The allusion to East Lynne , coloniality and inter‐cultural gender politics in the first Bengali science fiction story

This article contextualises and analyses the allusion to the novel East Lynne (1861) occurring in the first science fiction short story published in the Bengali language. The story entitled Rahasya (‘Mystery’ or ‘Joke’; 1882) by Hemlal Dutta contains a passing and off‐hand reference to the character named Cornelia present in the Victorian novel. Miss Cornelia Carlyle, who is shown to be an authoritarian and irritable unmarried woman in East Lynne , is briefly mentioned to indicate that Miss Harvey in the Bengali story possesses similar characteristics. However, the Bengali story ignores many of the respectable facets of Cornelia in favour of a reductive, sexist stereotype, thus betraying a patriarchal sentiment that is shared between the colonising and the colonised cultures. Miss Harvey’s anger at the narrator’s comically misdirected message shows her to be alien to the homosocial bond shared between the Bengali narrator and his English friend Harvey in the contact zone of the imperial metropolis. The allusion to Cornelia shows the story’s awareness of the broad socio‐cultural matrix in which science and technology are embedded. This article records the sparse evidence of the once‐popular novel’s reception in colonial India to indicate how the Bengali story alludes to the novel as part of its cultural capital and for naturalising gender stereotypes across a cultural divide.