Decolonising Victorian Pedagogy: A Methodology for Engaging with Literary Commons from the Global South

From Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest (1990) to Susie Tharu’s Subject to Change (1998), though much has been written about the functions of English (read ‘language’) in India, English literary studies in Indian Higher Education Institutions has been underrepresented in academic teaching and research practices across the global Anglophone world. As not much has been discussed in academia of English Departments in Universities and Colleges situated across colonial cities of India and their sustained attempt to read Victorian literature of Great Britain in its societal and ideological context, such analysis will not only facilitate to problematise the assumed universality of the Western canon of literary criticism but will also enable us to dismantle power structures inherited from the practices of colonisation. As a response to the global call for Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, the essay suggests ways to break away from the hegemony of the Western academia while introducing new frameworks to transform Victorian Studies. Limiting such radicalism to knowledge cultures fostered at capitalist countries of Europe and America will fail to eradicate the difference among transnational and transhistorical issues. Hence in a move against privileging structures generated by settler institutions to indigenous knowledge systems, the concerned article promotes the critical framing and pedagogical decision-making of institutions which function beyond the Western axis.