In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.
Mukhopadhyay鈥檚 account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier鈥檚 manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women鈥檚 literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.
Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize, Yale University
- Honorable Mention for the SHARP Book History Book Prize
- Winner of the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, Macmillan Center at Yale
- Winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize, Journal for the History of Ideas
- Shortlisted for the Stansky Book Prize, North American Conference on British Studies
- Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies, Modern Language Association
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is assistant professor of English at Yale University.
"Detailed. . . . [and] well-documented."鈥�Choice
"The title of Priyasha Mukhopadhyay’s Required Reading is not only witty (every review will begin with the words all authors crave!) but also provides a glimpse into the sophistication at work on every page of this gem."鈥擯riti Joshi, Victorian Periodicals Review聽鈥嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧��
"Priyasha Mukhopadhyay’s Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire offers an innovative contribution to the intersecting fields of postcolonial studies, comparative empire studies, and book history. Mukhopadhyay lucidly examines the entanglement of textuality and power in colonial South Asia by uncovering a seemingly banal yet significant administrative colonial archive."鈥擱awan Althunyan, ariel
"A tour de force. . . . Mukhopadhyay persuasively revises our understanding of reading in the colonial world."鈥擟edric Van Dijck, Postcolonial Text
"Required Reading is a valuable addition to the cultural history of the Raj and the history of reading and print culture. . . . It will be little surprise if, with time, this book might itself become required reading for students of the textual archive of empire."鈥擜tul V. Nair, Victorian Review
"Mukhopadhyay invites us to cast a critical eye not just on how people read in British India, but what the limits of reading were for a host of colonial subjects. . . . [W]hat Mukhopadhyay’s emphasis on the functional archive of imperial readership allows us to appreciate with particular vividness is what we might call the enduring and regenerative coloniality of the Englishness of English literature itself."鈥擜ntoinette Burton, Victorian Studies
“Priyasha Mukhopadhyay’s ambitious and inventive excavation of ‘functional’ genres in colonial South Asia brings back to life a forgotten textual landscape whose impact can be explained by none of our usual literary-critical interpretive operations. Neither passively absorbing the content of these works nor heroically repudiating them, the otherwise undocumented historical figures reconstructed by her meticulous research manage to assent and reappropriate at the same time, forging surprising blends of suspicion with belief and identification with distance.”—Leah Price, Rutgers University
“Required Reading is an extraordinarily inventive work of scholarship that brilliantly uncovers the material bases for modernity’s explosive contract with print. Mukhopadhyay’s research on Empire’s archives offers two dazzling conclusions: that imperial textuality articulated its power but paradoxically seeded resistance; and little of what constitutes ‘reading’ has been literary or even literal.”—Priya Joshi, Temple University
“This enchanting and witty book goes rummaging in the paper residues of the British empire and emerges with compelling and inventive insights on readers, reception and the history of imperial rule itself.”—Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand
This publication has been produced to meet accepted Accessibility standards and contains various accessibility features including concise image descriptions, a table of contents, a page list to navigate to pages corresponding to the print source version, and elements such as headings for structured navigation. Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system.
Accessibility Features
-
Inaccessible, or known limited accessibility
-
No known hazards or warnings
