Shuchi Kapila. Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1126-7. Price: US$39.95

Historians have long provided accounts of the indirect nature of British rule in India, wherein (especially in the so-called native princely states), the British ruled more by proxy rather than direct assumption of state power. Shuchi Kapila’s Educating Seeta adds a fresh literary angle to this discussion by analyzing the narrative tropes through which the complexities of indirect rule were mediated. As becomes evident, Kapila’s reference to indirect rule applies not only to the British policy in princely states but also to the broader compunctions of colonial liberalism. By focusing on depictions of interracial family structures–involving Britons and Indians–Kapila examines how the affective sway of family romance provided a key idiom for representing these relationships and also textualizing the fantasy of liberal rule in nineteenth-century India. In keeping with the expansive referentiality of romance in general, the family romance functions as an “allegory of indirect rule,” highlighting its modes of consolidation as well as its limits (2). Those familiar with Doris Sommer’s work on the efficacy of family romances in consolidating nationalist consciousness in nineteenth-century Latin America will appreciate Kapila’s deft appropriation of this framework to study the legitimation of a purportedly benevolent imperial structure in nineteenth-century India. For Kapila, the definition of family romance widens to refer to the “interracial love between an English man and an Indian woman” as well as to the “political conflict represented as [interracial] domestic drama” in which Indian women appear as wives, daughters, or widows (2). That the empire variously insinuated itself into the literary and cultural production of Victorian Britain has been widely acknowledged by now. By focusing on Anglo-Indian romances, however, Educating Seeta emphasizes an aspect of literary representation which is often overlooked. In contrast to the many Victorian novels in which the empire appears as a deus ex machina that enables several plot lines to be reconciled before being banished to provide narrative closure, Kapila points to the Anglo-Indian family romance “as a necessary supplement to the Victorian novel” because by focusing on interracial alliances, such novels posit the empire as the starting point for the narrative (9). The Anglo-Indian family romance, therefore, offers a sustained consideration of the “linguistic and cultural osmosis” that characterized nineteenth-century imperial culture (9). In so doing, it foregrounds the realm of the intimate, which has been critical in illuminating the multiple negotiations underpinning colonial rule. By drawing attention to the genre of family romance, Kapila offers an important literary site for reading colonial intimacies in terms that are fraught but non-agonistic and, therefore, possibly more nuanced. The two chapters that comprise Part One highlight how interracial conjugality was common in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. A brief preface documents how interracial liaisons between East India Company officers and Indian women were not subject to official sanction, as indeed they were in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion when more segregationist measures informed Anglo-Indian life. One of the merits of the preface lies in Kapila’s caveat on the question of hybridity. While acknowledging the theoretical efficacy of the concept, Kapila’s argument makes clear that although it is tempting to herald a hybrid culture (and offspring) as challenging discrete identity categories, a hybrid identity borne of interracial alliances simply did not gain political force in colonial South Asia. Instead, by focusing on “an analysis of the tropes of family as they encode moves of assimilation, collaboration, and resistance” (31), the argument looks more to the tapestry of interracial domesticity for the multiple maneuvers and affiliations that can get glossed over by the rubric of hybridity. The first chapter examines the domestic life of William Linnaeus Gardner …