ABSTRACT
I ndians in the British Empire never seemed to read at all. This is the conclusion one might draw from the popular and pervasive accounts of India and Indians in the British novel of the period. Even those novelists who knew India well from living there, such as Kipling, Forster, and Orwell, had Indians do all sorts of things including travel in trains, deliver and receive mail, play cricket and polo, bargain, dissemble, squat, spy, eat, shout, sleep, talk, hunt, and then talk some more-but they never represented them reading. True, Wilkie Collins showed three Indians work with ink in The Moonstone (1868), but all they used it for was to elicit pseudo-mystical m umbo-jumbo from the palms o f a ten-year old mesmerist hired for the purpose o f locating a holy diamond, news that the three Indians might have more easily got from a newspaper-that is, if they read, or were allowed to, in the hands o f these writers.2
