'Marvelous Excesses: English Travel Writing and India, 1608–1727'

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2002

Pramod K. Nayar was a period of crisis for the English in India. The several wars, charges of corruption, infighting at the East India House (London), mounting debts,1 the Parliamentary investigations of the 1780s, and the trial of Warren Hastings (beginning in 1788), followed by the appointment and disputed recall of Governor-General Arthur Wellesley, eroded the East India Company's (EIC) standing. Meanwhile, numerous English soldiers died in battles or suffered imprisonment across India. The Annual Register (1767:41) and other periodicals noted the crisis. The India affairs were described as "embarrassed* (CR 35:1) and India itself as a "precarious possession" (The Times, 25 February 1785). However, India's importance to England continued to grow amidst these problems. Englishmen continued to see India as a career, as the Monthly Review pointed out (MR 78:396). William Thomson in Memoirs of the Late War in Asia (1781) unambiguously stated that "the preservation of India. .. [is]. .. the only means of saving us from a general bankruptcy" (1:305). Control over land, revenue, trade, and military superiority emerged as the prime concerns for the EIC, as the several letters between Fort William (Calcutta) and India House illustrate. Extensive descriptions of the Indian landscape also mark travelogues of the period. In this essay I shall focus on the manner in which aesthetics and colonial ideology imbricate in these descriptions. I argue from the premise that contemporary aesthetics helped furnish a ready tool with which the traveller could articulate specifically colonial themes in her/his narrative. More importantly, aesthetics frequently helped camouflage colonial ideology

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2012

Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies.

The history of English travel narratives reveals that its origin and development is closely linked to the British encounter with the colonial 'other.' In the 'golden age' of European navigation and discovery travel narratives emerged in England in an effort to familiarise the unknown and the strange. Once the initial mapping was done by the navigators, travellers, artists and explorers went to the newly discovered territories and narrated the natural as well as the ethnographic conditions they observed there. Such travel narratives undoubtedly had a role in advancing the colonial and the imperial agenda, though simultaneously, they influenced the growth of modern form of tourism during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. William Hodges was the first European landscape painter to visit India. During his stay in India (1780-85) he travelled extensively and made several sketches for his paintings, forty eight of which were completed and published between 1785 and 1788 as Select Views of India. A few years later he wrote Travels in India, During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, & 1783 (1793). The present article aims to explore how Hodges exceeds his artistic self and becomes an apologist for the emerging British Empire in India.

The theory revolution and the counter-traditional wave in humanities in the 1980s have garnered attention towards new localism by positing alternatives to the great tradition. In this, Travel writing has proved adaptable and responsive to post-colonial and Globalization studies, thereby shaking off its 'middlebrow' status. Keeping in mind the relevance of travel writing in Global politics, the paper aims to engage with In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller's Tale (1992) by Amitav Ghosh to delineate the question of History, Travel and Narrative in Indian English Travel Writing. The paper contends that Ghosh uses the Hybrid non-fiction space of the travelogue to write a counter-narrative to the Eurocentric discourse of Travel writing. It seeks to foreground that the reverse Grand tour of Amitav Ghosh problematizes the western hegemonic hold on the field of Ethnography and History. The paper is divided into two parts-the first part will establish In an Antique Land as Resistive subaltern history, followed by the second part, which focuses on Ghosh's privileging of third world ethnography to write an alternative narrative.

2014

The last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first few of the twentieth witnessed an explosion of travel literature from Eastern India, particularly from Bengal. That Calcutta was the capital of British India till 1911 was of course one, of its reasons. The spread of English education for the middle class in the nineteenth century played a significant role in developing such narratives. It is through learning English that the enlightened Bengali of the new age learnt to see modern Europe. Also the emancipation of women, inculcated to a great extent by the progressive Brahmo Samaj movement, made the weaker sex venture into Victorian homes. Apart from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, these sea voyages to Europe and to England in particular, (often referred to by a general term ‘Vilayet’ in most of the writings) gained greater impetus and were recorded in a variety of literary forms ranging from diaries, religious tracts, personal memoirs, comparative analyses of the ...

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017

Indians have reportedly been traveling to Europe since the seventeenth century and narrativizing their travel accounts at least since the mid-eighteenth century. However, 'travelogue', what we know by European standards, as a genre in the Indian context is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, the literary 'modernity' that purportedly ushered thereafter, and the high noon of Indian nationalism. Citing late nineteenth and early twentieth century 'Indian' travelogues, this paper examines the stakes in the Indian travelers emulating the eighteenth century Grand Tourist, and demonstrates how the literary articulation of tourism therein is symptomatic of an elitist-exclusionary mindset that strived to showcase cultural proximity with the colonizer on the one hand, while distantiating the colonially un(der)exposed 'natives' on the other hand.

This article throws light on the biographical sketch of the travellers' who not only witnessed and experienced the Indian culture, religious ceremonies and the society in the Mughal state but also penned down their observations on the basis of their perceptions and experiences. When we piece together their treatises, they give us interesting insight about the religious and cultural landscape of the Mughal Empire. A detailed account of their contacts with the state and the society will help us understand the original contributions to the accounts which they have written during or after their visits to India.

The article explores the accounts of European travellers of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the context of images and representations of India. During these two centuries, about hundred travellers came to India from Europe and wrote accounts of their experiences. As travel writing had developed into a very popular genre in the early modern Europe, some of these accounts were published many times, translated into important European languages and read extensively. Some of them were also included in the popular anthologies and collections of travel writings. These travel accounts, therefore, became the first means to represent the 'reality' of India. This study is directly concerned with these early European representations and narrative constructions and problematizes them in relation to the 'reality' of India. KEY WORDS Travel Writing, Colonial India, European Imperialism, Early Modern Period, Orientalism