Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire

1830–1940

Pramod K. Nayar

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789389000948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire studies a variety of travel narratives by Indian kings, evangelists, statesmen, scholars, merchants, leisure travellers and reformers. It identifies the key modes through which the Indian traveller engaged with Europe and the world-from aesthetic evaluations to cosmopolitan nationalist perceptions, from exoticism to a keen sense of connected and global histories. These modes are constitutive of the identity of the traveller. The book demonstrates how the Indian traveller defied the prescriptive category of the 'imperial subject' and fashions himself through this multilayered engagement with England, Europe and the world in different identities.

1

Introduction

Travel and Self-fashioning in the Age of Empire

The chief value of travel in foreign countries … is to enlarge one’s ideas, to make them broad enough for approximation with the ideas of other nations—to 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 knowledge—between 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 Boehmer’s Indian Arrivals (2015), examining the writings—travel, poetry, memoirs—produced by Indians in England in the 1870–1915 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.

Others such as Javed Majeed (2007), however, argue that a mobility-driven identity is disruptive of the colonial mobility regime founded on the native-as-travellee (that is, the native is the one the Westerner travels to, to see and record as the object of the travel), the Westerner-as-traveller, the native traveller as labour, convict, soldiers of the Empire, among others. Mobility itself is an empowering condition for the colonial subject, and travel writing ‘informs the development of global citizenry literacy because, as cultural texts, they recount an engagement in, and with, cosmopolitanism’ (Johnson 2010: 80). Consequently, they ‘transform themselves (variously, temporarily, and often unstably) from objects of metropolitan spectacle to exhibitors of Western mores … [and] in doing so … unsettle the boundaries of empire and remake power relations in imperial culture’ (Burton 1998: 3). Elleke Boehmer has proposed that the Indian travellers

did not see themselves as secondary or belated in relation to it [the Empire]. Rather, they mapped and decoded the city’s [London’s] streets with reference to a ready-made index of pre-existing images, geographical coordinates and spatial terms acquired as part of a colonial education and from the pages of colonial newspapers. (2015: 83)

From a different perspective, Sumathi Ramaswamy details the introduction and expansion of geographical knowledge embodied in the globe in Indian school textbooks, in English as well as in local languages. Ramaswamy’s meticulous work shows us that, with all the chronic ailments of the English educational mission in India, ‘geography was the one subject to which the [Indian] child was invariably introduced’ (2018: 33). In many cases ‘cartographic evangelism’—Ramaswamy’s term—was linked to and embedded in Christian proselytizing—resulting in, she notes, local, vernacular efforts (such as Durgashankar Pathak’s in nineteenth-century Benares) to incorporate native (Hindu, Islamic) cosmologies with the European one (139–140).

That the Indian ‘eye’—a trope in many Indian travel texts of the period—was capable of observing and commenting on English life itself was a marker of subjecthood that was not entirely constituted by the Empire. Antoinette Burton has argued that we consider:

[The] Indian traveller as an ‘I’, a self—as the subject or see-er … rather than as merely the object of colonial rule. If the capacity to represent the western city conferred a certain kind of person—or subjecthood—on Indians, it also enables them to claim a kind of collective identity as well. (Burton 1996: 43)

Jayati Gupta argues along similar lines in her work on Indian travellers: ‘the act of travel could transform a colonial subject into a “citizen of the world” … a new form of sharing and understanding that sustains the underlying rationale of becoming transnational.’ (2008: 66). Gupta sees even domestic tourism narratives set in India, such as Bholanauth Chunder’s, as embodying an interesting tension and vision ‘of burgeoning nationhood as well as the potential of global expansion’ (65). It was a cosmopolitan rather than a ‘Hindoo’ vision, argues Gupta (65). More importantly, travel, including travel through Europe, was an exploration of the interiority of the colonial subject, and Gupta finds an intense self-awareness in these Indian narratives. That this ‘awareness of the self is problematized by the plurality of selves’ (67) is a part of the cosmopolitanization of the Indian and colonial subject. Such cosmopolitan travellers were hybrids, argues Julie Codell, and as they traversed Europe, they reversed the Grand Tour’s generic conventions:

Western travel narrative naturalized ‘ideal’ travelers—male, privileged, and autonomous agents, possessing leisure and means to satisfy their wanderlust. Indian travelers fit this profile but were not on quests for self-discovery, which occupied Western authors. They wanted to see Britain and Europe firsthand, judge what their colonizers told them, discover what colonizers did not say, and transmit information to other Indians. They negotiated conventions of travel literature in resistance to and in compliance with generic expectations, creating hybrids that drew on guidebooks (in an age of guidebooks), local histories, autobiography, and ethnography.

Hybridity fit their reversed Grand Tour throughout Great Britain, one of their many reversals of generic features, such as the Western smorgasbord descriptions of sights, tastes, and sounds. Most Western travelers explored the ‘unexplored’—places Europeans had not been before, which they tried to dominate through heroic claims and notions of the ‘other’ as exotic, inferior, quaint, erotic, and picturesque. Indian travelers played with these conventions by applying them to the over-explored, over-discovered Western metropole, reversing the hierarchy of periphery and center, and recalling the aristocratic eighteenth-century Grand Tour of Europe. (2007: 174, emphasis in original)

This means, their travels deterritorialized them as Indian or British, or Anglophile Indian or Indian Briton, or Bengali-Indian-Briton, or other hybrid possibilities (175).

This book, written in the wake and influence of such studies, also envisions a different kind of imperial-subject traveller. It studies works by a variety of Indians, shipbuilders such as Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, who went to England to study their profession; princes and kings on a leisure tour through Europe (the Rajah of Kolhapur, and Jagatjit Singh, the Raja of Kapurthala); those who spent some time as students in England (Rakhal Das Haldar and Romesh Chunder Dutt); journalists who were also on a leisure trip to Europe (G.P. Pillai); officials of the civil services or judiciary in India or those employed in specific projects like the Colonial Exhibition (Lala Baijnath and A.L. Roy) and others. Some, such as Jagatjit Singh, went on a round-the-world tour, including in their journey, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, Japan, the USA, besides Europe (Rabindranath Tagore has separate travelogues on Russia, the Middle East, Japan, South East Asia and Euro-America). Others, such as Dutt, explored England, primarily, although they would take a short trip to Paris or visit Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Norway. In most cases, though, England as the centre of the imperial world was the key site of travel.

The imperial-subject traveller arrives in England eager to see the land. His, and in many cases, her, enthusiasm for the land of the ‘master’, as some term England, is palpable. The traveller is awestruck at London’s crowds, busyness, museums and countryside. When travelling through Europe, they pay particular attention to the natural landscape but also the people and cultural practices, dress and museums. The imperial-subject traveller also travels aware of European history and identifies monuments and memorials. The traveller negotiates the physical and cultural landscape of these nations armed with information in the form of historical knowledge and a considerable number of literary sources for the places visited. However, beginning the journey as an awestruck imperial subject, seeking nothing more than a sight of England, the Indian traveller slowly alters his—the majority of travellers examined here are men, with a couple of exceptions—identity. The Indian traveller refuses to be in just a state of wide-eyed wonder at both familiar England—familiar because most of the Indians come to England already well read about the country—and ‘new’ England—new because this is often their first physical encounter with England/Europe. Therefore, the Indian traveller engages with England/Europe in fascinating and diverse ways. This book is a study of the Indian travellers’ forms of engagement.

It identifies four key modes through which the Indian traveller engaged with Europe and the world. By ‘modes’ I imply ‘manner’ and ‘measure’, a ‘way’ but also suggestive of ‘fashion’ and ‘style’. The term, I believe, captures both form and content, carrying with it the nuance of specific processes and methods. ‘Mode’, then, signals in this book the forms of narrative (objective travelogue, subjective descriptions) and experiential (intellectual, affective) engagement with the places they travel through, the conventions of writing adopted, and the political and cultural discourses that inform the writing. It assumes that narrative and its discourses are constitutive of the identity of the traveller and the very experience of travel. It tracks, through the exploration of these modes, the several kinds of identity that the Indian traveller constructs for himself.

Thus, it demonstrates how the Indian traveller often defies the sole category of the ‘imperial subject’ and presents himself, via an engagement with England, Europe and the world, in particular identities. He is a nationalist cosmopolitan whose moral cosmopolitanism determines the way he perceives the English social order. He is an aesthete who is also interested in the natural as well as built-up landscape and its inhabitants embedded in an unequal society. He is a connoisseur of the exotic, but one whose attention is repeatedly drawn to the foreign-exotic within England’s ‘national’ identity. He is enchanted by England, but transforms this enchantment into an informed one, and thereby refuses to be a wide-eyed native in the imperial capital. He examines England and Europe’s history but not ascribing any superior valence, instead exploring it through its entanglements with the rest of the world. In short, the book shows the Indian traveller as remarkably well-equipped to deal with colonial and imperial cultures when, through these four modes, he sets out to alter his bestowed identity as an imperial subject and that of England as an imperial power.

The book opens with the travellers’ aesthetic engagement with Europe and the world. In this, the first core chapter, it argues that the imperial subject, steeped in the conventions of the picturesque, employs it to reconstruct the England/Europe he encounters. First, the travellers insist on paying attention to social stratification, along with attention to the natural landscapes. Then, the imperial-subject traveller also includes maps, topographical data and statistics into his account when describing buildings, parks, open farmlands and homes—a variant the chapter identifies as the ‘enumerative picturesque’. The Indian traveller also departs from the traditional picturesque’s emphasis on the rural and the countryside in order to dwell upon the imperial centre, industrial cities and manufacturing sites in England, European cities and America, and thus invokes an ‘engineered picturesque’. Documenting variety, difference and wonder in the form of statistics, the traveller compresses and packages the lands he visits and travels through into an enumerative narrative. The chapter also examines the travellers’ interest in and focus on the deprived classes and the lower rungs of the social order within Europe and England. With this, the Indian traveller generates a ‘subaltern picturesque’.

Through the construction of an ‘Occidental exotic’, the Indian travellers appropriate a method of exoticization in order to creolize Europe/England. I argue in this chapter that the traveller, even when paying attention to European history, art or places, reconstructs England as a space of the cultural Other. Exoticism here serves as an aesthetics of diversity, and in the process, the traveller deterritorializes an English countryside or European history by pointing to the presence of a non-English or non-European Other within it. Through this, the traveller overturns the ethnocentrism of the traditional European exotic and instead demonstrates its ethno-diversity. In the process, even as he admits to a sense of enchantment at the wonder that is Europe, the Indian traveller recalibrates this enchantment as an ‘informed’ one. Exoticism and enchantment then serve as modes of self-fashioning, whereby the traveller does not emerge as one overwhelmed by Europe but as one in control of the negotiations with European sights and in the representations of those sights in the form of his travelogue.

In the continuing engagement with the multiple cultures, ethnic identities and their material and symbolic presences within Europe’s major cities, the Indian traveller exhibits a vernacular cosmopolitanism. Here, mediating between his sense of national identity and burgeoning nationalism, the traveller also extends his interest in Europe’s subaltern Others to invoke a ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’. Appropriating both the sentimental and the moral dimensions of this cosmopolitanism, the traveller engages with Europe in a wholly different manner, as the chapter shows.

The final chapter examines the Indian traveller’s portraits of ‘connected histories’ across Europe. It shows how the traveller asserts a different order of interpretation that gestures at the making of ‘epistemic communities’. Mediating between the global and the national in the form of a dialectic—what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o termed the ‘globalectic’—the Indian traveller thereby positions himself, yet again, at the cosmopolitan moment. Further, this traveller appropriates the traditional rhetorical device of ekphrasis to address the ruins, artwork and architectural sights he sees in Europe but modifies it in challenging and interesting ways. Positing a transnational ekphrasis that is mainly of the historical rather than the artistic kind, the chapter demonstrates how the Indian travellers’ attention to the inequalities and their attendant brutalities that are inscribed into, say, Roman ruins, constitutes a politically edged historical-critical ekphrasis by the imperial subject.

In the conclusion, I suggest that antinomies constitute the self-fashioning of the traveller, rather than contradictions. Both the imperial-subject self and the nationalist-cosmopolitan self coexist within him. This is a productive tension because it enables the traveller to find re-enchantment in Europe but one that qualifies the enchantment through an attention to social inequalities or brutal histories of Europe embodied in its memorials and ruins. The antinomic self is a form of transculturation.

There are interconnections and overlaps across some of the features—thematic, formal—of the travel texts discussed here. Exoticism is a part of the aesthetics of travel writing and the globalectic imagination contributes to the cosmopolitan sensibilities of the traveller. Subaltern picturesque accounts do speak with subaltern, moral cosmopolitan approaches to the English or European people and places in the analyses of these texts. The chapters, therefore, are at once distinct and supplement each other intentionally. What I have tried to do, despite these anastomosing connections, is to draw out specific strands within each chapter’s focal point, whether this is about the picturesque or the interest in tangled histories.

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These four modes are integral to the self-fashioning of the imperial-subject traveller. The cosmopolitan whose cosmopolitanism emerges from affective and moral investments in the European poor or the English working classes, the vanquished in battle or the memories of the victims of ancient carnages and social inequality, is a complex figure indeed. There is no ‘detachment’ that characterizes such a cosmopolitanism. Rather, it is a cosmopolitanism rooted in the complicated position of being an imperial subject but also a member of the social elite in India, of being an imperial subject but also one who is well-versed in Western history, literature and politics and intensely aware of his own country’s similarities with older colonies and oppressed nations. As an aesthete, the Indian traveller does not accord undiluted aesthetic power to the picturesque or the sublime, choosing, instead, to appropriate it in ways that demonstrate his affective spin, founded on an attention to political and social realities in England, upon the aesthetic. Reading a ruin for its chequered violent history enables the traveller to erode the English or European ‘national sentiments’ towards its rulers, heroes or military triumphs. Treating the exotic as a way of presenting a multicultural, multi-ethnic Europe allows the Indian traveller to represent himself as an alert outsider, appreciative of but not mesmerized by cultural difference.

These identities are to be inferred as emerging from the discourses and narrative modes adopted by the travellers. There are few direct representations of the self in these texts, although some attention is paid to proxemics and comportment of their embodied selves and that of their neighbours and fellow travellers in some of them. The modes explored in this book are forms of self-fashioning by imperial subjects who would not be reduced to that subjecth...