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Marvelous Excesses: English Travel Writing and India, 1608–1727

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Pramod K. Nayar
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 213 - 238
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2005

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References

1 Herbert, Thomas, A Relation of Some Years Travel into Afrique, Asia, Indies (London, 1634), 2Google Scholar. For European interest in Asia, see Lach, Donald F. and Van Kley, Edwin J., “Asia in the Eyes of Europe: The Seventeenth Century,” Seventeenth Century 5, no. 1 (1990): 93–109Google Scholar.

2 On the rhetoric of similarity and difference, see Teltscher, Kate, India Inscribed: European and English Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi, 1997), 18–19, 20, 25–28Google Scholar; and Metcalf, Thomas, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1998), 41Google Scholar.

3 Platt, Peter G., Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 41Google Scholar. In Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar, Stephen Greenblatt argues that the marvelous substituted for the theologically loaded “miraculous,” 79. Also see Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine's Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998)Google Scholar. For eighteenth-century forms of geographical narratives, see Edney, Mathew H.'s Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cormack, Lesley B.'s Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar.

4 See Todorov, Tzvetan, “The Journey and Its Narratives,” in Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830, ed. Chard, Chloe and Langdon, Helen (New Haven, CT, 2000), 287–95Google Scholar, 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.

5 On the “explanatory” role of the marvelous, see Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Howard, Richard (Ithaca, NY, 1975)Google Scholar.

6 Gilbert, Ruth, “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. Fudge, Erica, Gilbert, Ruth, and Wiseman, Susan (London, 1999), 150–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On “observation” and epistemological “responsibility,” see Stafford, Barbara Maria, “Voyeur or Observer? Enlightenment Thoughts on the Dilemmas of Display,” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 95–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 In the seventeenth century, travelers who gave up their country's culture for the other's were “renegades.” See, e.g., Hardy, Nathaniel, The Pious Votary and Prudent Traveler (London, 1658), 38Google Scholar. Also see Warnecke, Sara, Images of the Educational Traveler in Early Modern England (Leiden, 1995), 227–39Google Scholar; Chard, Chloe, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1999), 45–46Google Scholar.

8 Bacon, Francis, “Of Travel,” in The Works, ed. Spedding, James, Ellis, Robert Leslie, and Heath, Douglas Denon (Boston, 1860), 12:138Google Scholar, emphasis added. For other examples of similar instructions for India, see Edney, Mathew, Mapping an Empire (Chicago, 1997), 44–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Essex, Robert, Sidney, Philip, and Davison, William, Profitable Instructions (London, 1633), 2–7Google Scholar. Also see Batten, Charles L. Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley, 1978), 88–89Google Scholar.

10 Nicolas Monardes's natural history of the Indies appeared in English in 1577. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 149. Natural histories and maps suggested a form of rhetorical control over the land, especially “foreign” and “new” ones. See, among others, Campbell, Mary Baine, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 62Google Scholar; Helgerson, Richard, “The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England,” Representations 16 (1986): 51–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biggs, Michael, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999): 374–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koch, Mark, “Ruling the World: The Cartographic Gaze in Elizabethan Accounts of the New World,” Early Modern Literary Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 1–39Google Scholar; Carter, Paul, The Road to Botany Bay: A Spatial History (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

11 On regional geographic writing and natural histories, see Butlin, R. A., “Regions in England and Wales, c. 1600–1914,” in An Historical Geography of England and Wales, ed. Dodgshon, R. A. and Butlin, R. A., 2nd ed. (London, 1990), 226–46Google Scholar.

12 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1, no. 11 (1665–66): 186–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 2, no. 23 (1666–67): 415–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 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); and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 23, nos. 277, 282, and 287 (1702–3). On the role of the botanic gardens in imperialism, see Brockway, Lucile H.'s Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the English Royal Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979)Google Scholar.

14 Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Delhi, 1990), 31Google Scholar.

15 Ovington, John, A Voyage to Surat, in the Year 1689 (London, 1696), 348–49Google Scholar.

16 Fryer, John, A New Account of East-India and Persia (London, 1698), 418–19, 446Google Scholar.

17 Mun, Thomas, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (London, 1621), 9Google Scholar.

18 Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 348, 379.

19 Adas, Machines, 26–27.

20 On the “wonder shift,” see Peter Platt, Reason, 63.

21 Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science, 13.

22 Raleigh, Walter, The History of the World, ed. Patrides, C. A. (London, 1971), 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the notion of paradise as a labor-free space, see Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), 30–32Google Scholar. See also, with respect to Kashmir as a cultivated paradise, Bernier, François, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 2nd ed., rev. by Vincent A. Smith (London, 1914), 397Google Scholar. 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.

23 The East has, since the time of Marco Polo, appeared to the West as abundance. Campbell, Mary Baine, Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 109Google Scholar.

24 Terry, Edward, A Voyage to East India (London, 1655), 100, emphasis addedGoogle Scholar.

25 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London, 1992), 140Google Scholar. Enumeration was the basic rhetorical style of early geographical literature, as Mary Baine Campbell points out in Witness, 69. In her Wonder and Science, Campbell draws parallels between the commercial cataloging of commodities and the ethnographic “recording” of racial features, 30, 55.

26 On itemization as an important rhetorical form, see Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, 55. For a discussion of the enumerative modality in colonialism, see Cohn's, BernardColonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (New Delhi, 1997)Google Scholar; Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” 314–39, and David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,” 250–78, both in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Breckenridge, Carol A. and van der Veer, Peter (Delhi, 1994)Google Scholar.

27 The Register of Letters of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, 1600–1619, ed. Birdwood, George (London, 1965), 223Google Scholar.

28 Carey, Daniel, “Locke, Travel Literature, and the Natural History of Man,” Seventeenth Century 11, no. 2 (1996): 259–80Google Scholar. In England's Royal Library (shifted to the Cambridge University Library in 1737) catalog for the eighteenth century (held under “Class O,” Series I–VI), out of a total of 697 vols., 106 books were titled Voyages or Travels.

29 Bowrey, Thomas, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679 (1905; repr., New Delhi, 1997), 133–34, 165–68Google Scholar. Bruton, William's News from the East-Indies (London, 1638), 6, 9, 22–23, 32Google Scholar, was full of descriptions of Bengal's fertility, populousness, and the wealth of the court.

30 Bowrey, Geographical, 168.

31 Terry, Voyage, 92, emphasis added.

32 Ibid., 92, emphasis added.

33 Ibid., 102, 95–97.

34 Herbert, Relation, 182–83, 184, emphasis added.

35 Fryer, Account, 56, 76.

36 Ibid., 134–35.

37 Ibid., 179.

38 Ibid., 178–83, emphasis added.

39 Ibid., 186, 188, 411–12.

40 Hamilton, Alexander, A New Account of the East-Indies, 2 vols. (1727; repr., New Delhi, 1997), 1:160–61, 2:21Google Scholar.

41 Purchas, Samuel, ed., Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625; repr., Glasgow, 1905), 3:83Google Scholar. 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. Dellon, Gabriel, A Voyage to the East Indies (London, 1698), 54Google Scholar; The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612–1614, ed. Foster, William, series 2 (London, 1934), 85:230–34Google Scholar. See Edney, Mapping an Empire, 44–47.

42 Philosophical Transactions 1, no. 11 (1665–66): 188Google Scholar.

43 Fryer, Account, 198, 94.

44 Dellon, Voyage, 106.

45 Terry, Voyage, 305.

46 Orme, Robert, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes and of the English: Concerns in Indostan from the year MDCLIX, ed. Guha, J. P. (1782; repr., New Delhi, 1974), 300Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., 303.

48 Ibid., 262. Orme is reiterating what he had said earlier, describing the cultivation of land in India as “scarce a labour” (260).

49 Ibid., 263.

50 Ibid., 265.

51 Ibid., 303.

52 Ibid., 262.

53 Bolts, William, 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 addedGoogle Scholar.

54 Williams, The Country and the City, 30–34, 120–26.

55 Campbell, Witness, 69–71.

56 Bernier, Travels, 226–27.

57 Ibid., 227–28.

58 Terry, Voyage, 102–3, 107–9, 139–41, 141–45.

59 Fryer, Account, 34–37.

60 Ovington, Surat, 224–26, 303–4.

61 Hakluyt, Richard, ed., The Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 8 vols. (1582–89; repr., London, 1925–28), 3:287Google Scholar.

62 Purchas, , Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 3:30–33, 34–35, 41–42Google Scholar. François Bernier provided a detailed, itemized list of the emperor's income from various provinces in his Travels, 455–60.

63 Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 3:42.

64 SirRoe, Thomas, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, ed. Foster, William (Nendeln/Liechtenstein, 1967), 134Google Scholar.

65 Terry, Voyage, 115, 158–59.

66 Ibid., 111–18.

67 Herbert, Relation, 42, 187–88.

68 Fryer, Account, 156, 188–89.

69 Ibid., 196.

70 Ibid.

71 Ovington, Surat, 178, 218–19, 319–21.

72 Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 43.

73 Terry, Voyage, 122, emphasis added.

74 Ibid., n.p., in preface.

75 Ibid., 418, 419.

76 Ibid., 103.

77 Ibid., 121–25. On the threat of infection and moral corruption in post-Elizabethan England, see Harris, Jonathan Gil, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar. Descriptions of sickness projected the English fear of their collapse onto Indians. See Gilman, Sander L., Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (1988; repr., Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar. For the English discourse of disease in India, see Harrison, Mark's Climate and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Delhi, 1999), 25–57Google Scholar.

78 Terry, Voyage, 99, emphasis added.

79 Fryer, Account, 46, 76–77.

80 Terry, Voyage, 93–94. Spencer, Jeffrey B., in Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thomson (Evanston, IL, 1973), 15Google Scholar, identifies the enclosed garden as a hortus conclusus, a place of safety and refuge. An enclosed garden was also a sign of possession, as Seed, Patricia points out in Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 28–29Google Scholar.

81 Terry, Voyage, 193–94. By the seventeenth century, the pastoral was associated with hilly areas and flat (cultivated) lands with the georgic. See Murdoch, John, “The Landscape of Labour: Transformations of the Georgic,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Johnston, Kenneth R., Chaitin, Gilbert, Hanson, Karen, and Marks, Herbert (Bloomington, IN, 1990), 176–93Google Scholar.

82 Terry, Voyage, 123–24, emphasis added.

83 Ibid.

84 Fryer, Account, 125.

85 Ibid., 129.

86 Ibid., 188–89. Compare the French traveler Gabriel Dellon's description of some “very neatly kept” gardens in Surat, in his Voyage, 40.

87 Hardy, The Pious Votary and Prudent Traveler, 52.

88 Fryer, Account, 188–89.

89 Ibid., 56.

90 Ibid., 135.

91 Ibid., 141–42; these images recur in 178–79, 189–90.

92 Terry, Voyage, 173.

93 Ibid., 182.

94 Ibid., 419, emphasis added. Bernard Cohn points out that the Englishman preferred to view India from a distance. See Cohn's Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 9–10.

95 Terry, Voyage, 420.

96 Ibid., 421.

97 The physical difference between English and Indian climate/landscape/disease was mapped as the essential/unchanging difference between races/cultures. See Harrison, Mark'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): 68–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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 Fryer, Account, 113–14.

99 Ovington, Surat, 130–33, 140–41, 143–45, 347–48, 350.

100 Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:32.

101 Terry, Voyage, 241; Fryer, Account, 68.

102 Fryer, Account, 188.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid., 97–98.

105 Terry, Voyage, n.p., in preface.

106 Herbert, Relation, 187–88.

107 Fryer, Account, 31, emphasis added.

108 Ibid., 93.

109 Ibid., 73.

110 Ibid., 103. For a detailed analysis of European views of Indian iconography, see Mitter, Partha's Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar. By emphasizing the Hindu worship of such monsters, the English traveler presented Hinduism itself as “illogical and perverted.” Teltscher, India Inscribed, 23.

111 Fryer, Account, 138, 141.

112 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 20.

113 Terry, Voyage, 195. As late as 1757 Grose, John, in A Voyage to East Indies (London, 1757), 62–63Google Scholar, undertakes a similar desacralization, describing the Elephanta Caves as offering a potential site for picnics.

114 Ovington, Surat, 292.

115 Terry, Voyage, 158. Compare François Bernier's Travels, e.g., 205, 226, 231, 256–59.

116 Terry, Voyage, 162–63.

117 Orme, Fragments, 299.

118 Terry, Voyage, 134–35.

119 Ibid., 136, emphasis added.

120 Ovington, Surat, 279–80.

121 Terry, Voyage, 189–90.

122 Fryer, Account, 43.

123 Ovington, Surat, 143, emphasis added. The weak temperament of the Englishman—especially his penchant for gloom—is the subject of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates.

124 Ibid., 144–45, emphasis added.

125 Ibid., 313.

126 Ibid.

127 Thomas Mun, in his A Discourse of Trade, spoke of “religiously avoid[ing] common excesses of food and raiment,” 57. The discourse against luxury—which contextualizes depictions of Indian excesses—was directed primarily against food, clothing, and material culture. See Sekora, John, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977)Google Scholar. For a discussion of debates over the “corruption” of English society due to the Eastern trade, see Bhattacharya, Nandini's Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century English Writing on India (Newark, NJ, 1998), esp. chap. 4Google Scholar.

128 Terry, Voyage, 219.

129 Ibid., 173–74.

130 Ibid., 244.

131 Herbert, Relation, 184.

132 Fryer, Account, 63, 69.

133 Terry, Voyage, 297.

134 A central theme of the Grand Tour travelogue was the Englishman's corruption in the lands of excess and loose morals. See Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, 59–61; Warnecke, Educational Traveler, 74–85.

135 Fryer, Account, 40, 56.

136 Ibid., 82.

137 Ibid., 170–71, 53. For a reading of the “Other” as disease, see Bewell, Alan's Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999)Google Scholar.

138 Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:54.

139 Fryer, Account, 39, emphasis added. The English traveler only continues a more general European tradition of interest in the monstrous.

140 Ibid., 84.

141 Ibid., 63–64.

142 Ibid., 84.

143 Ibid., 105–6, emphasis added.

144 Ibid., 105, emphasis added.

145 Ibid., 106, emphasis added.

146 Ibid., 183.

147 Hamilton, East-Indies, 105.

148 Kindersley, Jemima, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (London, 1777), 181Google Scholar; Munro, Innes, 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), 67Google Scholar; Motte, Thomas, Asiatic Miscellany (Calcutta, 1786), 13Google Scholar; Moorcroft, William and Trebeck, George, 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. Wilson, H. H., 2 vols. (London, 1841)Google Scholar.

149 Purchas, , Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:42–45, 48–49Google Scholar.

150 Terry, Voyage, 82.

151 Fryer, Account, 183.

152 Patricia Seed argues that the “peculiar fixity” of England's settlements was its central characteristic; Ceremonies of Possession, 18–19. This fixity suggested a sense of permanence that contrasted with India's ruins.

153 Terry, Voyage, 99–201.

154 See Hagner, Michael, “Enlightened Monsters,” in The Sciences in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Clark, William, Golinski, Jan, and Schaffer, Simon (Chicago, 1999), 175–217Google Scholar. On excess in portraits, see Lynch, Deirdre, “Overloaded Portraits: The Excesses of Character and Countenance,” in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kelly, Veronica and von Mücke, Dorothea E. (Stanford, CA, 1994), 113–43Google Scholar.

155 Terry, Voyage, 283–84.

156 Fryer, Account, 95–96, 103, 192. The English Poor Law Amendment Act of 1662 suggested that vagrants be sent off to colonies. See Browning, Andrew, ed., English Historical Documents, 1660–1714 (London, 1953), 465Google Scholar. Also Beier, A. L.'s Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

157 Bruton, News from the East-Indies, 27; Hamilton, East-Indies, 1:155–56.

158 Mocquet, John, Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West-Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy-Land (London, 1696), 244Google Scholar.

159 Bernier, Travels, 317.

160 For a reading of the repopulation of Indian space and the colonial ideology of improvement, see Nayar, Pramod K., “The Imperial Sublime: English Travel Writing and India, 1750–1820,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 57–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.