1
Marvellous difficulty, 1600â1720
Thomas Herbertâs 1634 travelogue, A Relation of Some Years Travel into Afrique, Asia, Indies, declares:
Immediately afterwards, opening his main narrative, Herbert writes:
The two Herbert passages present a catalogue of the rhetorical devices and tropes used to describe India and Asia in the 1600â1720 period: difficulty, variety, wonder and the need to organize the new sights.
Merchants, âfactorsâ, 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, âcolonialâ, but they do exhibit a âcolonizing imaginationâ (Singh 1996:2â3, 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 âdiscoveryâ in order to deal with the absolutely new (Singh 1996). This âdiscoveryâ narrative also embodies a rhetoric of similarity and difference, comparing and contrasting the new (India) with familiar England or Europe (Teltscher 1997:18â19, 20, 25â28; Metcalf 1998:41). In addition to the narrativeâs oscillation between the twin poles of similarity and difference, the travelogue engaged in an âeditorial struggleâ, seeking a degree of textual ordering over the new sights and experiences (Teltscher 1997:14â15).
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). Sellâs argument proposes the existence of narrative models to be adhered to by traveller-writers. The demand for accurate, factual and organized accounts of their âdiscoveriesâ and travels cast the traveller as a responsible observer, one who pursued knowledge for its own sake, as opposed to an âirresponsibleâ 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, âOf Travelâ (1625) â like Robert Boyle was to do a few years later â the things a traveller must note when in new and strange lands:
Philip Sidney and his secretary William Davison provided a similar framework in their Profitable Instructions (1633:2â7). Prospective travellers were also aware of other models like Edward Leighâs The Gentlemanâs Guide for travel through advertisements (London Mercury 23â27 June 1682).4 The Royal Society published Boyleâs suggestions for a ânatural historyâ and a list of âinquiriesâ for Surat in the East Indies in Philosophical Transactions (PT 1. 11 [1665â66]: 186â89; 2. 23 [1666â67]: 415â19).5 Such lists and inquiries took into account everything, from the manners of the people to the soilâs 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 âthe divine, merchant, soldier and traveller may . . . take a particular view of those vast and pleasant countries, they have occasion to visitâ (Allingham 1698: unpaginated Preface). The several physic and botanic gardens â Padua, 1545; Leiden, 1587; Oxford, 1621; Paris, 1626 â 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 â that of the marvellous â 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 âdifficultâ, 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) Indiaâs 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 âdifficultyâ. 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 âdifficultyâ is overcome through specific rhetorical modes that demystify Indian excesses. The third strand of the marvellous narrative interprets and explains Indian landscapeâs excesses in both ârationalâ 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 âwonder shiftâ â 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 ârepopulationâ 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 travellerâs marvellous attempts, at one level, to capture a varied, strange, vast and âdifficultâ India within an ordered narrative, deriving its model from natural histories, and cast as a âscientificâ explanation or exploration of the new. At another level, the explanations frequently swerve into the theological, a direct result of the travellersâ own lack of training in the sciences, as Michael Adas (1990:26â27) has argued. The marvellous was thus a schismatic aesthetic, divided along the drive for a scientific and rational account of the new, and the travellerâs own fascination for the supernatural and the exotic.
The marvellous aesthetic was applied equally to varied topographical terrain in India. That is, aesthetics helped âlevelâ all cities and towns, deserts and rivers within the same descriptive vocabulary in a sort of âcolonial topographyâ, 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:
Raleghâs description echoes several themes of the seventeenth-century travel narrative. To the English traveller the Indian landscape presented a similar âcompletenessâ in its fertility, thick woods, massive harvests, and commodity-filled markets.12 Raleghâs 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:
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 soilâs 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 Bengalâs abundance (Bowrey 1997 [1905]: 133â34, 165â68). William Brutonâs narrative is full of descriptions of Bengalâs fertility, populousness, and the wealth of the court (Bruton 1638:6, 9, 22â23, 32). Food, Terry (1655:92) notes, the Mughal empire produces âin abundanceâ. Herbert (1634:184) claims: âthese negroes . . . have no famine of natureâs gifts and blessingsâ. John Fryer (1698:179) employs a biblical turn of phrase to describe Indiaâs profusion: âand to give the soil its due praise, it obeys in all things the first commandment, increase and multiplyâ. Fryer (1698:178â83) states that Indiaâs two harvests are âmost natural and uncompelledâ. Alexander Hamilton (1997 [1727], 2:21) declares: âTo mention all the particular species of goods that this rich country produces, is far beyond my skillâ. The English traveller invariably proceeds to itemize and enumerate Indian plenty â noting the variety of fruits, trees and crops (Herbert 1634:182â83; Terry 1655:95â97, 102; Fryer 1698:56, 76, 134â35, 178â83, 186, 188, 411â12; Hippon in Purchas 1905 [1625], 3:83; Best 1934:230â34; Hamilton 1997 [1727], 1:160â61).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 âmagicalâ flowering of harvests â suggested by Terryâs âResurrectionâ, Herbertâs âgifts and blessingsâ and Fryerâs ânatural and uncompelledâ â suggests a land or field that was ripe and fertile without any hum...