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Entertaining Indians.
The Introduction of Indo-Persian Travel
Literature to Britain, 1792-1827.
Global and Colonial History MA Thesis, 20 ECTS
Supervisor: Dr. L.P.J. Bes
Word Count [Excluding Footnotes & Bibliography]: 16,876
Anna Campbell-Hall, Leiden University, s2264242
01/07/2019
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Contents
1 • INTRODUCTION 3 Historiography 4 Context 7 Structure 92 • KNOWING THE OTHER 12
British interest in the Orient 12
Meeting Indian elites 18
Western Mirror 25
3 • EMPIRE OF OPINION 29
Opinion in the metropole 29
Opinion in the colony 35
4 • COLLABORATION WITH ORIENTALISM 41
Indian involvement in British orientalism 41
Orientalist interest in Oriental accounts 46
5 • CONCLUSION 52
6 • BIBLIOGRAPHY 55
List of Images
Figure 1: I’tisam al-Din 23
Figure 2: Abu Talib Khan 24
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1
•Introduction
Alongside the movement of British East India Company servants to the Indian subcontinent was another movement of people. Indians were heading west, and like the British who travelled east for trade, diplomacy and curiosity these Indian travellers went with similar aims. Such movement has been termed ‘counterflows’ by Michael Fisher, the renowned scholar of Indian settlers in Britain during this period. He terms this movement ‘counterflows’ because these men and women travelled against mainstream colonialism, and because their movements reveal a side of colonialism which diverges from traditional Eurocentric historiography.1 Even though many of the Indians venturing to Britain in this period were sailors (lascars), or servants (ayahs) who were accompanying returning British families home, there were several elite Indians who also made the journey. One of the first known accounts of this type of travel comes from the Indo-Persian traveller Mirza Sheikh I’tisam al-Din and was written following his journey to Britain in 1765.2 I’tisam al-Din’s diplomatic motivations for travel, on behalf of the
Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II, were a far cry from those of his own countrymen who travelled for menial work.
Elite Indians, like I’tisam al-Din, travelled and composed memoirs of their time in Britain, some with the intention of informing their audience back home of the government, culture and education in the metropole, the epicentre of the British Empire, and others for an English audience. Whilst some accounts were written exclusively for an Indian audience, nearly all the accounts were later published in English for a British audience. The first account from a traveller from India written in English, was that of the traveller Joseph Emin who published in 1792 and others followed suit. There was a growing audience in Britain reading and accessing Indo-Persian voices from the late eighteenth century. This paper will ask why a British interest in reading Indo-Persian travel accounts was starting to develop at the end of the eighteenth century?
1 Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1857,
(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
2 The term Indo-Persian is used in reference to the fact that these Indians were from a minority Persian
group in India. They were all Muslims with a Persian heritage, except for Emin who had a Christian Armenian heritage, but he also came from Persia; it is a popular designation for these travellers in current scholarship.
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Historiography
In looking at British interest in representations of India, this paper engages with the broader historiographical debate regarding eighteenth and nineteenth-century othering, a process by which the identity of one group is cast as a typically vilified and inferior ‘other’ in relation to another group. Arguably the most famous scholar of othering is Edward Said;3 his book Orientalism addresses the Western construction of the ‘Orient’ as an inferior other, crafted by the West from a position of colonial power, and since its publication many scholars have studied British perceptions of India in the eighteenth century.4 More recently, Said’s homogenised view of Western perceptions of India have been criticised as an inappropriate way to classify the diverse variety of opinions which existed about India in Britain.5 This diversity of opinion has been revealed by breaking
down the British observers of India into smaller subcategories such as missionaries, travellers, East India Company agents and diplomats, which highlights how distinct social and political contexts crafted different representations. However, this has done little to counter the fact that the study of Western literature about the non-Western world has received a lot more attention by historians than literature produced in Eastern contexts.6
Historians have principally studied British images of India as emerging from the pens of British writers in the subcontinent. Though this needs to change, as the scholar Mary Louise Pratt argued, “If one studies only what the Europeans saw and said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise sought”.7
3 Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
4 Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800, (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800, (London: Harvard University Press, 2017); Ronald Inden, Imagining India, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000).
5 Mona Narain, “Eighteenth-Century Indian’s Travel Narratives and Cross-Cultural Encounters with the
West”, Literature Compass 9, no.2 (2012), 151
6 It has received some attention in recent years see, Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the
West during the Eighteenth Century, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Tabish Khair et al., Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005);
Michael Fisher, “From India to England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers”,
Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no.1 (2007); Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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In recent years, in order to counter this monopoly on Western representations,
‘studies of the encounter between the British and non-Europeans have tried to recover the decentred narrative, the local discourse and the particular experience of the oppressed and marginalised’.8
As a part of this trend, there has been a growing interest regarding the history of Indians in Britain. This existing literature can be broadly divided into two crude groupings. Literature from the first category has taken a macro-historical approach to produce a long history of the Indian presence in Britain.9 The second, taking a more microhistorical approach, has explored how Indians in Britain took part in projects of self-fashioning and subverted traditional colonial discourses. These historians have discussed the applicability of terms such as Occidentalism or reverse-Orientalism, 10 both adaptations of Said’s model for Orientalism. Historians who study these Indo-Persian travellers as engaging in Occidentalist projects argue that Eastern travellers journeyed to the West and engaged in their own projects of othering, in which they constructed representations of Britain. Through arguing that Indians engaged in such projects these texts have been used to re-assign agency and power to Eastern actors; they were not only observed and objectified by Western travellers but also did the observing themselves.11 Whilst both historiographical approaches are relatively new, it is the second microhistorical approach which has been most popular in recent years. This is perhaps a result of the current projects that seek to disassociate histories from Eurocentrism and rectify that ‘our ways of thought follow national traditions of the Western world’ and that ‘no ‘other’ perspectives are part of our modes of expression’.12
8 Christopher A. Bayly, “The British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760-1860: Power, Perception and
Identity’, in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (eds.), Empire and Others. British Encounters with
Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 21.
9 Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947, (London: Pluto Press,
1986); Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain; 400 Years of History, (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Fisher,
Counterflows to Colonialism.
10 Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West; Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran:
Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography, (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Jagvinder Gill, "Reverse
Orientalism in the Texts of Sake Dean Mahomet", Rim Hassen and Susan Bassnett (eds.), Interfacing
Disciplines: Textual Narratives of Departure, Navigation and Discovery, (2008).
11 Aminur Rahman, "The Gaze: Imperial Britain in Indian Travel Narratives c.1765-1947." PhD diss.,
(The University of Manchester, 2009); Narain, “Eighteenth-Century Indian’s Travel Narratives”; Norbert Schürer, “Sustaining Identity in I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet”, The Eighteenth Century 52, (2011); Kate Teltscher, “The Shampooing Surgeon and the Persian Prince: Two Indians in Early Nineteenth-century Britain”, Interventions 2, no.3 (2000).
12 Dirk Hoerder, “How the Intimate lives of Subaltern Men, Women, and children Confound the Nation’s
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As we can see, historians have started to reassign agency to Indians as neglected historical actors; discussed the ‘counter’ movements of these specific travellers; shown how they subverted colonial discourses and self-fashioned. However, current literature about Orientalism and its counterpart Occidentalism still force us to look at the world through the binaries of East and West. This paper calls for us to look beyond these separate binaries and show that accounts of ‘otherness’ were produced through cross-cultural dialogues. The Indo-Persian texts considered here were produced in the ‘contact zone’ a term used by Mary Louise Pratt to denote an area in which two or more cultures communicate; ‘spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’.13 As products of this contact zone, these texts reveal that active engagement between the East and the West occurred and was responsible for shaping representation and identity regarding India in Britain. This paper, in part, builds upon work by the scholar Mona Narain. In her article ‘Eighteenth-Century Indians’ Travel Narratives and Cross-Cultural Encounters with the West’ she proposed reading the accounts of these Indo-Persian travellers to Britain to enable us to access a view of first-hand encounters between the British public at home and Indians,14 instead of just second-hand British engagement with India through travel accounts and overseas reports. Thus she started to look at the interconnectedness between Indo-Persians and Britons.15 This paper takes this even further and argues that these Indo-Persian texts should not only be read as proof of British engagement with Indians at home, but they should also be seen as actively shaping Anglo-Indian relationships; in terms of how India was represented and how scholarly engagement with the ‘East’ was shaped. In doing so, this paper looks at the broader relevance of Eastern and Western interactions and how we should move forward with the study of cross-cultural encounters.
This paper shows this communication by highlighting a relationship between Indian travel texts and British perceptions of India, which have so far largely been studied as two separate historical phenomena. Evidence points to a developing British interest towards engaging with Indians in the eighteenth century, both face-to-face and through print. This interest was significant; especially when we consider that examining works written by ‘subaltern classes’ is something which Euro-American historians have only
13 Mary L. Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”, in Janice M. Wolff (ed.), Professing in the Contact Zone.
Bringing Theory and Practice Together, (Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002), 4.
14 Narain, “Eighteenth-Century Indians Travel Narratives”. 15 Narain, “Eighteenth-Century Indians Travel Narratives”, 159.
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recently begun to do again in the last half-century, as through the scholarship mentioned above. The historian Juan Cole comes the closest to exploring this interest in his paper ‘Invisible Occidentalism: eighteenth-century Indo-Persian constructions of the West’;16
which focuses on the Persian travellers, Abdul-Latif Khan, Aqa Ahmad Bihbahani as well as Abu Talib Khan. Aside from Abu Talib none of these travellers went to Britain. Cole does not directly seek to analyse British interest in these accounts, rather his paper presents an argument against Occidentalism. Nevertheless, he does touch on this interest, noting that the British were interested in these accounts as ‘an extension of the Western power to shape images’, as they could be used to ‘assert a subtle [Western] cultural dominance…in works in Asian languages’.17 However, Cole’s argument is preoccupied
with the idea that British interest in the Orient was fundamentally shaped by political motivations, a by-product of Said’s emphasis on this same subject, thus it can be considered an incomplete analysis of British interest in these accounts. This paper will build on Cole’s argument, using different travel accounts which concern India and not Persia, to explicitly address why the British wanted to read these texts.
Context
This paper looks at the period in which the first recorded Indo-Persian travel accounts concerning Britain were produced. Following the movement of elite literate travellers to Britain and the publication of Indo-Persian travel accounts, a British interest in reading about their travels developed. This paper looks to the beginning of English engagement with these texts from the late eighteenth century, which arguably reached its peak by the mid-nineteenth century.18 Whilst it is not possible to know how many literate Indo-Persian travellers journeyed to Britain and had written travel accounts by the end of the eighteenth century, there are six known accounts, written in English and Persian, which have so far been identified by scholars. Out of these, Mirza Sheikh I’tisam al-Din (1730-1800), Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752-1806), Munshi Ismaīl, and Mir Muhammad Husain ibn Abdul Azim Isfahani (d. 1790) wrote their accounts in Persian. The other two travellers, Joseph Emin (1726-1809) and Sake Dean Mahomet (1759-1851) wrote in English. This paper is primarily concerned with four travel accounts, those by I’tisam al-Din, Abu Talib Khan, Joseph Emin and Dean Mahomet. Munshi Ismaīl and Mir
16 Juan Cole, “Invisible Occidentalism: Eighteenth Century Indo-Persian Constructions of the West”,
Iranian Studies 25, no.3-4 (1992).
17 Cole, “Invisible Occidentalism”, 16.
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Muhammad Husain ibn Abdul Azim Isfahani’s were not suitable because this paper is only concerned with the texts which were originally written in English or later translated into English – and thus available to the broader British public. Munshi Ismaīl and Mir Muhammad Husain ibn Abdul Azim Isfahani’s accounts remained in Persian and thus remained inaccessible.
Joseph Emin was the earliest of these travellers. Emin departed from Calcutta in 1751 as a seaman aboard the Walpole and he reached London later that year. After a difficult first few years in London where he worked as a low paid labourer, he eventually became an acquaintance of some of London’s high society. Emin is an interesting character as his narrative details both his experiences as a menial worker and later his experiences among the upper classes. He portrayed himself as moving to Britain for military training to help liberate his fellow persecuted Armenians in Persia. Emin published his autobiographical account The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, An
Armenian, Written in English by Himself in London, in 1792.19 Given his nationality (a
Persian born Armenian) he is a controversial addition to this canon of Indo-Persian travellers. However, he did spend most of his adult life in India and is generally included within the canon by the predominant historians of this field.20
The second of these travellers, Mirza Sheikh I’tisam al-Din journeyed to Britain in the company of the East India Company servant Captain Swinton in 1765. The aim of their journey was to deliver a letter from the Mughal Emperor to the British King requesting British military assistance. The journey lasted three years in total but unfortunately for I’tisam al-Din ended in failure - perhaps one of the reasons his journey did not have the same legacy in history as it no doubt would have had in his own life. Written at the behest of friends, the original Persian manuscript, Shigurf Nama-e-Vilayet was never published; however, it was translated into Hindustani and English by the British scholar James Edward Alexander during the nineteenth century. This translation was published in London in 1827 under the title Shigurf Namah-i-Vilaet or Excellent
Intelligence concerning Europe, Being the Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen.21 Seeking to
address British responses to the text, it is this English translation which shall be the source
19 Joseph Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 1726-1809, (1792), ed. Amy Apcar, (Calcutta:
The Baptist Mission Press, 1918).
20 Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism, 72.
21 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah i Velaët, Or, Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe: Being the
Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen, in Great Britain and France, trans. James Alexander, (London: Parbury,
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for this paper. Whilst I’tisam al-Din’s travel account was published in English slightly later than the other texts, he should be included in this canon of earlier texts because it was originally written in the late eighteenth century.
Dean Mahomet, the next travel writer in this canon, published his The Travels of
Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey Through India, in Ireland in 1793.22
Somewhat differently to the other travellers in this paper, Mahomet wrote about India and not about his experiences in Britain and like Emin he also wrote exclusively for a British audience. He arrived in Ireland in 1783 with his friend and companion of many years, the East India Company Captain, Godfrey Evan Baker, and over the years remained in close contact with the Baker family. Mahomet remained in Britain permanently, opened his own businesses, converted to Protestantism and married an Irish woman. Given Joseph Emin’s Armenian Persian heritage some consider Mahomet to be the first Indian to publish an English text in Britain, though this is debated.23
Mirza Abu Talib Khan, whilst the latest of these travellers, was certainly the most notorious, earning the nickname ‘The Persian Prince’ during his time in Britain. Abu Talib set out for Europe in 1797 from Calcutta onboard a ship bound for Denmark. After travelling via Cape Town, he arrived in Cork, Ireland and toured parts of the country where he coincidently met with the abovementioned Dean Mahomet, though the greatest part of his time was to be spent in London. His original Persian manuscript Masir-i Talibi, published in 1803, was subsequently translated into English by the scholar Charles Stewart and published in Britain in 1810 and 1814 as the Travels of Mirza Abu Talib
Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799 to 1803.24 For the same reasons as with I’tisam al-Din’s account, it will be the English translation by Stewart and not Abu Talib’s original Persian manuscript that will be used in this paper.
Structure
This paper presents a close reading of these four sources to develop a series of entangled historical narratives. Guided by the infamous model of historical othering, Saidian Orientalism, this paper will be divided into three chapters, which deal with curiosity
22 Dean Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of
India, while in the service of the Honourable East India Company, Written by himself, in a series of letters to a friend, (1794), ed. Michael H. Fisher, (London: University of California Press, 1997).
23 Fisher includes Emin in this canon; Fisher, “From India to England and Back”, 160.
24 Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan. Asia, Africa, and Europe, During the Years
1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, and 1803. Written by Himself, in the Persian Language, trans. Charles Stewart
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towards the ‘other’, colonial discourses and Orientalist academia respectively. Through this model these independent narratives are connected and brought into a discussion of a broader information network of cross-cultural representations between India and Britain. The aim is to understand how representations of India in Britain were intercultural and shaped by real and personal encounters with Indians.
The first chapter shall look at how British knowledge about the Orient was shaped and influenced not only by British accounts but also Indian ones. Whilst the number of British accounts of India being produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was arguably much higher, great value was assigned to these authentic Indian accounts by their eighteenth and nineteenth century British readers, as such their significance should not be ignored or understated. This chapter seeks in part to question how we understand the production of knowledge about India in Britain. It begins to break down the distinctions between Orient and Occident by highlighting that Oriental literature was being read in the Occident and that perceptions of India in Britain did not just come from British writers. There was a real interest in engaging with real Indians which came across in the encounters between these travellers and Britons, not only during their journeys but also through their texts. Some of these texts were translations and the consequences of using these translations shall also be addressed within this chapter. This chapter will delve into this British interest and understand the ways in which these accounts fit into and occasionally challenged British expectations of the Orient.
The second chapter seeks to re-evaluate the ‘authenticity’ that so attracted the interest of the eighteenth-century British readership. By building up an image of how these Indo-Persian accounts were formed we understand that they can no longer be taken as objective accounts, neither in their production nor in their interpretation. Rather in the same ways we now understand Western travel literature about the East, we should see these texts as shaped by social and political relationships. The texts themselves were influenced by political connections formed within the colonial sphere; interest in these texts was also shaped by their potential as tools in fashioning opinion about the British colony. By studying political motivations as only one factor among many, this paper highlights how we should not put more emphasis on the role of colonial politics but present a more nuanced examination of the variety of interest in these accounts. Ultimately, by exploring the broader relevance of this political motivation, this chapter seeks to show that these texts were not simply part of separate canon of Oriental literature
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detached from Britain, but that these texts were shaped and influenced by prior connections and later appropriations which intrinsically tied them to Occidental discourses.
The third and final chapter shall return to the notion of the independent agency of these Indo-Persians that recent historiography has celebrated. However, in contrast to such work this paper will highlight the collaboration between these scholars and their Orientalist counterparts. These Indo-Persians came to Britain and collaborated with Orientalist projects; they interacted with Britons and Britons engaged with their texts. Their voices were not just appropriated by the British, but these Indo-Persians actively engaged with British discourses. This chapter will reinforce the notion that we cannot look along the binaries of Orient and Occident. By reframing this relationship as interaction, we can understand it was produced by an engagement between East and West, and that the binaries, at least in this context, are misleading constructs.
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2
•Knowing the Other
‘I, who went to see a spectacle, became myself a sight to others’.25
Wherever these elite Indian travellers went in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, people gazed at them in wonder, as the above quote from I’tisam al-Din reveals. As stated in an 1810 review of Charles Stewart’s translation of Abu Talib Khan’s
Masir-i TalMasir-ibMasir-i, ‘It Masir-is dMasir-iffMasir-icult to Masir-imagMasir-ine any character whose fMasir-irst Masir-impressMasir-ions would excMasir-ite
more natural curiosity, than an Asiatic traveller in Europe’.26 The exotic Orient was in
vogue in eighteenth-century Britain and these Indo-Persians attracted a lot of attention during their travels. This chapter shall study what specific aspects of these texts appealed to the British public and in what ways the texts fit into existing British representations of India.
British interest in the ‘Orient’
There was already a market for texts written by Oriental figures in eighteenth century Britain, specifically fictional accounts. We can see this as the translator of Abu Talib’s account, Charles Stewart, juxtaposed the ‘several books of fictitious travels, ascribed to natives of the east’ to Abu Talib’s account which was the ‘genuine opinions of an Asiatic’.27 James Alexander, the translator of I’tisam al-Din’s account, did the same, he
argued ‘that the work is any thing but spurious, and that it could not have been compiled by any other than a native of the East’.28 There was a significant market for fictitious Indo-Persian voices, as stated in The Eclectic Review in 1811, the market was ‘thoroughly saturated with the European travels of fictitious Asiatic personages’.29 A popular example of these fictious travels, and written around the same time as our travellers’ accounts, was Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of the Hindoo Rajah (1796).30
There was a developing public interest in elite Indian culture in eighteenth-century Britain, but aristocratic Indians were rarely encountered in British public spheres. Instead, the world of elite India was predominantly introduced to Britain through returning
25 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah i Velaët, 38.
26 Daniel O'Quinn (ed.), appendix to Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 386. 27 Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 57.
28 James Alexander, introduction to I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah i Velaët, vii.
29 Daniel O'Quinn (ed.), appendix to Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 401. 30 Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindu Rajah, (1796), eds. Pamela Perkins and
13 nabobs, the East India Company servants returning with wealth from the East to live a
life of luxury in Britain; the term nabob an adaption of nawab which referred to native governors in India. Nabobs were viewed as notorious social upstarts living lives of excessive consumption. These figures were typically mocked in British literature of the era, famously Samuel Foote’s 1772 play The Nabob.31 Through the fictional character of
Sir Matthew Mite this play was a thinly veiled caricature of real-life nabobs and the controversy they sparked in Britain. Mite was depicted as returning to London from India ‘preceded by all the pomp of Asia’, he then tried to buy his way into high society by ‘profusely scattering the spoils of ruined provinces’, this ultimately ‘corrupted the virtue and alienated the affections of all the old friends’.32 Such stereotypical figures helped to shape British opinion about the Indian upper class and Indian wealth; an elite Indian lifestyle was luxurious and lavish and built off the backs of the poorer classes.33
Arguably, our Indian travellers were viewed through the lens of the nabob, a lens through which Britain had come to learn about elite India. Consequently, they became exaggerated figures in the public eye, bestowed with princely status; though this did not seem to have the same negative associations as the British nabob. I’tisam al-Din wrote: ‘I was reckoned a great man of Bengal, if not brother to some nouab [nawab] or other, and people came from far and near to visit me’.34 Similarly, Abu Talib, despite declaring
he ‘never assumed the title’, was referred to as ‘the Persian Prince’ and reports to have been ‘so much better known by it’ than his own name.35 Moreover, Joseph Emin onboard
the ship to England was given ‘the nickname of Nadir Shah’s son’, the ruler of Persia from 1736 to 1747.36 Whilst none of these travellers were princes, they all originated from an elite Muslim class in India, except for Emin; something that also may have contributed to them being assigned exaggerated princely titles in Britain. We can see their elite status from the prefixes Mirza, denoting an aristocratic rank, and Sheikh or Sake which was also an honorific title, for instance Mahomet explains in his texts that his family ‘was descended from the same race as the Nabobs of Moorshadabad [Murshidabad]’ whose close relationship was confirmed as they gave support to his family after the death of his
31 Samuel Foote, The Nabob: A Comedy, in Three Acts. As it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in the
Haymarket, ed. George Coleman, (London: T. Sherlock, 1778).
32 Foote, The Nabob, 4.
33 Rahman, “The Gaze Returned”, 90. 34 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 40.
35 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 158. 36 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 26.
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father.37 The arrival of these elite travellers in Britain meant that Britons no longer had to imagine the luxuries of the East through the experiences of returning nabobs, but they could encounter it ‘authentically’ through the lives of these travellers.
It thus comes as little surprise that these Indo-Persian travellers ‘were regarded by most Britons at the time as exotic, even romantic curiosities’; they were entering a Britain which already had preconceived ideas about the Indo-Persian nobleman. 38 There was an expectation that these would be texts inundated with Oriental stereotypes that were in keeping with the conventions of fictitious orientalist accounts. Abu Talib Khan’s text was actually criticised for ‘the want of climacterical warmth’ and for not being ‘sufficiently replete with Oriental imagery, or flights of fancy’, as the translator Charles Stewart noted.39 Abu Talib’s aim with the text was to produce an account of ‘the state of the Arts and Sciences in Europe’, as such he included lengthy and rather dry descriptions of various sciences.40 The translator even decided to omit some of these, such as the chapter on ‘the science of anatomy’ for the reason that the British reader would find it uninteresting.41 The translator of I’tisam al-Din’s work also claimed to make similar
amendments in the interest of the British reader, he writes: ‘in the original there are some tedious details…these I have thought proper to omit’.42
Whilst this does raise questions about the role of the translation in shaping these texts, as the modern editor of Abu Talib’s text Daniel O’Quinn argues, ‘these errors’, such as the above mentioned omissions, as well as other adaptations and linguistic interpretations by their nineteenth-century British translators, ‘are part and parcel of the document, and thus inflect any conclusions derived from readings of the Travels’.43 We must consider that British readers were often only engaging with these edited texts and not the originals. Whilst translation maybe restricted the Indo-Persian travellers’ voices to some extent, arguably what was missing, especially when the editors inform why it is missing, often reveals as much about opinions at the time as analysing the material that was published. This is especially true when studying Orientalism, which looks more at
37 Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 35-36. 38 Fisher, “From India to England and Back”, 172.
39 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 60-61. 40 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 60. 41 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 126.
42 Alexander, introduction to I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, xi.
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constructions of the Orient than the reality. Moreover, such adaptations only strengthen the argument that these texts were ultimately products of cross-cultural engagement.
In light of the criticism aimed at Abu Talib’s account, Stewart argued that ‘the Author wrote at the same time a Poetical Description of his Travels, which he named the
Mesnevy [Masnavi], consisting of a thousand verses’ which may include all the
‘climacterical warmth’ and ‘oriental imagery’ that his travels were lacking.44 Some of
these poems were translated into English and published in London in 1807 under the title the Poems of Mirza Abu Talib Khan.45 These poems, including Abu Talib’s well-known verse “Poem in Praise of Miss Julia Burrell”, were translated into English by George Swinton, a former student of Abu Talib. The themes and language used within these poems differ dramatically from the travel account, as is to be expected of the conventions of the genre. For instance, within these poems Abu Talib used highly romantic, sexualised imagery and metaphorical language; for instance, he writes that Miss Burrell’s lip ‘demands plunder from the ruby of Kundoong’; ‘The soul of the pomegranate with envy melts into blood’.46 Similarly, ‘Her beauty, like the Messiah, recalls them to life’ and ‘If
the idols of India had ever beheld it [her veil], They would have cast away their necklaces of pearls and emeralds’. 47 These poems were translated into English and published in
London three years before Stewart’s translation of Abu Talib’s travel account. Persian poetry was more familiar to an English audience than these Indo-Persian travel accounts, as Stewart himself noted:
‘the generality of Persian works which have hitherto been translated into the languages of Europe have been either Poems of Romances, in which such imagery is peculiarly appropriate’. 48
In contrast, we can see Dean Mahomet’s Travels as replete with the ‘textbook Orientalist imagery’ which was more in line with British expectations and supposedly had been lacking in Abu Talib’s travel account.49 Mahomet was writing with a significantly different agenda, seeking to produce a ‘natives’ account of India for an English speaking audience and thus reveal ‘the charms of the exotic for the British’.50
44 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 60-61.
45 Talib Khan, “Poem in Praise of Miss Julia Burrell”, trans. George Swinton, (1807), appendix to Talib
Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 371.
46 Talib Khan, “Poem in Praise of Miss Julia Burrell”, 372. 47 Talib Khan, “Poem in Praise of Miss Julia Burrell”, 372. 48 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 61. 49 Gill, “Re-oriented Britain”, 104, 106.
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Mahomet was very insightful in terms of choosing his subject matter, as when he was writing in the 1790s, there were several people in the Irish town of Cork, where Mahomet was living, who had travelled to India and many others who would later travel. Unsurprisingly, it was this Anglo-Irish community that subscribed to his text. 51 Writing within traditional British conventions of the epistolary genre, it is little surprise his book echoed the works of British Orientalists. Mahomet tapped into the romantic imagery of India prevalent in the British imagination at this time, through describing the ‘striking
scenes [original emphasis] in India, which we are wont to survey with a kind of sublime
delight’.52 In his first letter, he writes:
‘The people of India, in general, are peculiarly favoured by Providence in the possession of all that can cheer the mind and allure the eye, and tho’ the situation of Eden is only traced in the Poet’s creative fancy…You will here behold the generous soil crowned with various plenty; the garden beautifully diversified with the gayest of flowers… and the very bowels of the earth enriched with inestimable mines of gold and diamonds’.53
In addition to these ‘striking scenes’, his book is full of ethnographic descriptions of the specific Indian customs and habits that eighteenth century European travellers remarked upon and found curious. For instance, like the ethnographical texts written by British scholars, Mahomet discusses the chewing of betel nut and religious rituals in detail and he presents them as curious spectacles,
‘[Brahmin] women rise early in the morning to bathe, carrying pieces of dough on silver salvers, adorned with flowers, to the river side, and lighted lamps in their hands: after bathing, they form the dough into images, which they worship with much adoration, at the same time ringing bells and burning incense, and afterwards commit their images to the bosom of the Ganges, with some formality. However strange their doctrine may appear to Europeans, yet they are much to be commended for the exercise of the moral virtues they inculcate, namely, temperance, justice, and humanity. Amidst a variety of extravagant customs,
51 Mona Narain, "Dean Mahomet’s Travels, Border Crossings, and the Narrative of Alterity." SEL Studies
in English Literature 1500-1900 49, no.3 (2009), 698.
52 Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 2. 53 Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 3.
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strange ceremonies, and prejudices, we may discover the traces of sublime morality, deep philosophy, and refined policy’.54
Whilst his text addressed similar issues to those addressed in British texts, Mahomet wrote from the perspective of a native of India and defended certain Indian rituals from Europe and the judgement of its ‘boasting philosophers’.55 This native voice is what
makes his text interesting; Mahomet offered what was believed to be a new and more ‘authentic’ view of India, a view with which he was trying to reshape British perceptions about the subcontinent. Through these examples, we can see that British interest towards Abu Talib and Mahomet’s texts was piqued through their supposed similarity to existing British discourses, even whilst they offered resistance.
The interest shown towards Joseph Emin’s life and the curiosity regarding his travels was a far cry from the interest shown towards Dean Mahomet’s text. Interest towards Emin emerged whilst he was in England and long before he had written his Life
and Adventures. On first meeting the Duke of Northumberland, who would later become
his patron, at a private horse sale, Emin was prompted to tell him his life story. Emin reported that ‘the story of the various misfortunes of his life…affected his lordship so, that he could not refrain from shedding tears’.56 In light of this, once Emin had told ‘the
narrative of his life’ and informed the Duke that he was literate, ‘his Grace desired him to draw a short memorial of it’.57 In this short narrative written as a letter, Emin detailed
his long admiration of European liberty which he witnessed whilst in India and his grief that his people ‘were in Slavery and Ignorance like Jews Vagabonds upon Earth’.58 He
discussed his resolve to ‘go to Europe to learn Art [of] Military and other Sciences’ so he ‘may be useful at least in some degree’ to his country.59 The rest of the letter detailed his
subsequent journey to England, his work as a low paid labourer and his fortune at meeting Edmund Burke; which are discussed in detail at the beginning of his Life and Adventures. Through the Duke’s response to Emin and his request for the ‘short memorial’ of his life we can see there was a real personal interest which prompted Britons to engage with these stories from visitors, not just an interest in reading Oriental imagery. Moreover, interest in Emin’s short narrative was not limited to the Duke but was felt more widely,
54 Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 172. 55 Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 2. 56 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 57. 57 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 57. 58 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 59. 59 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 59.
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highlighting that an interest in the personal lives of these figures was part of a broader fashion, Emin wrote:
‘[T]wenty messages on cards were brought with compliments, desiring of his lordship to see Emin. His lordship said to him, “Look at these cards, and visit those who sent them, paying your respects one after another. I have this to add, that your letter has been copied by 300 different gentlemen, ever since last Thursday.”’60
Similarly, Abu Talib Khan attracted a lot of interest in Britain. One instance he writes about concerned his invitation to an ‘entertainment’ at Vauxhall Gardens in London ‘for the benefit of some public charity’.61 He writes how it was published in the papers, as his
movements typically were when he was in London, ‘that the Prince Abu Talib would honour the gardens with his presence on the appointed night’.62 Abu Talib’s presence
attracted a great deal of public attention, as was often the intended aim of inviting him. He wrote:
‘I had never been seen in that part of the town, the crowd of people who assembled in the evening was greater than ever before known, and it was with much difficulty I could pass through them’. 63
As we can see the Orient, and India in particular, were fashionable topics in eighteenth-century Britain, a fashion that these texts slotted into. But there was already a plethora of material in Britain about India thus the question remains, why did these travellers excite such attention and curiosity in Britain, in terms of their actual physical presence whilst travelling, but also later through their texts when their travels were long since over?
Meeting Indian elites
Arguably, Abu Talib and I’tisam al-Din from the outset had held celebrity statuses in Britain, on the other hand Emin only took the limelight after the random, but highly fortuitous, turn of events which led him to meet the Duke. On his arrival in England he was reckoned an Indian lascar and advised ‘not to lose the opportunity of returning to Bengal, with the rest of the lascars’. 64 His presumed fate, if he were to remain in England, would be the same as that of low class Indians, ‘either beg or starve’, as without reference
60 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 67. 61 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 158. 62 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 158. 63 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 158. 64 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 28-29.
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he would be unable to enter service even as a common servant, a typical source of employment for arriving Indians.65 The sight of lower-class migrants from India,
especially around ports was very common; lascars rarely had access to any other areas except for the port towns and thus the Indian community living in Britain was forced to exist separately from the wider British public.
On the other hand, gentleman travellers reached a much wider public than their countrymen and interacted with people who had had little or no previous contact with Indians. As the historian Mona Narain celebrates, these travels marked the first ‘provincial’ British encounter with Indians.66 She uses the term ‘provincial’ to refer to
their encounters with Britons beyond cities like London where they were a familiar presence.We can see this unfamiliarity towards Indian travellers within the texts; when traveling in Dublin, Abu Talib Khan noted the confusion these Britons had concerning his ethnicity. Whilst ‘the greater part agreed [he] was a Persian Prince’, ‘Some said [he] must be the Russian General, who had been for some time expected; others affirmed [he] was either a German or Spanish nobleman’.67 Whilst Abu Talib’s nationality was debated,
it was unanimously agreed that he was from an elite class. This shows not only a lack of engagement with foreigners in provincial Britain, but also that these Indo-Persian travellers were being defined by their class as well as their ‘Oriental’ background. These Indo-Persians were understood to be foreign noblemen, which was also an important aspect of their appeal to the British.
To a similar extent, but within the confines of polite conversation, when the Duke met Emin for the first time he did not express much interest towards him. The Duke’s interest in Emin was only sparked as he saw ‘some extraordinary thing’ in Emin’s mind, no doubt confirmed by Emin’s ability to read and write and thus confirmation he was from a literate class. It was this which distinguished him from figures like the Armenian groom who was also present at the horse sale, and could not speak English, made him an object of curiosity and prompted a high-ranking nobleman to become his patron, funding his study at the Woolwich academy. Emin’s ‘rags to riches’ experience acts as a wonderful anecdote for one of the reasons these Indian travellers, and consequently their writings, were of such interest to the British. They were from literate, wealthier
65 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 28-29. 66 Narain, “Eighteenth-Century Indians”, 153.
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backgrounds and had travelled to Britain with ‘noble intentions’, a hundred miles from the illiterate Indian lascars and ayahs who had made the journey for menial work.
Historian Aminur Rahman talks about how ‘The Indian body’ had been, up until the arrival of these elite Indians in the eighteenth century, ‘predominantly represented through the subaltern presence in Britain’.68 Rahman specifically looks at this topic through ‘the clothed body’ and how these travellers were visually received in Britain as something new and other. These elite Indo-Persian travellers, notably Abu Talib and I’tisam al-Din, had an ‘extraordinary visual presence’ marked by traditional costume and significant exposure ‘in the public spaces of metropolitan Britain’. 69 Especially in
contrast to the Indians who had come before them. These Indo-Persian travellers were self-aware of the interest they attracted in the British public sphere. I’tisam al-Din noticed that:
‘Before I went to England the English had never seen a moonshee dressed in the manner I was, only Chatgaon and Juhangeer Nuggur Lascars: the people were (therefore) unacquainted with the manners and conduct of a Hindoostanee… Whenever I attempted to go abroad, crowds accompanied me, and the people in the houses of the bazaars thrust their heads out of the windows and gazed at me with wonder.70
Moreover, his appearance did not only cause a stir among the lower-class Britons in the bazaar but also at a dance he attended with ‘ladies and gentlemen and a band of music’ his appearance caused a similar stir,
‘As soon as we arrive there, a stop was put to the dancing and music, and they all began to stare at me, and having examined my robe, turban, shawl, and other parts of my costume, they thought that it was a dress for dancing or acting in. I endeavoured to persuade them to the contrary, but they would not believe me; and every one in the assembly continued to gaze at my dress and appearance’.71
To an extent we can still access this sense of wonder created through the stunning visual presence of these travellers through the inclusion of their portraits in the texts. The most notable example of this is the full colour picture of I’tisam al-Din (see Figure 1) -
68 Rahman, “The Gaze Returned”, 103. 69Rahman, “The Gaze Returned”, 103. 70 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 40. 71 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 37.
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though there was also a striking engraving of Abu Talib included in the 1810 and 1814 editions of his Travels (see Figure 2). I’tisam al-Din was by all accounts the most fabulously dressed of the travellers, in Figure 1 he is depicted kneeling in all his finery on a Persian carpet with a hookah pipe and a palm tree in the background, encapsulating everything the Orient was imagined to be by a nineteenth-century Briton. This image was printed in James Alexander’s 1827 translation of I’tisam al-Din’s travel account as the frontispiece and it had a prominent visual impact. Whilst not all these texts included such images, those that did provide evidence of how the fascination with the visual ‘Orient’ that these travellers excited in Britain was retained through print.
Whilst there were Indians in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century the above passage from I’tisam al-Din’s account does suggest that many Britons were unfamiliar with Indians. There may have been a significant Indian community in Britain made up of ‘Chatgaon and Juhangeer Nuggur lascars’, as well as Indian servants or ayahs but they occupied the lowest social classes. Moreover, due to their practical reasons for travel these lower class Indian travellers were more concerned with toning down their Indian identities in order to adapt to British customs rather than seeking to assert their ‘alien’ or ‘other’ identities in their host country.72 This is something which we can see happening
with Emin when he first unsuccessfully tries to board a ship to England, a year previous to his eventual departure. For instance, Emin said ‘the first might be taken off, and the second cut short’ when the European captain objected to Emin’s ‘Turkish black turban and long clothes’.73 In seeking work as a lascar, Emin sought to fit into European
conventions rather than stress his own identity, something which an elite traveller like I’tisam al-Din had no qualms with, as he:
‘used to dress in my jamah [a long garment], with my turban on my head, a sash tied round my waist, and a dagger in my belt, and went abroad after the manner of a man of Hindoostan’.74
Like Joseph Emin’s appearance in Calcutta, I’tisam al-Din’s appearance almost certainly caused objections. For instance, he wrote that whilst ‘many people were much pleased with my costume…a few thought it was the dress of the Harem and of delicate females’.75
Unlike Emin however, I’tisam al-Din made no alterations to his appearance to fit in and
72 Rahman, “The Gaze Returned”, 97.
73 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 20. 74 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 40. 75 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 40.
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continued to dress as he pleased. Rahman argues that travellers’ conscious self-fashioning of their own otherness meant that they claimed much more space for themselves in the British public sphere than their countrymen had been able to.76
These elite Indo-Persians were also significant as until their arrival and the publication of their travel accounts the Indian voice was restricted in Britain; these travellers were claiming a space for the Indian voice. Lascars and ayahs were illiterate and the Indian scholars that taught Persian and Indian languages, independently or in the East India Company College at Haileybury were only really starting to be accepted in Britain in the early nineteenth century. For instance, the first scholar to teach at Haileybury college was Sheth Ghulam Hyder in 1806.77 Through their visual presence in Britain, and through their published accounts they ‘reframed the British imagination about Indians’ and ‘consciously started to participate in the making of their self-representations’, all the while being gazed upon in wonder.78
76 Rahman, “The Gaze Returned”, 98.
77 Michael H. Fisher, “Persian Professor in Britain: Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim at the East India
Company’s College, 1826-44”, Comparative Studies of South Asia and the Middle East 21, no.1 (2001), 25.
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Figure 1: James Northcote, I’tisam al-Din, Frontispiece to I’tisam al-Din,
Shigurf Namah i Velaët, Or, Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe: Being the Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen, in Great Britain and France, trans.
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Figure 2: W. Bond, Abu Talib Khan, (1810), Engraving, Frontispiece to Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan. Asia, Africa, and Europe,
During the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, and 1803. Written by Himself, in the Persian Language, trans. Charles Stewart (1810), ed. Daniel O’Quinn,
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A Western Mirror
Whilst these texts did contribute to representations of India in Britain as shown above, for the most part these were not accounts about India. Rather they were Indo-Persian reflections on British society. Texts published in Britain which were written by ‘others’ also served as a ‘Western mirror’. The term ‘Western mirror’ comes from Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam’s book Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of
Discoveries, in which they criticise historiography for still privileging Indo-Persian texts
which had a connection to Europe, ‘partly because today’s Indian “xenologists” remain obsessed with the problem of Indian identity as defined in a European looking-glass’.79 This paper uses the term ‘Western Mirror’ in a similar way to refer to how the British were interested in publishing texts in order to see how British identity was being reflected on a world stage. Thus, not a mirror belonging to the West but a mirror through which the West could see themselves reflected. We can see this motivation for reading the works within the prefaces to the translated texts. The translator and scholar James Alexander writes in the preface to his translation of I’tisam al-Din’s work, that this was a book ‘exhibiting the impressions made upon a native of Hindostan by the manners, customs, and superior civilisation of the inhabitants of Europe’.80 Similarly, Charles
Stewart, the translator of Abu Talib Khan’s travels, wrote in the book’s dedicatory to the Marchioness of Hertford:
‘The remarks of such an observer, on the laws, manners, and customs of the different countries of Europe, particularly on those of our own, can never be without interest and importance to an enlightened mind’.81
These texts, in providing commentaries on British society, fit into a growing trend in reading travel accounts from non-Europeans. For instance, a number of accounts from Africans were also published in England in the late eighteenth century, famously the account of Olaudah Equiano (1789).82 There was a broad literary genre for ‘other’ texts, in particular those which fit into popular British discourses; for instance, the writings by former enslaved Africans were seen as valuable contributions to debates about the abolition of slavery, and these Indo-Persian texts fit into discussions about colonialism in
79 Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 245. 80 Alexander, introduction to I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, vi.
81 Charles Stewart, dedicatory in Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, 56.
82 John McLeod, Postcolonial Writing in Britain, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
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India. These ‘other’ texts can be seen as a subgenre of ethnographical travel accounts; a popular genre in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain which documented and critically examined the society and culture of different peoples. The accounts of these Indo-Persians travellers were a way to access an ethnography of British society from the perspective of the other, in line with contemporary discourses concerning India and according to the conventions of a popular British genre.
In the two texts written for an Indo-Persian audience we get more a sense that these texts wanted to produce a commentary on British society. Abu Talib Khan’s aim in writing his narrative was to provide a ‘gratifying banquet to his countrymen’ of all the ‘curiosities and wonders which he saw’ in Europe.83 Furthermore, he expressed a wish
that ‘the enlightened reader…by reading this account of the state of Arts and Sciences in Europe’ would ‘considerably add to the stock of his own knowledge’.84 Similarly, I’tisam
al-Din travelled with this aim to observe foreign customs, he writes he was ‘very desirous of making the tour of different countries, and of seeing the curiosities and varieties which they contain’. 85
However, we do also see this commentary of British society in the two texts written for an English-speaking audience. Joseph Emin travelled with ‘an inexpressible thirst’ for learning, and whilst the primary function of his narrative was autobiographical, during his travels he was interested in producing a commentary of European societies; he expressed an aim to ‘study as well as he could the disposition of Europeans’, which he recorded in his narrative.86 For instance, in regard to the English who he appeared to hold in particularly high esteem he wrote: ‘he observed one particular goodness in the English… that they are glad and happy to hear, from the remotest part of the globe, of any people who are freed from slavery’, something which was close to his own heart as he saw it as his mission to bring liberty to Armenians in Persia.87 Similarly, whilst the primary function of Dean Mahomet’s text was not a commentary of British society, we can still see evidence of this throughout his text. He makes the comparison between ‘the manners of my countrymen, who, I am proud to think, have still more of the innocence of our ancestors, than some of the boasting philosophers of Europe’ and throughout the
83 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 59. 84 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 60. 85 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 196.
86 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, xxix. 87 Emin, The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, xxix-xxx.
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text he takes lengths to defend Indian customs against what those boasting philosophers had written.88 Arguably, these texts were attractive to the British who wished to see
themselves portrayed in a way they typically portrayed other nations, even if it was not always a positive reflection.
Arguably, Abu Talib’s commentaries on British customs were the most prominent of all our travellers and he offered several criticisms of British society. Amongst these he listed ‘selfishness’, ‘vanity, and arrogance, respecting their acquirements in science, and a knowledge of foreign languages’ and ‘contempt for the customs of other nations, and the preference they give to their own’.89 He wrote that after being ‘frequently attacked
on the apparent unreasonableness and childishness of some of the Mohammedan customs’ he ‘contented’ himself ‘with parrying the subject’.90 For instance when Britons
ridiculed ‘ceremonies used by pilgrims on their arrival at Mecca’ he asked them ‘why they supposed the ceremony of baptism, by a clergyman, requisite for the salvation of a child, who could not possibly be sensible what he was about?’.91 Or, ‘when they
reproached us for eating with our hands’ he replied, ‘a man’s own hands are surely cleaner than the feet of a baker’s boy, for it is well known, that half the bread in London is kneaded by the feet’.92 As we can see from these examples, and as the historian Juan Cole
has argued, Abu Talib’s criticisms only ever addressed superficial issues. For instance, in Chapter XIX where he listed the vices of the British, he only really attacked the behaviour of British aristocrats; however, even when his criticisms touched on more important issues, such as colonialism, he still did not ‘cavil at the colonial enterprise in and of itself’.93 Moreover, whilst his criticisms may have appeared forceful, they were in fact
sanctioned, albeit ordered, by members of the British aristocracy, as Abu Talib writes: ‘It now becomes an unpleasant, and perhaps ungrateful, part off my duty, by complying with the positive desire of Lady Spenser, and several other of my friends, to mention those defect and vices which appeared to me to pervade the English character, but which, perhaps, only existed in my imagination.’94
88 Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 2.
89 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 216-217. 90 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 217. 91 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 218. 92 Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 218. 93 Cole, “Invisible Occidentalism”, 14.
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Arguably we can see this recurring in I’tisam al-Din’s commentary as whilst he also offered judgement on British customs this was typically only in defence of his own. For instance, defending himself against Captain Swinton’s remarks that he was a ‘fool’ and a ‘blockhead’ for following Muslim dietary customs whilst in England, I’tisam al-din retorted that he found British food bland, having ‘an offensive odour’, ‘disagreeable’, and asked ‘how can we [Muslims] swallow such food?’95 As I’tisam al-Din summarised:
‘Between your manners and customs and ours there is the distance of the west and the east’.96 Through these criticisms they were able to highlight to the British how British
customs were equally strange and unfamiliar to an Indian observer without alienating a British audience.
These texts, in part, re-confirmed British assumptions of their own society from the perspective of what they believed to be an objective and neutral outsider. That they were simply reconfirming British opinions was stated by a contemporary reviewer of Abu Talib’s account. He writes that whilst Abu Talib may make some valuable observations, they are only ever observations ‘which in our self-complacency believe we [Britons] have made a hundred times before’. 97 These texts were not merely a way to view the ‘other’
or the opinion of the ‘other’, instead they represented the voice of an ‘other’ confirming ‘western self-understanding’ and to an extent fed into contemporary discourses regarding colonialism and Western superiority, as the following chapter shall show.98 As the scholar Stuart Hall argues, the ‘uniqueness’ of the ‘West’ was, to an extent produced by Europe’s self-comparison to the ‘Rest’, a term which came to encapsulate all other, non-western societies. And without this ‘Rest’ ‘the West would not have been able to recognise and represent itself as the summit of human history”.99
95 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 203. 96 I’tisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah I Velaet, 203.
97 Daniel O’Quinn (ed.), appendix to Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 402. 98 Cole, “Invisible Occidentalism”, 16.
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3
•Empire of Opinion
Whilst the eighteenth-century Britons reading these narratives understood them to be objective observations by Indo-Persians, more recent developments in histories of cross-cultural encounters and its literature force us to look at these instead as subjective interpretations, shaped by political and cultural contexts. These travellers did not only originate from an elite Indo-Persian class, but from an elite class without strong national loyalties.As Indo-Persians they were considered outsiders in India, had been used to serving a foreign power, the Mughal empire, in various capacities for generations and adapted to serving the British. These travellers were Persian-speaking Muslims of high social status who had connections with the East India Company in Calcutta, which no doubt informed their perspectives. Ultimately, the social context from which these Indo-Persian travel accounts emerged helped colour them so that they favoured the British. 100 By the early nineteenth century the conviction that the British empire was built on opinion was becoming popular, it was believed that the empire could only remain standing if the British could ensure that their Indian subjects retained a favourable opinion of them.101 Building on from the idea these texts could be used as Western Mirrors that reflected specific attitudes and opinions, this chapter shall show how they could be used as tools in the maintenance of the British Empire of Opinion.
Opinion in the metropole
The transformation from British commercial activity in India to political rule at the end of the eighteenth century prompted a period of colonial self-questioning within Britain. Necessary to legitimise British colonial rule was being able to justify it in the metropole.102 Complex and contradictory representations of India appeared in colonial
discourses of eighteenth-century Britain, demonstrating the dramatic political shift which was taking place on an ideological level.103 Popular British representations of India
100 Cole, "Invisible Occidentalism”, 16.
101 Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents relating to the
Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 9-10.
102 Michael Mann, “’Torchbearers Upon the Path of Progress’: Britain’s Ideology of a ‘Moral and
Material Progress’ in India. An Introductory Essay”, in Michael Mann and Harald Fischer-Tine (eds.),
Colonialism as Civilising Mission: Cultural ideology in British India, (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 5.
103 Jyotsna Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: 'Discoveries' of India in the Language of
