I was fortunate to be awarded the 2025 President’s Fellowship from the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), which enabled me to spend time in Oxford researching the presence of Indian objects in the visual culture of the Romantic period. The fellowship gave me access to extraordinary collections at the Bodleian Libraries allowing me to explore the ways in which India featured in ephemeral and print forms at the time.
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Spending time in Oxford was an experience in itself. The city is filled with world-famous colleges, whose grand, imposing doors dominate a part of Oxford. As I walked past them each day, I could not help but reflect on how such architecture symbolises processes of opulence and grandeur as well as those of tragic exclusion. I was reminded, for instance, of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), in which the protagonist wished vainly to enrol for scholarship in the “dreaming spires of Oxford,” as Matthew Arnold phrased it separately.[1] For me, as a woman, as a scholar of colour, the high gates of Oxford University recalled these long legacies of exclusion from knowledge and privilege. Yet being able to cross into some of these spaces through the support of a BARS fellowship was profoundly moving. I have come to appreciate how valuable initiatives such as this are in opening access to places that were once closed to so many.
During my stay, I spent many hours working in the Bodleian libraries, consulting prints and satirical images that are not always easily available in digital form. Handling these materials in person was an invaluable experience. The varying scales, colour, and physicality of the prints often carry emotional, archival meanings that can sometimes get lost in reproduction. Indeed, I was struck by how much the quality of paper, ink, or even marginal annotations added to my understanding, transporting me to a different world, the eighteenth-century world of conversation, conviviality, and petty and fierce emotional conflicts that was characteristic of the period.
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Looking for material things in the satires, I came across a caricature in which an Indian turban is exaggerated almost to the point of absurdity, visually ridiculing both the wearer and Britain’s fascination with Eastern commodities – mostly as a consequence of the East India Company’s long engagement with India as well as its ongoing ambitions of a political empire in the subcontinent. The images reminded me that the Romantic period was not only a time of poetic reflection, but also one of intense visual commentary on Britain’s global position.
I also visited the Ashmolean Museum and consulted dress and, textiles, jewellery, and shawls. The recent emphasis on interdisciplinarity in museum setting also provided a mental space in which I could readily build an imaginative bridge between words and things. Coming across a gorgeous Kashmiri/ “India” shawl, for instance, I was reminded of how the late eighteenth century playwright Elizabeth Inchbald used a fine Indian shawl to provide a stereotype of women’s fashion in her farce Appearance is Against Them (1788). The shawl in the play is constantly being stolen; and as such, it showcased the vast gap between a “gift” and a “bribe” to eventually take aim at the corruption of the East India Company in the subcontinent in which many expensive things and commodities changed hands.[2]
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My time in Oxford has encouraged me to think more carefully about how material culture, especially textiles, communicated ideas about the East in the literary Romantic period. In particular, it has developed my thinking on a book project exploring the representation of India in the literature and culture of the period. I am deeply grateful to BARS for this fellowship. I would also like to extend my thanks to the librarians at Bodleian, and to Mathew Winterbottom, Caroline Palmer, and Katherine Wodehouse at the Ashmolean Museum.
Dr Suchitra Choudhury (she/her) is an Affiliate Researcher with the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Following a PhD in English literature, she has published widely on the cultural history of Kashmiri and Paisley shawls in venues including Textile History, Victorian Literature and Culture, and The Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR). Her award-winning monograph Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture was published by Ohio University Press in 2023. It is the first major study of oriental shawls in literature and shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British empire in the extended nineteenth century.
[1] Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994)
Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author’s Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, << https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43608/thyrsis-a-monody-to-commemorate-the-authors-friend-arthur-hugh-clough>>
[2] See my, “It Came over but Last Night from India” The Shawl as Gift in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Appearance Is against Them (1785)”, Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture (Ohio UP, 2023), 59-79.
