Readers and their texts: Priyasha Mukhopadhyay on ‘Required Reading’

If you hate filing taxes or fumbling your way through a confusing instruction manual, it might comfort you to know that you’re taking part in a longstanding conflict between people and their paperwork. 

“The kinds of relationships that nineteenth century readers forged with written materials are not unlike the kinds of relationships that we forge with these materials in the present,” said Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, a literary historian of the British empire and Assistant Professor of English. “Who hasn't felt worried in tax season when they have to fill in their tax forms? Who hasn't felt frustrated when they haven't been able to figure out what's happening in an instruction manual?” 

Mukhopadhyay’s work focuses on writings from the nineteenth century to the present, with a special emphasis on run-of-the-mill documents like censuses, petitions, official forms, and other everyday writings encountered by people living under British colonial rule in South Asia. 

Her first book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024), examines writings that exemplify how Britain viewed its subjects—and how those subjects understood, subverted, and experienced the empire. Mukhopadhyay’s work pays special attention to the relationships readers would form with these texts and expertly excavates the mundanity, confusion, and occasional humor that shaped those relationships. 

Required Reading has garnered Mukhopadhyay several awards. She won the 2024 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies from the Modern Language Association, the 2025 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize from Yale’s MacMillan Center, and the 2024 Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for the best first book in intellectual history. The book also received an honorable mention for the SHARP Book History Book Prize and was shortlisted for the NACBS’ Stansky Book Prize. 

The FAS also honored Mukhopadhyay for Required Reading, awarding her the 2024-25 Samuel ’60 and Ronnie ’72 Heyman Prize. In studying texts written hundreds of years ago, Mukhopadhyay said she’s become “more and more interested in the way in which historical readers responded to these texts in the moment of their publication.”

“That's what led to Required Reading and made me think about the way historical readers under the British empire in South Asia dealt with the masses of writing and paperwork that they encountered in their daily lives.”

Close readings of mundane—and surprising—documents 

Along with the British empire’s incursion into India came masses of written material. Many texts were technical—instruction manuals, forms, and petitions, and more—while some literary. At this moment in the nineteenth century, people in colonial South Asia were inundated with writings telling them how to order their lives. 

“There's generally this sense of being completely overwhelmed,” Mukhopadhyay said of people’s reaction to the explosion of written material. In colonial Bengal, for example, people were confronted with the empire’s demands to restructure time via almanacs. “Previously, people would navigate something like a religious ritual without a book that told them how to do it. And suddenly you have an almanac that says, ‘okay, this needs to happen at X time and Y time,’” she explained. “It's not like these things didn't happen before. It's just that they didn't necessarily take the same mass printed circulatable form.”

Some of the technical documents Mukhopadhyay analyzed include petitions that people living in the empire’s shadow would write to its officials, seeking redress for property issues, conflicts with neighbors, and other problems. “I know things like petitions and forms aren't necessarily meant to be humorous,” she said, “but often, reading the stories documented in petitions, it's fun to see the double-edged sarcasm that's often ingrained into them.”  

Petitioners sometimes poked fun at the contradictions or hierarchy of empire in a tongue-in-cheek way, Mukhopadhyay said. “You've got the colonized subject being downtrodden by empire, but there are these moments of humor in those statements as well. There's a self-awareness and a kind of playfulness with which people start using these genres and forms as a way of getting what they want.”

A turn-of-the-century magazine for Indian women

Mukhopadhyay also examined literary texts to understand readers in South Asia. The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, a first-of-its-kind women’s magazine, offered her a peek into the lives of women grappling with their relationship to empire. Luckily, a full print run of it was preserved in the British Library, one of many places around the world where Mukhopadhyay conducted her archival research.

The Indian Ladies’ Magazine was first published in Madras in 1901 and “wore a bunch of different hats” during its run, Mukhopadhyay said. “It was a women’s literary magazine but also ran articles about political meetings and had recipes and quick tips for how to run your household. It was a grab bag that gave a sense of what the modern Indian woman in the twentieth century was supposed to be like.”

The magazine was run almost single-handedly by Kamala Satthianadhan, an “extraordinary writer and intellectual in her own right” who imagined the magazine as “catering to Indian women like herself—people who were English literate and educated.” Less than one percent of Indian women in Madras could read English in 1901, and yet Satthianadhan saw the magazine having “an expansive life providing a link between Indian women and their British counterparts,” Mukhopadhyay explained. 

“She often had British women write articles for it as well, and parts of the magazine were reprinted in British magazines in London and vice versa. She kind of saw it as a bridge or a mode of exchange between these different communities of women,” Mukhopadhyay said, pointing out how Satthianadhan’s work provided unique insight into how women saw themselves and related to each other during British colonial rule.

The next chapter: Data and empire

Mukhopadhyay is now in the midst of research for her next book, an exploration of data visualization and its interlinkages with the British empire. “Data visualization propelled empire or generated arguments about it,” she said of the upcoming project. “In turn, empire generated raw material and raw data that then fueled the development of data visualization as a field.” 

She plans to analyze canonical documents in the field of data visualization to reinterpret them in light of the colonial data they represented. She’ll study William Playfair, who is “widely credited with creating the first pie chart and the first line graph,” as well as Florence Nightingale, “who developed and employed a surprising amount of data visualization in the advocacy for public health reform,” said Mukhopadhyay.

“What’s interesting about those [examples] is they often draw on data from imperial contexts, but people are more interested in the technical innovation than what the data is actually showing,” she explained. “I’m going to reread these early moments in data visualization history and think about what we see when we add empire back into the mix. My sense is that data visualization and empire have been entangled for much longer than we realize.” 

Mukhopadhyay will be busy this spring teaching two courses: “The South Asian Novel Now,” in which students will read novels in English as well as translations from Hindi, Bengali, and Kannada; and “Theory and Praxis of Material Histories,” a workshop she’s co-teaching alongside Yale Library Special Collections Curator Julia Hernandez that will see students engage in the “close analysis and physical handling of rare books, maps, manuscripts, images, objects, and textiles.”

All of it is characteristic of Mukhopadhyay’s approach: patient, meticulous, creative, and deeply curious about other people and how they lived.

“Despite the historical gulf, it has been really interesting for me to see that in the nineteenth century people were terrified of paperwork and had a kind of morbid fascination with it,” she said. “And that continues for us in the twenty-first century as well.”