underprocessed extent, appear not yet to have been reduced (or fully fash- ioned) into British illusions about India. True, it is not always, or even ever,

QUANTITATIVE METHOD, LITERARY HISTORY 267

the unmediated voice of subaltern agency we hear in the lengthy comments in column 16; yet the qualitative summaries come as close as we can within the colonial archive to accessing what Pierre Bourdieu would call the left hand of the state, namely, the "revolt of the minor state nobility against the senior state nobility."3 Perhaps inevitably, a fuller narrative of these "revolts" comes through in the actual books that constitute the robust print world of India that Darnton highlights from the catalogues. The sta- tistics in the colonial archive and in Darnton's essay simply gesture to this world, and to have access to it, one would need to read words, not num- bers, books, not catalogues, a point I will return to shortly.

But the British, for all their stolid, excruciating, laborious bean-counting, were in too much of a hurry to do this. Reading the books and serials that came rolling out of Indian presses in dozens of print languages took too much time and linguistic expertise, if not sympathy. So, as Darnton writes, the British turned to producing more books, this time called annual reports, in which they compiled aggregate annual statistics, analyzed book produc- tion by presidency, and provided further qualitative summaries of the print world. These reports were different from the quarterly catalogues in sev- eral important ways. For one, they were processed and produced by British bureaucrats often far removed from the publishing centers in the presi- dency capitals and frequently lacking the philological expertise or ethno- graphic sympathy that characterized the polyglot librarian-keepers of the catalogues. Furthermore, while Indians of a certain class had access to the quarterly catalogues and used them for all sorts of purposes designed to advance their own ends, the reports evidently circulated confidentially and exclusively among British bureaucrats in the colonial state apparatus. In an 1870 speech delivered before the Bengal Social Science Association, a distressed Bankim referred to the catalogues in order to highlight the crisis in Bengali literary production as he saw it:

If you look over the quarterly returns published by Government, you will find that the Bengali mind is anything but unproductive. But its productions are remarkable for quantity alone; the quality is on an average contemptible-often they are positively injurious. Excepting a few good books of recognized excellence, they are, when they are nothing more mischievous, either clumsy imitations of good Bengali models, or abject copies of the silly stories of the later San- skrit writers, or a string of harmless common-places.4

I have discussed elsewhere the significance of Bankim's concerns over the "contemptible" quality of Bengali books.5 For now, the access he had to the catalogues is the point I want to underscore, for access is not something

268 BOOK HISTORY

that he, or most other Indian civilians, could have had to the reports. These documents were indeed compiled by British bureaucrats on the right hand of the colonial state-for more bureaucrats in the senior state nobility in London.

If the annual reports are useful today, it is largely because they reveal aspects of the fantasy of "British" India and underscore the extent of the optical illusion of colonial rule among the British during the nineteenth century. The qualitative data in these reports is mostly abstract at best, and at worst simply misleading. While the catalogues from 1875 to 1890 doc- ument the sustained popularity of Bankim in Bengali and (through trans- lation) in just about every other major Indian language, Darnton points out ("Book Production," 25z) that "the reports did not mention them at all." And while the catalogues, being produced serially, reflect the limited retro- spective knowledge of the indexers, the writers of the reports, despite their privileged vantage of retrospection and hindsight, simply failed to note either Bankim or Tagore (two of India's most renowned men of letters, whose writings greatly shaped the anticolonial and nationalist movements).

The greater shortcomings of the reports appear in their statistics com- piled on print production. Here the figures are so far removed from those in the catalogues that they give one pause. In explaining his choice to use the reports for their compilation of print statistics, Darnton notes: "The figures given in the quarterly catalogues do not tally with those in the annual reports, which usually are much larger. Either the reports cover data that were not included in the catalogues ... or the compilers of the reports made frequent, sloppy errors. The former possibility seems more likely to me. I have therefore amalgamated statistics from the reports, a procedure that has the additional advantage of respecting the integrity of a single run of documents" ("Book Production," 259).

To use the reports in order to preserve the integrity of a single source is a judicious decision. Yet using the catalogues consistently would also main- tain the integrity of a single source and allow the scholar to verify tallies of print production and the often arbitrary taxonomies, since the cata- logues list all titles by name, subject, and content. The reports have no such check incorporated in them: what one sees is what one sees, with no access to the colonial compilers' fields of vision or to their sources. It is of course possible that the reports cover data not included in the catalogues, but given that this is a speculation at best-and that it does not explain other discrepancies between catalogue and report having to do with the presence of literary figures such as Bankim and Tagore-this line of reasoning needs more evidence to be fully persuasive.

One is left then with two mutually inconsistent sources, incompatible in significant points of content and abstraction. In one-the catalogues-the

QUANTITATIVE METHOD, LITERARY HISTORY z69

researcher attuned to the substance of Indian print can qualify, requantify, and verify the many optical illusions created by British bureaucrats and their Indian informants and from them extract a wider sociology of print. This source provides data that can be evaluated for consistency by the standards of the colonial archive itself. Using it, we can count books to check the veracity of numbers, scrutinize their taxonomy, and verify to some extent the accuracy of totals submitted by the colonial scribes.

From the other source-the annual reports-that work has already been performed by a British bureaucrat, probably one not particularly trained in Indian languages, literatures, or history, working not unlike a junior ana- lyst for a multinational, with a view of the world as wide and as narrow as the multinational's. What this source provides is processed data, syn- thesized, analyzed, and summarized. Any errors within are already incor- porated and therefore impossible to locate or to correct. Efforts to verify this data against the only other known source (the catalogues) prove shaky. The reports therefore oblige the skeptical scholar to make judgments and speculations that are impossible to substantiate fully. This is not to suggest that the catalogues are infallible: rather, their errors are simply more pos- sible to detect, if not to correct. Because compilers of the catalogues list their data before processing it in the qualitative assessments, they include some degree of transparency. For some researchers, therefore, the cata- logues provide a better profile of print than do the reports, and they are the source put to use. But the caveat for the catalogues remains the same as for the reports: one has to read them with considerable skepticism and as much as possible against the grain. (To the extent that figures from the catalogue are of use to others, they appear, as compiled by this author, in Table i.)

Some of quantitative history's detractors will undoubtedly pounce upon this discussion as "further" evidence of the dubious value of statistical methods. For these critics, the inconsistency of statistical sources and their unreli- ability will add further fuel to the objection that not only are numbers antithetical to literary method; they are no more accurate or verifiable than typical literary constructions such as intentionality. To this, one can only respond that the lack of accurate literary texts has not persuaded literary historians to abandon the study of texts altogether. The absence of an "original" written Homeric epic has not shut down epic studies; on the contrary, it has invigorated it in all sorts of ways for several centuries. Like- wise, Hamlet is studied despite (perhaps because of) debates involving quarto and folio versions. Bankim's Anandamath has had a robust critical life in part because of the many inconsistencies between the text serialized in Bangadarsan and the three editions that followed its publication as a

Table i. Book registration in the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Presidencies, 1867-1901

Year Bengal Madras Bombay

1867 *318 *116 *138 1868 966 418 *6 1869 968 422 *224 1870 898 444 *531 1871 666 218 *390 1872 675 *121 *7 1873 329 397 *350 1874 692 335 461 1875 669 288 539 1876 599 377 592 1877 789 *216 581 1878 506 337 696 1879 499 403 923 1880 611 448 778 1881 464 409 679 1882 493 370 884 1883 1,766 763 1,121 1884 2,021 744 1,233 1885 2,309 753 1,525 1886 2,291 793 1,470 1887 2,044 823 1,250 1888 2,425 942 1,398 1889 2,293 1138 1,439 1890 1,461 846 1,419 1891 1,655 627 912 1892 1,252 799 860 1893 1,548 642 1,144 1894 1,343 683 1,111 1895 1,970 777 886 1896 1,699 753 884 1897 1,607 769 603 1898 1,303 820 745 1899 1,485 923 748 1900 1,894 895 695 1901 2,227 859 706

*Indicates data missing for one or more quarters SOURCES: A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Bengal Presidency (Calcutta: Government Printing Press, 1867-1901); A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, I867-1901); A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Madras Presidency, Fort St. George Gazette Supplement (Madras: Fort St. George Gazette Press, 1867-1901).

QUANTITATIVE METHOD, LITERARY HISTORY 271

book in 1882. Similarly, the inconsistency in figures between an imperial bureaucracy's publishing catalogues and reports is a problem that actually expands the colonial archive rather than shrinks it, one that creates a field of inquiry rather than truncates it.

Among other matters, Darnton's essay underscores the possibilities avail- able from quantitative research. Recognizing the distortions in the archive obliges the scholar to read it against the grain. Both sources--catalogue and report-provide the possibility of writing a macrohistory of print in India that can be compared productively, as Darnton insightfully does, with publishing macrohistories from other parts of the world (a stunning com- parison, incidentally, that no other print historian to my knowledge has ventured to make). Moreover, if one archival source in India provides more detail than another, the former complements rather than renders irrelevant the other. The British illusions that emerge in the reports are no less "accu- rate" or "useful" than the taxonomies in the catalogues: they are simply a kind of qualitative data that has its own place and use in the cultural his- tory of empire. Together, catalogue and report enable the possibility of re- mapping the Indian literary field in order to incorporate new narratives of both production and consumption, as we will see shortly. Therefore, rather than an exclusive reliance on the conventional methods of literary study, the use of these quantitative sources provides a form of close reading that brings the larger cultural field into sharper focus. But it does so only in con- cert with literary history. The endless lists in the catalogue are interesting not simply as raw numbers but in their capacity to reveal a wider literary sociology. Let me explain how.

"During my boyhood," wrote Rabindranath Tagore, referring to the i870s, "Bengali literature was in meagre supply, and I think I must have finished all the readable and unreadable books then extant.... I read every available book from one end to the other, and both what I understood and what I did not went on working within me."6 Alongside the paucity of Bengali fiction in those days, Tagore also rued the inordinate influence of British literature in India to the extent that "our minds are being moulded from infancy to old age by English literature alone."7 Yet the world of print in Bengal and indeed the rest of India was already undergoing a transfor- mation that was to become apparent very shortly. As the import of English books into the Subcontinent increased twofold between 1850 and 188o, publishing in Indian languages (as the catalogues reveal) increased pro- portionally.8 Between 1868 and 1885, the total number of printed titles registered in Bengal increased by almost 140 percent and in Madras by more than 8o percent. The percentage increase for the Bombay presidency was most dramatic at more than 340 percent-and also the most steady, with few sharp peaks or drastic declines (see Table I). What these data help

272 BOOK HISTORY

underscore are the beginnings of a period of immense literary and intellec- tual synergy promoted by an interaction in print among the different Indian languages as well as between them and English, so that while English print continued to be imported into India, it was never able to regain the peak it had marked in 1863-64.

When one calibrates publishing taxonomies of the Raj with those of today, the catalogues further reveal that, regional variations notwithstand- ing, educational titles formed more than half the total published output in India between 1867 and 1901, followed by government and commercial printing. Literature comprised approximately a third of total book titles published in the Bengal, Bombay, and Madras presidencies.' More than half the literary titles published in Indian presses were works of poetry; approximately a third were works of fiction; and fewer than a fifth were dramatic works, often translated or adapted from the ancient epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The regional variations in publishing output are nevertheless telling: Bombay was the forerunner in poetry pro- duction with Bengal, despite its long-standing tradition in verse, lagging behind by 0-20o percent. One reason for this lapse may lie with shifting Bengali tastes during the same period. In 1868, when poetry was roughly a third of Bengali print, fiction comprised approximately 6o percent of it, and while the output of fiction diminished considerably to average 32 per- cent by the end of the century, it begins to record the arrival of a new lit- erary form in Indian publishing. The novel emerged slowly: on average, only 25 percent of Bombay's published output was fiction, and zz percent in Madras. Included in this output as "fiction" during the period are not just original novels in the regional languages and occasionally in English, but also short stories, chapbooks, tales, and fables, as well as increasing numbers of translations and adaptations from British novels.

These details of Indian publishing arrive from some of the same sources that provide the macrohistorical account of Indian print production in Darnton's essay. When the details are absent, as they have been in the reports, they tell us more about British perspectives than about Indian pre- occupations - matters by no means uninteresting to cultural and social his- torians of empire. When the details appear as they do in the catalogues, they illuminate a literary world encountering a new fictional form for the first time. Indeed, if the birth of the novel is not the only insight evident from the archive (English education is another that begs further study), it is certainly among the most provocative. For the catalogues list not just the titles and print runs of novels produced by Indian authors; they also specify which novels were translated. From this we learn of Bankim's mas- sive influence throughout India; we also learn about the power and pres- tige of G. W. M. Reynolds, who was the most popular foreign novelist in

QUANTITATIVE METHOD, LITERARY HISTORY 273

India, reprinted and translated in almost a dozen languages between 1867 and 19o0.

The effort to understand Bankim's success and Reynolds's popularity brings us squarely to the domain of literary analysis. The statistics have sim- ply indicated the question, but only close textual reading-what Reynolds wrote and how, why, when, and where-can address why he was so widely read in India both in English and in Indian languages during the nineteenth century. When the answers emerge, they help illuminate not just the soci- ology of readership in colonial India, but also the fabrication of a public sphere, its complex encounter with modernity, and the social life of books and ideas as they come in contact with readers in the colonies.

Statistics, as Fernand Braudel cautioned, "are contributions, not solu- tions." Therefore, rather than forcing a divide between quantitative method and literary study, between statistics and cultural understanding, we should use each to enhance the other. Like all data, statistics ought to be regarded as approximations at best, only as good as the tools to retrieve and manip- ulate them, and therefore only provisional until different or better statistics -

or different or better methods of historical inquiry-emerge. Paradoxically, those most hostile to statistical research are often also those most reluctant to challenge it frontally, which is too bad, because flawed statistics need not necessarily be corrected by "correct" statistics; in some ways, challenges from conventional methods of literary scholarship are far more useful in correcting statistical distortions than more numbers might be.

The challenges that literary and cultural historians make to each other's interpretations might therefore be usefully extended to challenges of their statistical retrieval. Rather than shutting down discussion, these questions might advance it, as the editors of this journal have tried to do in this symposium on the epistemology of publishing statistics.

Notes

i. Appendix to the Calcutta Gazette for 1883 (Calcutta, 1883). 2. Robert Darnton, "Literary Surveillance in the British Raj: The Contradictions of Lib-

eral Imperialism," Book History 4 (zooo): 144. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, trans.

Richard Nice (New York: New Press, 1998), 2.

4. Bankim Chandra Chatterji, "A Popular Literature for Bengal," in Bankim Rachna- vali, ed. Jogesh Chandra Bagal (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1969), Ioo.

5. See my In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, zooz), especially chap. 4 on Bankim, which expands upon some of the quantitative and taxonomic material presented in the second part of this

essay. 6. Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences, trans. Surendranath Tagore (1917; reprint,

London: Macmillan, I99I), 87.

274 BOOK HISTORY

7. Ibid., 132. 8. For lists of annual book production, see A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Bengal

Presidency (Calcutta: Government Printing Press, 1867-1901); A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1867-1901); A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Madras Presidency, Fort St. George Gazette Supplement (Madras: Fort St. George Gazette Press, 1867-1901).

9. The 30 percent ratio of literature to total output is the average for all three presi- dencies, although occasionally regional variations were considerable. In 1876 and x88x, lit- erary titles were more than 50 percent of the total titles published in Bengal. Madras, where educational printing was far higher than in the other regions, saw an average of zo percent literary titles overall, with the lowest dip, of 13 percent, in 1881.