English Writing and India, 1600-1920

Colonizing Aesthetics

Pramod K. Nayar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134131495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias europeas

This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period.

Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of India.

Looking specifically at the aesthetic modes of the marvellous, the monstrous, the sublime, the picturesque and the luxuriant, Nayar marks the shift in the rhetoric – from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the 'shikar' memoirs of the latenineteenth and earlytwentieth century's extreme exotic. English Writing and India provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of new lands and cultures.

1
Marvellous difficulty, 1600–1720

Thomas Herbert’s 1634 travelogue, A Relation of Some Years Travel into Afrique, Asia, Indies, declares:

This journal was taken in danger, which admits of no curiosity, and craves but the same favourable light for approbation, it was drawn by. Many storms it has endured for company, but more hot days, which have sun-burnt my lines, as well as my face. And though I am on shore, yet I fear, the sea is not yet calm, for each book, sent into the world, is like a bark put to sea, and is as liable to censures as the bark is to foul weather.

(Herbert 1634: unpaginated Preface)

Immediately afterwards, opening his main narrative, Herbert writes:

But I was on my way to many countries, and travellers have enough to do with variety, in men and manners, which make up a library to themselves, besides the situations and present beings of cities and territories, seeming better than to labour in uncertain stories, which not only perplex the hearers, but beget incredulity, often times amongst the credulous.

(Herbert 1634:2)

The two Herbert passages present a catalogue of the rhetorical devices and tropes used to describe India and Asia in the 1600–1720 period: difficulty, variety, wonder and the need to organize the new sights.

Merchants, ‘factors’, ambassadors, chaplains and surgeons travelled out to India seeking employment and profits. In some cases they were entrusted with tasks by the English government (Sir Thomas Roe, for instance, was the ambassador from James I to Jahangir, the Mughal emperor). East India Company (EIC) travellers of this period were not, in the strict sense of the term, ‘colonial’, but they do exhibit a ‘colonizing imagination’ (Singh 1996:2–3, 2b).¹ The early English travellers confronted a radically different topography, climate, fauna and flora, diseases, cultures and belief systems. Their travelogues, cast as exploration nar ratives, often take recourse to a trope of ‘discovery’ in order to deal with the absolutely new (Singh 1996). This ‘discovery’ narrative also embodies a rhetoric of similarity and difference, comparing and contrasting the new (India) with familiar England or Europe (Teltscher 1997:18–19, 20, 25–28; Metcalf 1998:41). In addition to the narrative’s oscillation between the twin poles of similarity and difference, the travelogue engaged in an ‘editorial struggle’, seeking a degree of textual ordering over the new sights and experiences (Teltscher 1997:14–15).

New worlds required new cognitive techniques and new rhetorical strategies. Jonathan Sell has argued that English traveller-writers from the sixteenth century could have written rhetorically only because rhetoric had been established as the best system of organizing experiences and ideas, making them intelligible and communicating them (Sell 2006:13). Sell’s argument proposes the existence of narrative models to be adhered to by traveller-writers. The demand for accurate, factual and organized accounts of their ‘discoveries’ and travels cast the traveller as a responsible observer, one who pursued knowledge for its own sake, as opposed to an ‘irresponsible’ viewer who pursued pleasure (Stafford 1993; Gilbert 1999).² Such a traveller also had to guard against being enchanted by exotic India.³ The responsible traveller was not only to explore or observe but also to order the new into suitable categories and narratives so that readers in England could find both pleasure and knowledge in the travelogue. Francis Bacon listed in his essay, ‘Of Travel’ (1625) – like Robert Boyle was to do a few years later – the things a traveller must note when in new and strange lands:

The things to be seen and observed are, the courts of princes, especially when they give audience to ambassadors, the courts of justice . . . the churches and monasteries . . . the walls and fortifications of cities and towns . . . antiquities and ruins; libraries, colleges, disputations, and lectures . . . shipping and navies; houses and gardens of state and pleasure, near great cities; armouries; arsenals, magazine; exchanges; burses; warehouses; exercises of horsemanship, fencing, training of soldiers, and the like; comedies . . . treasuries of jewels and robes, cabinets and rarities; and, to conclude, whatsoever is memorable in the places where they go.

(Bacon 1860 [1625], 12:138)

Philip Sidney and his secretary William Davison provided a similar framework in their Profitable Instructions (1633:2–7). Prospective travellers were also aware of other models like Edward Leigh’s The Gentleman’s Guide for travel through advertisements (London Mercury 23–27 June 1682).⁴ The Royal Society published Boyle’s suggestions for a ‘natural history’ and a list of ‘inquiries’ for Surat in the East Indies in Philosophical Transactions (PT 1. 11 [1665–66]: 186–89; 2. 23 [1666–67]: 415–19).⁵ Such lists and inquiries took into account everything, from the manners of the people to the soil’s fertility. The numerous natural histories compiled during this period also provided narrative models for these travelogues. These histories, like maps, categorized an otherwise unknown or unknowable, wild land into something more orderly and comprehensible.⁶ Thus William Allingham in his A Short Account of the Nature and Use of Maps argues that with the help of maps ‘the divine, merchant, soldier and traveller may . . . take a particular view of those vast and pleasant countries, they have occasion to visit’ (Allingham 1698: unpaginated Preface). The several physic and botanic gardens – Padua, 1545; Leiden, 1587; Oxford, 1621; Paris, 1626 – collected and reported about plant species from exotic places.⁷

The narrative ordering of India in the seventeenth-century travelogue is greatly facilitated and informed by a particular aesthetic – that of the marvellous – that tropes India in particular ways preliminary to demonstrating rhetorical control and transformation. The descriptive vocabulary of these early travel narratives reveals extensive use of two key components of the marvellous aesthetic: variety and otherness (Platt 1997:41; Daston and Park 1998:33). Together, variety and otherness construct a strange and wondrous India, simultaneously frightening and fascinating, invoking feelings of awe and revulsion, and demanding investigation and interpretation. Troping India as a wondrous, if ‘difficult’, space enables English travellers to carve out a definite role for themselves because the marvellous, like wonder, demands investigation, inquiry and interpretation.⁸ The marvellous was an explanatory and exploratory aesthetic that enables the traveller to wonder at, organize, define and ultimately explain (away) India’s newness.⁹

This marvellous narrative consists of three prominent, interpenetrating thematic strands: profusion, difficult excesses and demystification. Travelogues of the period invariably construct a prosperous Indian landscape, as images of wealth map a landscape of profusion (a feature that persists from the marvellous travel narrative of the medieval age: Daston and Park 1998:33). Eventually, this same discourse of plenty modulates into a second strand where the traveller tropes India as a space of ‘difficulty’. Troping India as difficult excess demanded from English travellers acts of rhetorical control and narrative order. This marks the third thematic strand of the marvellous narrative where ‘difficulty’ is overcome through specific rhetorical modes that demystify Indian excesses. The third strand of the marvellous narrative interprets and explains Indian landscape’s excesses in both ‘rational’ and moral terms.

This third thematic strand in the discourse of the marvellous is crucial for two reasons. On the one hand, it enables a shift from the discourse of a wondrous India to an explanation of the same. The marvellous in the English encounter marks a proto-colonial ‘wonder shift’ – from the effects of the marvellous to its causes, a shift that helps the English traveller attain a degree of certitude in the face of difference.¹⁰ On the other hand, it anticipates the later, active colonial ideology and intervention. Effectively, this is an anterior moment to late-eighteenth-century ‘repopulation’ of Indian landscape with British icons such as memorials, edifices, boundaries and buildings.

The early marvellous was thus a method of inquiry and interpretation. The traveller’s marvellous attempts, at one level, to capture a varied, strange, vast and ‘difficult’ India within an ordered narrative, deriving its model from natural histories, and cast as a ‘scientific’ explanation or exploration of the new. At another level, the explanations frequently swerve into the theological, a direct result of the travellers’ own lack of training in the sciences, as Michael Adas (1990:26–27) has argued. The marvellous was thus a schismatic aesthetic, divided along the drive for a scientific and rational account of the new, and the traveller’s own fascination for the supernatural and the exotic.

The marvellous aesthetic was applied equally to varied topographical terrain in India. That is, aesthetics helped ‘level’ all cities and towns, deserts and rivers within the same descriptive vocabulary in a sort of ‘colonial topography’, where differences and historical/architectural/cultural specificities between, say, the Deccan and northern India are erased through the same set of tropes and descriptive vocabulary. The marvellous was therefore a project of categorizing and homogenization that cast the traveller as a proto-colonial.

Pleasurable profusion

In his History of the World (1614) Sir Walter Ralegh writes:

Paradise was a place created by God . . . in which climate the most excellent wines, fruits, oil, grain of all sorts are to this day found in abundance. And there is nothing that better proves the excellence of this said soil and temper, than the abundant growing of palm-trees, without the care and labour of man.

(Ralegh 1971 [1614]: 133)¹¹

Ralegh’s description echoes several themes of the seventeenth-century travel narrative. To the English traveller the Indian landscape presented a similar ‘completeness’ in its fertility, thick woods, massive harvests, and commodity-filled markets.¹² Ralegh’s rhetoric of intensification and incomparability becomes a standard feature of English narratives about India. Here is the EIC chaplain, Edward Terry (1655), in his first topographical descriptions:

This most spacious and fertile land (called by the inhabitants Indostan) so much abounds in all necessaries for the use and service of man, to feed, and cloathe and enrich him, as that it is able to subsist and flourish of itself, without any help from any neighbour prince or nation . . .

When the ground there hath been destitute of rain nine months together, and looks all of it like the barren sands in the deserts of Arabia, where there is not one spire of green grass to be found, within a few days after those fat enriching showers begin to fall, the face of the earth there (as it were by a new Resurrection) is so revived, and throughout so renewed, as that it is presently covered all over with a pure green mantle . . . amongst the many hundred acres of corn of diverse kinds I have there beheld, I never saw any but what was very rich and good, standing as thick on the ground as the land could well bear it.

(Terry 1655:92, 100, emphasis added)

Terry presents an Indian marvel of fertile soils, plentiful harvests and lush vegetation, treating the variety, uniqueness and plenty as magical, even as his rhetoric of intensification reveals the sense of wonder and pleasure at the sight of the rich Indian landscape. This is the first strand of the Indian marvellous.

Every English traveller marvels at the Indian soil’s fecundity, the fields with their load of crops, the dense woods, and markets with a variety of fruits and vegetables. Thomas Bowrey in his A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal 1669 to 1679 notes Bengal’s abundance (Bowrey 1997 [1905]: 133–34, 165–68). William Bruton’s narrative is full of descriptions of Bengal’s fertility, populousness, and the wealth of the court (Bruton 1638:6, 9, 22–23, 32). Food, Terry (1655:92) notes, the Mughal empire produces ‘in abundance’. Herbert (1634:184) claims: ‘these negroes . . . have no famine of nature’s gifts and blessings’. John Fryer (1698:179) employs a biblical turn of phrase to describe India’s profusion: ‘and to give the soil its due praise, it obeys in all things the first commandment, increase and multiply’. Fryer (1698:178–83) states that India’s two harvests are ‘most natural and uncompelled’. Alexander Hamilton (1997 [1727], 2:21) declares: ‘To mention all the particular species of goods that this rich country produces, is far beyond my skill’. The English traveller invariably proceeds to itemize and enumerate Indian plenty – noting the variety of fruits, trees and crops (Herbert 1634:182–83; Terry 1655:95–97, 102; Fryer 1698:56, 76, 134–35, 178–83, 186, 188, 411–12; Hippon in Purchas 1905 [1625], 3:83; Best 1934:230–34; Hamilton 1997 [1727], 1:160–61).¹³ A sense of wonder is unmistakable in these descriptions, which are, it must be noted, couched in terms of praise in this, the first strand of the marvellous narrative.

Each of the above descriptions of profusion carefully omits descriptions of farming labour. The apparently ‘magical’ flowering of harvests – suggested by Terry’s ‘Resurrection’, Herbert’s ‘gifts and blessings’ and Fryer’s ‘natural and uncompelled’ – suggests a land or field that was ripe and fertile without any hum...