Rowshan Chowdhury, PhD candidate in English, has accomplished a great deal — here at UMass and in the field of American studies more broadly.
Prior to arriving at UMass Amherst, Chowdhury earned an MA in English and taught at a university in Bangladesh. She moved to the United States in 2017 to earn a second master’s degree; in 2019, she came to UMass Amherst to begin her doctoral studies.
You’re currently working on your dissertation. Can you tell me about your research?
I am a 19th-century Americanist, and my project investigates the investment of the United States in the colonial history of British India, focusing on the place of Indianness in the U.S. literary imagination in the long 19th century, particularly via figurations of uprisings and rebellions.
I am working on how the concept of Indian anti-colonial rebellion turns into the concept of mutiny in 19th-century American writings. The 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in British India was the first war of Indian independence, also called the “Sepoy Mutiny” or “Indian Mutiny” by historians.
One of my chapters focuses on the naming of this event as a mutiny. This concept struck me when I was exploring the newspaper The Christian Recorder, published by the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. A report from 1857 condemned the Sepoys and rebellion in India; this indifference to the anticolonial rebellion of Indians among African Americans shocked me. I started to dig deep into the definition of mutiny from a 19th-century perspective to understand why the concept of anti-colonial rebellion in India appeared as mutinous to Americans.
Focusing on the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, I show how Asian Indians rebelled against British colonizers and how that rebellion was imagined in U.S. writings. When you talk about British India, the United States is somehow absent. I'm looking at literary texts and newspapers published in the 19th century to explore how Indian rebellions became a sensational topic in the United States. There was a huge audience for newspapers regularly reporting what was happening in India and how Indians were fighting against the British Raj. I pay particular attention to the figurative use of the terms “Indians” or “Mutiny” that appeared across the triangular network uniting Britain, the United States, and British India.
By showing how stories about India were republished and even rewritten across this network, I demonstrate how India functioned as a real and metaphorical space through which Americans staged issues such as race, Indianness, and colonialism, and that the U.S.-India interaction we talk about today originated long ago.
Can you share more about the historical newspapers you’re looking at?
Along with the literary writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Mark Twain, one chapter of my dissertation focuses on 19th-century newspapers and the transatlantic newspaper network. Working on old newspapers is rigorous intensive work. I'm collecting data on which American newspapers reported on Indian rebellions, how those reports were borrowed from British newspapers, and who the subscribers of those newspapers were. To do that, I am reading through British newspapers, American newspapers, and South Asian newspapers from the 19th century.
I'm discovering exciting and thought-provoking things such as how some African American and Native American newspapers did not support anti-colonial rebellions of Asian Indians. The newspapers portrayed Asian Indians as “savage” and violent because Indians were fighting against British colonizers, Americans’ Christian brothers. I'm trying to find out more about that complexity. I want to understand why oppressed peoples in the United States didn't support Asian Indians, and also why they decided to support the British who were oppressing, colonizing, and living on land illegally occupied.
When we think of that intimacy of continents like Lisa Lowe said, it is not so easy. It is more complicated, and there was — and still, there is, I think — an empathetic distance even among all oppressed groups.
And I am not only looking at newspapers or periodicals, but I have also found many 19th-century drawings, photographs, pamphlets, broadsides, playbills, and posters exoticizing and advertising the dramatic (and sensationalized) presentation of the Sepoy Rebellion for commercial profit in the United States.
What archives have you been researching in?
I went to the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester last summer. It's a quiet cozy archive, and it is an invaluable resource for 19th-century Americanists. I collected data there including playbills, advertisements, and broadsides. I also visited the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for a few days.
Wow, that is fascinating work. Have you received any funding to help with travel costs? Will you be visiting more archives?
I have recently received a Fieldwork Grant from the UMass Amherst Graduate School for my research. So I'm going to the British Library for a month to access some 19th-century Indian newspapers, both in Bengali and English.
I also received the Michael Kraus Research Grant from the American Historical Association to do research at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., which holds many rare documents and periodicals from 19th-century India.
This winter, I plan to go to the New York Public Library. It holds significant documents on John Greenleaf Whittier whose poem about the Sepoy Rebellion glorifies the British victory over Indian natives. Interestingly, Whittier was also the editor of The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper. The second chapter of my dissertation engages with Whittier’s literary and editorial stance (a contradictory one) regarding the Sepoy Rebellion.
It sounds like you’re enjoying all this archival research?
Archival work is fun, but it requires a lot of traveling. Still, this is something I like, something I feel passionate about: going to archives, discovering those distorted or hidden narratives, and presenting a counter-narrative of things we knew or believed for so long — these aspects add originality to my project.
Not everything I find in archives is relevant to my dissertation, but I note them down and take pictures and videos of those documents. I also scan them when possible. I know that if I don't use all of them in my dissertation, I will use them for my first monograph or other publications. Even though some of the archival materials have been digitized, many are not.
Can you digitize the 19th-century advertisement of a drama on the Sepoy Rebellion on a five-foot-long fabric? Even if you do, can you feel its actual gravity? Seeing those long-preserved materials — some of which have not been touched in many years — in archives and feeling their physical existence makes a huge difference to me. Now that I have seen many of the documents with my eyes, I can discuss them with more confidence.
I know you’ve presented this work at conferences (and you’re also now a MLA Regional Delegate).
I have. While presenting at conferences such as MLA, NeMLA, ASA, ALA, AAS, MELUS, and C19, I saw many distinguished scholars listening to my work and asking me questions. These are the people I'm citing in my dissertation. And they were right there. This is big. This is scary. But I think this is necessary, too.
Conferences gave me a lot of confidence. It's not that all the papers I presented went well. It is not that I was very confident about all of my projects. But this has prepared me to go to the next conference and then to go to the next conference.
Do you have any last thoughts you would like to share?
I feel that my whole PhD life so far would have been more difficult if I did not have a very supportive committee. At the end of the day, you need a good human being, not just a great scholar to work with. And I'm glad that I get to work with professors like Asha Nadkarni, Laura Doyle, Caroline Yang, Hoang Phan, and Britt Rusert. I am lucky to have people around me who always make me feel like my work is worthy; whatever I'm doing is interesting and valuable. Even when I think I am not doing much, they make me feel that I'm doing a lot. This keeps us, PhD students, going.
In 2023, Chowdhury was awarded the English Department’s Meredith B. Raymond Scholarship. More recently, she received a Michael Kraus Research Grant from the American Historical Association for research at the Library of Congress, a Graduate School Fieldwork Research Grant for research at the British Library in London, and a Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She has also been selected as a participant in the 2024 Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth.