“How many people’s happiness were in his guardianship!”: A Postcolonial 1 Reading of the Representation of Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice Kaustav Bakshi Lecturer in English, Haldia Govt. College It’s high time that the novels of Jane Austen were to be studied as powerful political texts, and the traditional view that they were apolitical and naïve was done away with. It was Edward Said who had set the ball rolling when he pointed out that Austen’s Mansfield Park contributed to “an expanding imperialist venture” 2 ; even before that, critics such as Avrom Flieshman and R.S. Neale had reviewed the novel as an imperialist literary work. However, Said’s contrapuntal reading of the novel was much more hyped and influential. Since then, critics started taking Austen more seriously in that they began looking for signs of controversial discourses in her fiction. Maaja Stewart observes, “…the controversies surrounding [imperialism in the East and West Indies] became part of the discourses of that age that penetrated all aspects of metropolitan culture, including Austen’s texts.” 3 Therefore, it is important to re-read Austen keeping in mind that she was not at all uninformed of what was going on beyond the boundaries of Regency England. To quote Elleke Boehmer: “In the view of the British imperial nation, its history made up a tale of firsts, bests, and absolute beginnings. Where the British established a cross, a city, or a colony, they proclaimed the start of a new history. Other histories, by definition, were declared of lesser significance or, in certain situations, non-existent. N. B: This paper was read as a part of a lecture on “Rethinking Jane Austen” organized by the English Academy of St. Xavier’s College on 30 April 2007.