The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze

India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856

David John Arnold, K. Sivaramakrishnan

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295800943
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze considers the European representation and understanding of landscape and nature in early nineteenth-century India. It draws on travel narratives, literary texts, and scientific literature to show the diversity of European (especially British) responses to the Indian environment and the ways in which these contributed to the wider colonizing process. Through its close examination of the correlation between tropicality and "otherness, " and of science as a means of colonial appropriation, the book offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world. It will be of interest to historians of the environment, science, and colonialism; South Asianists; and cultural and environmental anthropologists and geographers.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Carter, Road.

2. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 2.

3. Taussig, Shamanism, 334–5.

4. Writers sometimes referred, as in Europe, to the “environs” of a town or village. The term “ecology” was similarly not used in scientific literature in India before the 1900s.

5. For example, Arnold, Colonizing; Grove, Damodaran, and Sangwan, Nature; Harrison, Climates.

6. Cohn’s other modalities were historiography, surveying, enumeration, museology, and surveillance, though clearly some of these, especially the last, overlap with observation and travel. Cohn, Colonialism, 5–11.

7. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.

8. A classic statement of this was Thomson, “Natives;” but many Europeans believed India capable of environmental amelioration, including measures that would eliminate disease, curb drought, transform agriculture and facilitate white settlement. This book is not primarily concerned, however, with European acclimatization in the tropics. See Anderson, Cultivation; Harrison, Climates; Livingstone, “Climate’s Moral Economy.”

9. Cosgrove and Daniels, Iconography, 1; also Cosgrove, “Social Formation.”

10. Notably Carter, Road; Griffiths and Robin, Ecology; Neumann, Imposing Wilderness. See also the “Introduction” to Beinart and McGregor, Social History, 4–6, 14–15, for the importance of landscape traditions in colonial Africa.

11. Green, Spectacle. The landscape as “the work of the mind” has also been tellingly discussed by Schama, Landscape, though, as will be evident from the early chapters of this book, in this case the “memory” evoked by Indian landscapes was often of landscapes that lay elsewhere—in Britain or in “tropical” Brazil and the West Indies.

12. Drayton, Nature’s Government, and Guha, Rule. While excellent in its coverage of the metropolitan forces behind nineteenth-century “improvement,” and especially those that emanated from Kew Gardens, Drayton’s study fails to recognize the extent to which such ideas and practices had acquired a dynamic force of their own within colonial territories like India by the early decades of the century and were not dependent upon repeated stimulus from Kew. Equally, as this study will try to show, economic botany was only one of the ways in which botany served the empire and its colonizing ambitions.

13. As in the case of French and German influences on “scientific forestry” in late nineteenth-century India: see Rajan, “Imperial Environmentalism.”

14. Said, Orientalism.

15. Not all historians would agree: see Harrison, Climates, for a dissenting view. The main arguments for the present claim will be found here in chapters 4–6.

16. See Dunlap, Nature.

17. Bayly, Empire; Raj, “Colonial Encounters.” For the “dialogic” idea, see Irschick, Dialogue.

18. E.g., Dirks, “Introduction.”

19. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 4, 6.

20. As this book is concerned with European travel, it does not seek to address the question of Indian travel and its relation to the “colonial gaze,” about which a significant literature has begun to emerge: e.g., Grewal, Home, chapter 4.

21. E.g., Sangwan, “Strength.”

1 / ITINERANT EMPIRE

1. Unless otherwise specified, “India” in this book refers to the whole of the subcontinent, except Ceylon, including the present states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; as will be evident however the Himalayan regions, including Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan...