Making a spectacle of empire: Indian travellers in Fin-de-Siècle London

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 126-146

  Burton, Antoinette ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41949089656     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. 'A Walk Round the "Colonies,"' Pall Mall Gazette, May 4, 1886, p. 1.
2. Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886 Official Catalogue, London, 1886, p. 2;
3. 'E.V.B.' A London Sparrow at the Colinderies, London, 1887, p. 15.
4. Quote is from Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester, 1995, p. 102.
5. The term 'nationally geographic' is an echo of Arjun Appadurai's 'Making the National Geographic: Changing Images of Territory in Colonial India,' paper presented at the University of Pennsylvania Ethnohistory Workshop, November 1995.
6. For an account of Indians in Britain see Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The History of Indians in Britain, 1700-1947, London, 1986,
7. and Antoinette Burton, At The Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain, forthcoming.
8. Lala Baijnuth, England and India: Being Impressions of Persons, Things, English and Indian, and Brief Notes of Visits to France, Switzerland, Italy and Ceylon, Bombay, 1893;
9. N. Dasa, Reminiscences English and Australasian; Being an Account of a Visit to England, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Ceylon, Calcutta, 1893.
10. See William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out, London, 1890;
11. Margaret Harkness, In Darkest London, London, 1891, especially p. 3;
12. Peter Keating, ed., Into Unknown England 1866-1913: Selections from the Social Explorers, Manchester, 1976;
13. Deborah Epstein Nord, 'The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers among the Urban Poor,' in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (eds.), Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature, Baltimore, 1987, pp. 122-34;
14. and Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle/Reading Imperial London, forthcoming, The University Press of Virginia.
15. Anne Mclintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, New York, 1995, p. 16.
16. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Berkeley, 1988, chapter 1.
17. This is Charles Booth, quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society, New York, 1984, p. 160.
18. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
19. A. L. Roy, Reminiscences English and American, Part II: England and India Calcutta, 1890, p. 29.
20. T. B. Pandian, England to an Indian Eye; or, English Pictures from an Indian Camera, London, 1897, p. 19;
21. R. C. Dutt, Three Years in Europe, 1868-71, with an Account of a Second Visit to Europe in 1886, Calcutta, 1890, p. 132.
22. S. Satthianadhan, A Holiday Trip to Europe and America, Madras, 1897, p. 72.
23. T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe, Calcutta, 1889;
24. Jhinda Ram, My Trip to Europe, Lahore, 1893, p. 11.
25. Behramji Malabari, The Indian Eye on English Life; or, Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer, Westminster, 1893, p. 141;
26. see also Dasa, Reminiscences English and Australasian, p. 40.
27. Pandian, England to an Indian Eye, p. 23.
28. For Mayhewsee R.D. Storch, 'The Policeman as Missionary,' in R. J. Morris and Richard Rodger (eds), The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History 1820-1914, London, 1993, p. 285.
29. Baijnath, England and India, p. 33.
30. Medhi Hasan Khan, 'London Sketched by an Indian Pen,' Indian Magazine and Review, February 1890, p. 147.
31. Dasa, Reminiscences, p. 37.
32. For a similar experience among Egyptian travellers to Europe see Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, chapter 1.
33. Bhagvat Sinh Gee, Journal of a Visit to England in 1883, Bombay, 1886, p. 29. The Pargiter sisters in Virginia Woolfs novel experienced some of the same reactions walking up Bond Street in the 1880s;
34. see Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, the City and Representation, Ithaca, 1995, pp. 3-4.
35. Ram, My Trip, p. 10.
36. Ram, My Trip, p. 62.
37. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe, pp.99, 100; p. 101.
38. Henry James, 'London,' in Henry James, Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, New York, 1993, p. 30, p. 20.
39. Satthianadhan, A Holiday Trip, p. 61.
40. Joseph Salter, The Asiatic in England: Sketches of Sixteen Years' Work Among Orientals, London, 1873, p. 182.
41. 'E.V.B.,' A London Sparrow, p. 12.
42. For lists of 'natives' affiliated with the 1886 exhibition, see Report of The Royal Commission for Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, 1887, pp. 311-14.
43. For details of these women's excursions see Burton, At The Heart of the Empire, forthcoming.
44. Malabari, The Indian Eye, p. 188;
45. Visram, Ayahs Lascars and Princes, p. 85.
46. Malabari, The Indian Eye, p. 188.
47. Ram, My Trip, p. 87.
48. Baijnath, England and India, p. 21.
49. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe, pp. 102-3.
50. Malabari, The Indian Eye, p. 33-34.
51. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography; or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Ahmedabad, 1927
52. and James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London Springfield, Virginia, 1994.
53. See for example Ram, My Trip, pp. 76-77, where the woman in question may or may not have been a prostitute (Ram recounted that she fled when the policeman approached).
54. See Edmund Swinglehurst, Cook's Tours: the Story of Popular Travel, Dorset: 1982;
55. Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour, London, 1985;
56. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918, Oxford, 1993;
57. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, 1992;
58. Barbara N. Ramusack, 'The Indian Princes as Fantasy: Palace Hotels, Palace Museums, and Palace on Wheels,' in Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Minneapolis, 1995, pp. 66-89.
59. Dutt, Three Years in Europe, p. iii.
60. The phrase is Paul Greenhalgh's. See Ephemeral Visits: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939, Manchester, 1988, p. 1;
61. and David Scobey, 'Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-century New York,' Social History 17, May 1992, pp. 203-27.
62. I set off 'domestic' here because I wish to be understood as recognizing that notions of home and way, and of empire and nation, emerged in relationship to each other and that what historians have seen as 'domestic' culture was therefore imperial as well. For an explication of this process of 'uneven development' see Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
63. Satthianadhan, A Holiday Trip, p. 72.
64. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, New York, 1925.
65. For a similar bus ride (the number 11's route, in the late twentieth century), see Elizabeth Bowen, To the North, New York, 1945.
66. Ram, My Trip, p. 66. He may also have seen the representations of various Brahman pundits draping memorials to eighteenth century Indian officials that were to be found throughout the Abbey.
67. See Barbara Groseclose, 'Imag(in)ing Indians,' Art History 13, 4, December 1990, pp. 488-515.
68. Syed A. M. Shah, 'A Visit to the Tower of London,' Indian Magazine and Review, April 1893, p. 209;
69. see also Pandian, England to an Indian Eye, p. 28.
70. See for example Rao Bahadur G. N. Nadkarni, Journal of a Visit to Europe in 1896, Bombay, 1903.
71. Sinh Gee, Journal, p. 99.
72. Pandian, England to an Indian Eye, p. 21.
73. Malabari, The Indian Eye, p. 80.
74. Khan, 'London Sketched by an Indian Pen,' p. 143.
75. Baijnath, England and India, p. 38.
76. See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago, 1992.
77. Pandian, England to an Indian Eye, p. 18.
78. Sinh Gee, Journal, p. 27.
79. Baijnath, England and India, p. 19.
80. Baijnath, England and India, pp. 22-23.
81. G. P. Pillai, London and Paris Through Indian Spectacles, Madras, 1897, p. 78.
82. Pandian, England to an Indian Eye.
83. Baijnath, England and India, pp. 36-8.
84. Mukharji, A Visit, p. 106.
85. Ram, My Trip, p. 57.
86. Ram, My Trip, p. 42.
87. For discussions of London before and after Nash, see Celina Fox, (ed.), London - World City, 1800-1840, New Haven, 1992.
88. See Roy, Reminiscences.
89. Malabari, The Indian Eye, p. 177.
90. Roy, Reminiscences, p. 34.
91. Dasa, Reminiscences, p. 56.
92. Ram, My Trip, pp. 34-38.
93. Mukherji, A Visit, p. 72. Educated Indians had long objected to their country being turned into a kind of ethnographic museum.
94. See Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, 1994, p. 119.
95. Mukharji, A Visit, pp. 100-7.
96. See Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination, New Haven, 1994.
97. Baijnath, England and India, p. 25.
98. I am grateful to Michael Levenson for suggesting this notion of London's 'interior spaces.'
99. For a fuller discussion of this point see Frank F. Conlon, 'Dining Out in Bombay,' in Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity, pp. 90-130.
100. One exception was T. N. Mukharji, who discusses the restaurant facilities in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in some detail. See A Visit, pp. 103-6;
101. and Dasa, Reminiscences, p. 35, 44.
102. Nadkarni, Journal of a Visit, p. 37.
103. Ram, My Trip, p. 28.
104. Ram, My Trip, p. 27.
105. Ram, My Trip, p. 30.
106. For an account of eighteenth-century black Britons as subjects and spectators at the London theater see Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life before Emancipation, New Brunswick, 1995, p. 14.
107. Ram, My Trip, pp. 24-25.
108. Baijnath, England and India, pp. 26-28.
109. Baijnath, England and India, p. 28.
110. Baijnath, England and India, p. 29.
111. Malabari, The Indian Eye, pp. 33-34.
112. For a full discussion of Malabari's travelogue see Antoinette Burton, 'A "Pilgrim" Reformer at the Heart of the Empire: Behramji Malabari in Late-Victorian London,' forthcoming in Gender and History, August, 1996.
113. Nord makes this point about western men in Walking the Victorian Streets, pp. 2-5, 145, and 237;
114. see also Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight.
115. James, Collected Travel Writings, p. 14.
116. Malabari, The Indian Eye, pp. 154-56.
117. Pillai, London and Paris, p. 4.
118. Pillai, London and Paris, p. 5.
119. Pillai, London and Paris, p. 7.
120. Malabari, The Indian Eye, pp. 154-56.
121. For an excellent discussion of how the late-Victorian imperial project was implicated in notions of manly Englishness and Indian effeminacy see Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
122. I am borrowing here from Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, p. 15.
123. I am grateful to Robert Reid-Pharr's essay, 'Violent Ambiguity: Martin Delany, Bourgeois Sadomasochism, and the Production of Black National Masculinity,' in Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham (eds.), Representing Black Men, New York, 1996, p. 89, for this point.
124. Mukharji, A Visit, pp. 69, 71.
125. 'E.V.B.,' A London Sparrow, p.
126. Mukharji, A Visit, p. 99.
127. See for example Greenhalgh, Imperial Vistas, p. 60.
128. Mukharji, A Visit, pp. 83-4.
129. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, p. 238.
130. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, p. 240, where Nord argues that this is the condition under which Victorian women were flaneurs in London and Manchester.
131. For a discussion of postcolonial history as a quest to provincialize Europe see Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?' Representations, 37, Winter, 1992, p. 20.
132. Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality', p. xi.
133. See also Nagendra Nath Ghose, Indian Views of England: The Effects of Observation of England Upon Indian Ideas and Institutions, Calcutta, 1877.