Nayar Pramod K. - Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire

INDIAN
TRAVEL WRITING
IN THE
AGE OF EMPIRE

INDIAN
TRAVEL WRITING
IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE
18301940

Pramod K. Nayar

BLOOMSBURY INDIA

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First published in India 2020

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ISBN: HB: 978-93-89000-92-4; eBook: 978-93-89000-94-8

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Contents

I thank Chandra Sekhar of Bloomsbury India for inviting me to submit a book proposal, and for readily accepting this oneit has been in the pipelines for a long time, but it took Chandra Sekhars insistence for it to take concrete shape.

Many thanks to the ecosystem in which most of my travels occur:

My parents; parents-in-law; Nandini and Pranav, and their ever-reliable, loving support for these academic itineraries;

FriendsIbrahim, Josy, Ajeet, Neelu, Vaishali, Haneef, Savitha, Naveed, Premlata, Shruti, Soma for their unfailing enquiries about my perambulations;

Nandanagentle, affectionate and ever-present contributor to the traffic of ideas, and for insistence on proper localizing and historicizing of Theory;

Molly, a.k.a. Chechu, for her prayers, when I set out every time;

Mentor, teacher, biblio-reference desk (also available for online help and consultation), K. Narayana Chandran (KNC), whose knowledge of routes into the most unexpected, and unsuspected, of realms (from St Augustine to Udta Punjab) is matched only by his wit and generosity in being pathfinderto KNC, I owe reams of pages filled with gratitude;

Gratitude, boundless, to my loving interlocutor and friend, Anna Kurian, who flags off the journey, clears the route and ensures my safe runespecially in terms of dodging disasters such as the potholes and obstacles of bad verb forms and thinkingto the destined destination. This one is for you, Anna, fellow traveller through my, what, 40+ books?

To Soma Ghosh, LibrarianEnglish, of the Salar Jung Museum (SJM) Library, I express my special gratitude for finding these texts and for making my Library visits and research so comfortable and fun. Soma was not only thrilled that somebody actually wanted to use these texts, but also began her own project of digging them up and digitizing many of them;

Special mention must be made of the fact that the principal texts discussed here were discovered in a ledger-catalogue at SJM many years ago by Anna. This books journey began with that serendipitous, Columbine moment of discovery; and

To Dinesh at SJM, for his constant good cheer and help, a separate Thank you.

Parts of this book originated in the form of early essays, and I am very grateful to the editors and referees of these journals for their observations and suggestions:

1. Colonial Subjects and Aesthetic Understanding: Indian Travel Literature about England, 18701900, South Asian Review 33.1 (2012).
2. Beyond the Colonial Subject: Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Self-fashioning in Sarat Chandra Das A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 14.2 (2012).

Excerpts from many of the travel narratives used in this book appeared in my edited collection, Indian Travel Writing, 18301947 (5 volumes, Routledge, 2016).

To the reviewer of the manuscript, for incisive comments: this book is better for them, so thank you, wherever you are in the wide, wide world of Indian academia.

A part of Chapter Four, Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire, was delivered as a plenary talk at the India Travel Writings 1500 2000: Producing Knowledge, Fashioning Selves and Others conference of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi, August 2019. I gratefully acknowledge responses to my paper by Kate Teltscher and Joan-Pau Rubis, and thank Rita Banerjee, Fellow of the NMML, for inviting me to the conference. The paper will appear in a volume on travel writing edited by Rita Banerjee.

Travel and Self-fashioning in the Age of Empire

The chief value of travel in foreign countries is to enlarge ones ideas, to make them broad enough for approximation with the ideas of other nationsto make one cosmopolitan, in a word; cosmopolitan, not necessarily in habits and manners, but in sentiments, sympathies and aspirations.

A.L. Roy, Reminiscences English and
American (1888, emphasis added)

The myth that it was Europeans who travelled and discovered various peoples and places of the world has been demolished quite effectively with critical studies of travel writing by non-Europeans in the last few decades. Writing about the knowledge production by non-European and imperial travelling subjects, Paul Smethurst says:

Mobility is the sine qua non of travel writing, and travel writers, having been granted mobility as imperial subjects, then assume the authority to narrate. The duty of imperial travelling subjects is then either to explore and extend the empire, or survey and reconfirm its territories and the within-bounds of the places and peoples of empire. They fit experience and anecdotal evidence to existing structures, maintaining order by acting as intermediaries between the world of experience and accumulated knowledgebetween the empirical and the imperial. (2009: 7)

Smethurst, therefore, sees the travelling imperial subject as fitting into the imperial structures, reinforcing, mediating and translating it.

Work done on native travellers and presences in colonial England by Sukanya Banerjee (2010), Simonti Sen (2005) and Antoinette Burton (1996) has treated the Indian travellers as fitting the category of imperial citizens, and whose writings embody a certain guest discourse (Codell 2007). Elleke Boehmers Indian Arrivals (2015), examining the writingstravel, poetry, memoirsproduced by Indians in England in the 18701915 period, documents how the Indians were influential in English culture, as the metropolis began to engage with the imperial periphery that had folded into its everyday processes and practices.