“Give it a definite literary flavour”: Humphry House’s Experiments with the Pamphlet as Genre

Abstract

Humphry House’s I Spy with My Little Eye (1937) was a satirical pamphlet which explores the system of “spyarchy” that had been imposed in Bengal in the late 1930s by the colonial police. This meant a constant surveillance of thought, action and writing by the state, accompanied by “messy” operations of policing through casual informants. The pamphlet was received enthusiastically in Bengal, where its perceptiveness and use of humour to call out an oppressive regime were appreciated. Its reception in England was less warm. This paper is an attempt to understand the political moment which produced this mysterious text and to explore the generic experiments which the author undertakes in his writing of it. It situates the author within the Calcutta social circles he inhabited and the text within two intersecting traditions: that of satirical pamphleteering and of political pamphleteering, in order to assert its importance in the history of pamphlets in terms of generic flexibility.