Marvelous excesses: English travel writing and India, 1608-1727

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 213-238

  Nayar, Pramod K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD   (India)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949092576     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/427123     Document Type: Review

References (129)

1. Thomas Herbert, A Relation of Some Years Travel into Afrique, Asia, Indies (London, 1634), 2
2. For European interest in Asia, see Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Klev, "Asia in the Eyes of Europe: The Seventeenth Century," Seventeenth Century 5, no. 1 (1990): 93-109
3. On the rhetoric of similarity and difference, see Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and English Writing on India, 1600-1800 (Delhi, 1997), 18-19, 20, 25-28
4. and Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1998), 41
5. Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 41
6. In Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1991), Stephen Greenblatt argues that the marvelous substituted for the theologically loaded "miraculous," 79
7. Also see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park's Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998)
8. For eighteenth-century forms of geographical narratives, see Mathew H. Edney's Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997)
9. Lesley B. Cormack's Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620 (Chicago, 1997)
10. See Tzvetan Todorov, "The Journey and Its Narratives," in Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830, ed. Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (New Haven, CT, 2000), 287-95, which argues that even travelers such as missionaries, soldiers, and merchants were colonizers, where each represents a specific form of colonialism: spiritual, military, and commercial
11. On the "explanatory" role of the marvelous, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY, 1975)
12. Ruth Gilbert, "Seeing and Knowing: Science, Pornography and Early Modern Hermaphrodites," in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (London, 1999), 150-70
13. On "observation" and epistemological "responsibility, " see Barbara Maria Stafford, "Voyeur or Observer? Enlightenment Thoughts on the Dilemmas of Display," Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 95-128
14. and Voyage into Substance; Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1984)
15. In the seventeenth century, travelers who gave up their country's culture for the other's were "renegades." See, e.g., Nathaniel Hardy, The Pious Votary and Prudent Traveler (London, 1658), 38
16. Also see Sara Warnecke, Images of the Educational Traveler in Early Modern England (Leiden, 1995), 227-39
17. Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830 (Manchester, 1999), 45-46
18. Francis Bacon, "Of Travel," in The Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (Boston, 1860), 12:138, emphasis added
19. For other examples of similar instructions for India, see Mathew Edney, Mapping an Empire (Chicago, 1997), 44-47
20. Robert Essex, Philip Sidney, and William Davison, Profitable Instructions (London, 1633), 2-7
21. Also see Charles L. Batten Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley, 1978), 88-89
22. Nicolas Monardes's natural history of the Indies appeared in English in 1577. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 149
23. Natural histories and maps suggested a form of rhetorical control over the land, especially "foreign" and "new" ones. See, among others, Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 62
24. Richard Helgerson, "The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England," Representations 16 (1986): 51-84
25. Michael Biggs, "Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation," Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999): 374-411
26. Mark Koch, "Ruling the World: The Cartographic Gaze in Elizabethan Accounts of the New World," Early Modern Literary Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 1-39
27. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: A Spatial History (London, 1987)
28. On regional geographic writing and natural histories, see R. A. Butlin, "Regions in England and Wales, c. 1600-1914," in An Historical Geography of England and Wales, ed. R. A. Dodgshon and R. A. Butlin, 2nd ed. (London, 1990), 226-46
29. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1, no. 11 (1665-66): 186-89
30. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 2, no. 23 (1666-67): 415-19
31. The Philosophical Transactions regularly published accounts of the plants imported by or gifted to the Royal Society as "curiosities" for scientific study. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 22, nos. 264, 267, 271, 274, and 276 (1700-1701)
32. and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 23, nos. 277, 282, and 287 (1702-3)
33. On the role of the botanic gardens in imperialism, see Lucile H. Brockway's Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the English Royal Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979)
34. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Delhi, 1990), 31
35. John Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, in the Year 1689 (London, 1696), 348-49
36. John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia (London, 1698), 418-19, 446
37. Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (London, 1621), 9
38. Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 348, 379
39. Adas, Machines, 26-27
40. On the "wonder shift," see Peter Platt, Reason, 63
41. Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science, 13
42. Walter Raleigh, The History of the World, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1971), 133
43. On die notion of paradise as a labor-free space, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), 30-32
44. See also, with respect to Kashmir as a cultivated paradise, François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 2nd ed., rev. by Vincent A. Smith (London, 1914), 397. The first English translation of the Bernier text was published in 1671; translation on the basis of Irving Brock's version and annotation by Archibald Constable was published in 1891
45. The East has, since the time of Marco Polo, appeared to the West as abundance. Mary Baine Campbell, Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 109
46. Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London, 1655), 100, emphasis added
47. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London, 1992), 140
48. In her Wonder and Science, Campbell draws parallels between the commercial cataloging of commodities and the ethnographic "recording" of racial features, 30, 55
49. On itemization as an important rhetorical form, see Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, 55
50. For a discussion of the enumerative modality in colonialism, see Bernard Cohn's Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; The British in India (New Delhi, 1997)
51. Arjun Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," 314-39
52. and David Ludden, "Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge," 250-78
53. both in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Delhi, 1994)
54. The Register of Letters of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, 1600-1619, ed. George Birdwood (London, 1965), 223
55. Daniel Carey, "Locke, Travel Literature, and the Natural History of Man," Seventeenth Century 11, no. 2 (1996): 259-80
56. Thomas Bowrey, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679 (1905; repr., New Delhi, 1997), 133-34, 165-68
57. William Bruton's News from the East-Indies (London, 1638), 6, 9, 22-23, 32, was full of descriptions of Bengal's fertility, populousness, and the wealth of the court
58. Bowrey, Geographical, 168
59. Terry, Voyage, 92, emphasis added
60. Herbert, Relation, 182-83, 184, emphasis added
61. Fryer, Account, 56, 76
62. Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East-Indies, 2 vols. (1727; repr., New Delhi, 1997), 1:160-61, 2:21
63. Samuel Purchas, ed., Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625; repr., Glasgow, 1905), 3:83
64. The French traveler Gabriel Dellon also noted the "great magnificence in their [Indian women's] jewels" before going on to provide a brief inventory of the items. Gabriel Dellon, A Voyage to the "East Indies (London, 1698), 54
65. The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-1614, ed. William Foster, series 2 (London, 1934), 85:230-34
66. See Edney, Mapping an Empire, 44-47
67. Philosophical Transactions 1, no. 11 (1665-66): 188
68. Fryer, Account, 198, 94
69. Dellon, Voyage, 106
70. Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes and of the English: Concerns in Indostan from the year MDCLIX, ed. J. P. Guha (1782; repr., New Delhi, 1974), 300
71. William Bolts, Considerations on Indian Affairs, particularly respecting the present State of Bengal and its Dependencies with a Map of these Countries chiefly from actual Surveys (London, 1772), 20-22, emphasis added
72. Williams, The Country and the City, 30-34, 120-26
73. Campbell, Witness, 69-71
74. Bernier, Travels, 226-27
75. Fryer, Account, 34-37
76. Ovington, Surat, 224-26, 303-4
77. Richard Hakluyt, ed., The Principal! Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 8 vols. (1582-89; repr., London, 1925-28), 3:287
78. Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 3:30-33, 34-35, 41-42
79. François Bernier provided a detailed, itemized list of the emperor's income from various provinces in his Travels, 455-60
80. Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Parchas His Pilgrimes, 3:42
81. Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Tilomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, ed. William Foster (Nendeln/Liechtenstein, 1967), 134
82. Terry, Voyage, 115, 158-59
83. Herbert, Relation, 42, 187-88
84. Fryer, Account, 156, 188-89
85. Ovington, Surat, 178, 218-19, 319-21
86. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 43
87. On the threat of infection and moral corruption in post-Elizabethan England, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Parly Modern England (Cambridge, 1998)
88. See Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (1988; repr., Baltimore, 1994)
89. For the English discourse of disease in India, see Mark Harrison's Climate and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850 (Delhi, 1999), 25-57
90. Fryer, Account, 46, 76-77
91. Jeffrey B. Spencer, in Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thomson (Evanston, IL, 1973), 15, identifies the enclosed garden as a hortus conclusus, a place of safety and refuge
92. An enclosed garden was also a sign of possession, as Patricia Seed points out in Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 28-29
93. By the seventeenth century, the pastoral was associated with hilly areas and flat (cultivated) lands with the georgic. See John Murdoch, "The Landscape of Labour: Transformations of the Georgic," in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks (Bloomington, IN, 1990), 176-93
94. Compare the French traveler Gabriel Dellon's description of some "very neatly kept" gardens in Surat, in his Voyage, 40
95. Hardy, The Pious Votary and Prudent Traveler, 52
96. Bernard Colin points out that the Englishman preferred to view India from a distance. See Cohn's Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 9-10
97. The physical difference between English and Indian climate/landscape/ disease was mapped as the essential/unchanging difference between races/cultures. See Mark Harrison's "'The Tender Frame of Man': Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760-1860," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 68-93. The detailing of places and their endemic diseases in Fryer and others looks forward to the genre of "medical topography" that appears in the nineteenth century
98. Ovingron, Surat, 130-33, 140-41, 143-4-5, 347-48, 350
99. Purchas Hahluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:32
100. Herbert, Relation, 187-88
101. For a detailed analysis of European views of Indian iconography, see Partira Mitter's Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977)
102. By emphasizing the Hindu worship of such monsters, the English traveler presented Hinduism itself as "illogical and perverted." Teltscher, India Inscribed, 23
103. Fryer, Account, 138, 141
104. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 20
105. As late as 1757 John Grose, in A Voyage to East Indies (London, 1757), 62-63, undertakes a similar desacralization, describing the Elephanta Caves as offering a potential site for picnics
106. Ovington, Surat, 292
107. Orme, Fragments, 299
108. Thomas Mun, in his A Discourse of Trade, spoke of "religiously avoid [ing] common excesses of food and raiment," 57
109. The discourse against luxury - which contextualizes depictions of Indian excesses - was directed primarily against food, clothing, and material culture. See John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977)
110. For a discussion of debates over the "corruption" of English society due to the Eastern trade, see Nandini Bhattacharya's Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century English Writing on India (Newark, NT, 1998), esp. chap. 4
111. Fryer, Account, 63, 69
112. Warnecke, Educational Trveler,74-85
113. Fryer, Account, 40, 56
114. For a reading of the "Other" as disease, see Alan Bewell's Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999)
115. Purchas Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:54
116. Hamilton, East-Indies, 105
117. Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (London, 1777), 181
118. Innes Munro, A Narrative of the Military Operations, on the Coromandel Coast, against the Combined Forces of the French, Dutch and Hyder Ally Cawn, from the Year 1780 to the Peace in 1784; in a series of Letters (London, 1789), 67
119. Thomas Motte, Asiatic Miscellany (Calcutta, 1786), 13
120. William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab; in Ladakh and Kashmir; in Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz and Bokhara, from 1819 to 1825, ed. H. H. Wilson, 2 vols. (London, 1841)
121. See Michael Hagner, "Enlightened Monsters," in The Sciences in Enlightenment Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago, 1999), 175-217
122. On excess in portraits, see Deirdre Lynch, "Overloaded Portraits: The Excesses of Character and Countenance," in "Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von Mücke (Stanford, CA, 1994), 113-13
123. Fryer, Account, 95-96, 103, 192
124. The English Poor Law Amendment Act of 1662 suggested that vagrants be sent off to colonies. See Andrew Browning, ed., English Historical Documents, 1660-1714 (London, 1953), 465
125. Also A. L. Beier's Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London, 1985)
126. Bruton, News from the East-Indies, 27
127. Hamilton, East-Indies, 1:155-56
128. John Mocquet, Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West-Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy-Land (London, 1696), 244
129. For a reading of the repopulation of Indian space and the colonial ideology of improvement, see Pramod K. Nayar, "The Imperial Sublime: English Travel Writing and India, 1750-1820," Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 57-99