Of literary jackfruits and the female sage: The colonial Bengali reception of George Eliot

George Eliot was read in select circles of the English‐educated colonial Bengali intelligentsia but her popularity was never unqualified. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) in an 1882 essay recalls with admiration the passage in Middlemarch about a squirrel's heartbeat, but in an 1892 essay he compares her novels to a jackfruit (a large tropical multiple fruit) and suggests that each of her novels can be helpfully divided into several smaller ones. In the Bengali novel Kahake (‘Whom?’; 1898) by Tagore's elder sister Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal (1855–1932), later translated into English as An Unfinished Song (1913) by the author herself, four Bengali characters appear to be familiar with George Eliot's novels and one of these characters even claims George Eliot to be as great as Shakespeare in her own realm. But the enthusiasm shown by this fictional character was not necessarily replicated by real‐life Bengali readers of English novels in the long nineteenth century. Standard histories of Bengali literature never register George Eliot to be a major influence on the Bengali novel. Besides, her novels were hardly adapted in Bengali. The case made by some critics that Tagore's epic novel Gora (1909–1910) was palpably influenced by Felix Holt, the Radical is not widely accepted. A 1909 article published in the monthly Prabasi calls Tagore the ‘George Eliot of Bengal’ because of the similarity between Tagore and George Eliot as regards the attention they give to the exploration of human psychology in their novels. The same article declares that George Eliot's novels are for the refined intellect and likely to be detested by the common reader. This article also observes that George Eliot's novels have been profitably read by many as lessons in psychology. This comment signals another tendency in the Bengali reception of George Eliot, that of hailing her as a (female) sage. This tendency is also seen in an 1885 article published in the monthly Bharati , which discusses her non‐fictional writing especially with respect to her affinity with Comte's Positivism and mentions her novels only in passing. The comments on George Eliot generated by the colonial Bengali elite seem to be aware of her gender but consistently highlight the intellectual appeal of her corpus irrespective of her gendered identity.