This essay examines scenes from prose fiction in which two Indian novelists (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Fakir Mohan Senapati) interrogated subalternity in colonial India by talking about books. It first examines narrators’ frustration with books as acts of “irreverent reading” in colonial India, where the presence and scarcity of readable print produced anxieties about language and community. It then examines “reading” in the novels and compares how different kinds of irreverence allows narrators to introduce women characters as agents of very different kinds of violence in colonial India. Following insights of Gayatri Spivak, Elleke Boehmer, and Leah Price, and others, this article argues that Fakir Mohan Senapati’s sensitivity to his readers’ inability to access books enabled his novel to empower readers without books and emphasize how community in colonial India was constituted by the collective forgetting of women.
