Britain in Indian Travelogues: A Study of English, Urdu, and Persian Accounts of the Nineteenth Century

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This project examines the accounts, autobiographies, and memoirs of four Muslim Indian travellers to Britain during the19th century in their original English, Urdu, and Persian forms. The texts I will examine are the Persian Iqbal-i Firang byNawab Iqbalud Daulah (Calcutta, 1834), Lutfullah's English Autobiography of Lutfullah A Mohamedan Gentleman, edited byE.B. Eastwick (London, 1857), Maseehuddin Alvi's Urdu Tarikh-i Inglistan (Manuscript at Kakori dargah, c. 1860), and SyedAhmad Khan's Urdu Musafiran-i London (c. 1870).All four figures had close experience of the workings of colonial power at its higher levels. Moreover, all are Muslims ofa privileged background but their experiences are heterogenous because of the contesting demands of their separate identities, circumstances, and purposes. Furthermore, their texts span four tumultuous decades, including the unsuccessful Uprising of 1857, and as such, they give us an insight into the changing contours of colonial power and relations between imperial Britain and Muslim subjects in India.South Asian travel writing to Britain has been a rich ground of academic inquiry, although much of it has focussed on a fewselect figures, such as Sheikh Itesamuddin (c. 1730-1800) and his Shigarf-Nama-i Vilayat (c. 1780s), Masir-i Talibi of MirzaAbu Taleb Khan, and the Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794). I am therefore focussing on figures who have received less attention. My focus will be on how theseauthors conformed to or deviated from the norms governing the safar-nama tradition of Persian and Urdu, including thetravel accounts of Britain by Abu Taleb and Yusuf Khan Kambalposh (c. 1830-1890), and how they understood the scope and ambit of their writing. The deliberate stylistic choices of the production of the works - an English translationprovided by Iqbalud Daulah himself, Lutfullah's English original edited by Eastwick, Maseehuddin's Urdu manuscript, and SyedAhmad's serialised letters and journal entries - reveal a great deal about the nature of the work they produced and howthey viewed the function and purpose of travel writing. I will look at the scholarly attention paid to travel-writing in the languages in which the travelogues were produced, in private correspondence, reviews, and other expressions in the public sphere.This is with a view to understanding how the 'intended audience' received the texts, and to what extent this differed fromcontemporary reception accorded to English travelogues of the same time. Moreover, I will examine how the content ofthe travelogues are shaped by the contexts of the author, and how much of that depends upon where the author placeshimself within his society. Syed Ahmad's travelogue, focussing as it does on modernism and social reform, tells us as muchabout his circumstances as Iqbalud Daulah's unqualified panegyric of Britain does about his. In examining these texts, I will pursue a number of lines of inquiry. What did the authorshope to achieve by writing their experience, and how does their portrayal of Britain have abearing on themselves, British rulers, and their fellow Indians? How did these authorsfashion themselves in their texts as Muslims, Indians, and colonial subjects in relation toBritain and how did they perform their 'foreign-ness' in Britain? How did they situate theirtexts in the traditions of travel writing of the languages in which they were writing? In whatsense can we see Britain as a 'contact zone' in their accounts? Asnoted above, I will also situate their texts in the traditions of travelogue in the language inwhich they were writing. In doing so I will also reflect on how they communicated theirexperiences to their fellow countrymen at home, and how their works were received inIndia. Finally, I will consider what these works tell us about contemporary questions of race,belonging, belief, and coloniser-colonised relations and the changing meanings of the terms