Marvelous Excesses: English Travel Writing and India, 1608–1727
Author(s): Pramod K. Nayar
Source: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 (April 2005), pp. 213-238
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies
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Marvelous Excesses: English Travel Writing
and India, 1608–1727
Pramod K. Nayar
But I was on my way to many countries, and travelers have enough to do with
variety, in men and manners, which make up a library to themselves, besides the
situations and present beings of cities and territories, seeming better than to labour
in uncertain stories, which not only perplex the hearers, but beget incredulity, often
times amongst the credulous.1
T
his is Thomas Herbert’s opening description from his travelogue, A
Relation of Some Years Travel into Afrique, Asia, Indies (1634). Herbert’s description emphasizes two conditions encountered by travelers
of the 1600–1750 period: variety and unbelievable strangeness (or, to use the word
most commonly deployed during this period, “novelty”). This dual image of variety
and novelty is, I shall demonstrate, a feature of the aesthetic mode of the entire
genre of seventeenth-century English travel writing on India. Traveling into India
from the port city of Surat (where they alighted after their long voyage), through
the Deccan, Berhampore (present Orissa), Madras and Masulipatnam on the eastern coast, the Bengal province, and Agra-Delhi (the seat of Mughal power), the
English travelers were confronted with a radically different topography, climate,
animal and plant life, and diseases.2 The negotiation of this difference took the
form of a rhetorical transformation of India. This transformative rhetoric was
Pramod K. Nayar teaches in the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. He was
recently a Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge
(2000–2001). The author is grateful to Nick Rogers, Jim Epstein, and the other referee of this essay
for their suggestions and comments.
1
Thomas Herbert, A Relation of Some Years Travel into Afrique, Asia, Indies (London, 1634), 2.
For European interest in Asia, see Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, “Asia in the Eyes of Europe:
The Seventeenth Century,” Seventeenth Century 5, no. 1 (1990): 93–109.
2
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; and Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies
of the Raj (Cambridge, 1998), 41.
Journal of British Studies 44 (April 2005): 213–238
䉷 2005 by The North American Conference on British Studies.
All rights reserved. 0021-9371/2005/4402-0000$10.00
213
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informed, and in many ways facilitated, by the aesthetics of the marvelous. The
aesthetic of the marvelous, with its dual emphases on variety and otherness, highlighted India’s uniqueness, evoked wonder, and constructed a “marvelous topography” of Indian space.3
The 1600–1750 period was one of tentative exploration for the English in India.
East India Company (EIC) travelers of this period were not, in the strict sense of
the term, “colonial.”4 However, the travelogues of this period embody themes
that anticipate and prepare for the overt colonialist writings of the post-Plassey
(1757) phase. This continuity in descriptions of wonder and excess is a remarkable
feature of travelogues right up to the middle of the eighteenth century. It is also
interesting that travelers of such diverse backgrounds—Thomas Roe was the
knighted English ambassador, Edward Terry and John Ovington were chaplains,
John Fryer was a surgeon—should have described India in much the same way,
though with minor variations. Thus Fryer paid attention to India-specific diseases,
while Terry and Ovington were more interested in religion and moral issues.
The marvelous underlined India’s difference and otherness, while simultaneously
providing a strategy to understand this otherness. The marvelous was therefore
an explanatory and exploratory aesthetic that enabled the traveler to discover, wonder at, organize and define, and ultimately explain (away) India’s newness.5 The
reference to the “library” in the Herbert description quoted above is thus hardly
accidental. For Herbert’s attempt, like that of other travelers of his time, was to
provide an encyclopedic, organized body of texts/knowledge about this diversity
that was India.
However, this marvelous was not a seamless aesthetic of explanation. The aesthetic was schismatic: divided along the drive for a scientific and rational account
of the new, and the traveler’s own fascination for the supernatural and the exotic.
People like Francis Bacon and institutions such as the Royal Society of London
made constant demands for accurate descriptions of new places. This derived partly
from a “gaze of penetrative visual exploration of both the expanding geographical
world and the inner human body” (as Ruth Gilbert puts it) and an Enlightenment
distinction between irresponsible viewing for pleasure and responsible viewing/
observing for knowledge.6 The responsible viewer was an observer, and he pursued
3
Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 41. In
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1991), Stephen Greenblatt argues that
the marvelous substituted for the theologically loaded “miraculous,” 79. Also see Lorraine Daston and
Katharine Park’s Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998). For eighteenthcentury forms of geographical narratives, see Mathew H. Edney’s Mapping an Empire: The Geographical
Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997); Lesley B. Cormack’s Charting an Empire:
Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago, 1997).
4
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.
5
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).
6
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. On “observation” and
epistemological “responsibility,” see Barbara Maria Stafford, “Voyeur or Observer? Enlightenment
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knowledge for its own sake. Such a traveler could not just be enamored of exotic
India; he had to provide an ordered survey of this space. It was also not considered
appropriate for an English traveler of the period to be overawed or enchanted by
the strange and the new in a foreign land.7 To this end, he was to systematically
analyze (“observe”) and order the new into suitable categories and narratives so
that the people back home could find both pleasure and knowledge in the travelogue. Francis Bacon therefore listed—like Robert Boyle a few years later, and
nineteenth-century India surveyors of the EIC such as Colin Mackenzie—the
things a traveler must note when in new and strange lands. Bacon provides a
veritable framework for the travel diary and the travelogue. Here is Bacon’s list
from “Of Travel” (1625):
The things to be seen and observed are, the courts of princes, especially when they
give audience to ambassadors, the courts of justice, while they sit and hears causes;
and so consistories ecclesiastic; the churches and monasteries which are therein extant;
the walls and fortifications of cities and towns, and so the havens and harbours;
antiquities and ruins; libraries, colleges, disputations, and lectures, where any are;
shipping and navies; houses and gardens of state and pleasure, near great cities; armouries; arsenals, magazine; exchanges; burses; warehouses; exercises of horsemanship, fencing, training of soldiers, and the like; comedies, such whereunto the better
sort of persons do resort; treasuries of jewels and robes, cabinets and rarities; and, to
conclude, whatsoever is memorable in the places where they go.8
William Davison published his Profitable Instructions in 1633, where he listed the
items to be specially observed by travelers, asking them to organize the information
into three groups: “The Country,” “The People,” and “The Policy and Government.”9 The numerous natural histories compiled during this period provided
narrative models for these travelogues. Natural history categorized an otherwise
unknown/unknowable and wild land into something more orderly. It was an
attempt rhetorically to transform the land into an object of inquiry and control.10
Thoughts on the Dilemmas of Display,” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 95–128, and Voyage into
Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1984).
7
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.
Also see Sara Warnecke, Images of the Educational Traveler in Early Modern England (Leiden, 1995),
227–39; Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1999), 45–46.
8
Francis Bacon, “Of Travel,” in The Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas
Denon Heath (Boston, 1860), 12:138, emphasis added. For other examples of similar instructions for
India, see Mathew Edney, Mapping an Empire (Chicago, 1997), 44–47.
9
Robert Essex, Philip Sidney, and William Davison, Profitable Instructions (London, 1633), 2–7.
Also see Charles L. Batten Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century
Travel Literature (Berkeley, 1978), 88–89.
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, Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder
and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 62; Richard Helgerson,
“The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England,” Representations 16 (1986): 51–84; 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;
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In England, Tristram Risdon, John Morton, and others compiled chorographic
and natural histories.11 The drive to record, analyze, and describe local features
moved into another dimension with the establishment of the Royal Society’s Charter (1662–63, although informal meetings had begun as far back as 1645), the
establishment of the Royal Society’s Museum of Natural and Artificial Curiosities,
and the Ashmolean Museum. The Philosophical Transactions published Boyle’s
suggestions for a “natural history” and a list of “inquiries” for Surat.12 The lists
and inquiries took into account everything from the manners of the people to the
soil’s fertility. The several physic and botanic gardens (Padua, 1545; Leiden, 1587;
Oxford, 1621; and Paris, 1626) asked for and collected plant species from exotic
places. Travelers were asked to bring back samples, which eventually enabled the
creation of natural history museums of the new places.13
The “scientific marvelous,” as I term this component, thus negotiated the
strangeness of Indian landscape through rational explanations and categorizations.
It sought to demystify Indian landscape, behavior, religion and, with its spirit of
inquiry, effected a transformation of wonder itself. This not only reduced the Other
into something knowable, it also enabled the traveler to retain his epistemological/
cultural integrity in the face of the Other’s excesses.
However, it was not always easy to be rational and scientific in the face of the
new and the utterly strange. English travelers to India during this period demonstrate a tension between scientific rationality and the belief in the supernatural.
Michael Adas points out that even the better-educated European traveler and those
best informed about Asian sciences were concerned primarily with religion and
not with science. Noting the emphasis on prayers and such nonscientific “events”
among the travelers, Adas argues that virtually all travelers “believed that supernatural forces could, and regularly did, influence the workings of the natural order.”14 John Ovington, the EIC chaplain, located the hand of providence in disseminating both India’s diseases and cure. Having described the Surat plague,
Ovington proceeded to enumerate the suffering among the Indians. His final
comment was as follows:
But that which creates the greatest admiration in the Moors, and not a little joy in
the English, is our escaping all this while the direful influence of this mortal disease,
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; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: A Spatial
History (London, 1987).
11
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.
12
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1, no. 11 (1665–66):186–89; Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London 2, no. 23 (1666–67): 415–19.
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 Lucile H. Brockway’s Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the English Royal
Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979).
14
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Delhi, 1990), 31.
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so that not one English man was ever yet affected by it. This makes the heathens cry
out, that God is among us, whilst they observe whole families of their own swept
away, without the least infection touching any one of our nation. . . . I think there
is some reason for the pious opinion of the Indians, and that the Almighty displays
an extraordinary power in our preservation.15
John Fryer ended his narrative with the description of a spectacular marvel of his
times: the sighting of a comet in India. Having first termed it a “wonderful sign,”
Fryer proceeded to claim that Indians did not see it as ominous. He concluded
with a prayer that “it may not affect our Europe kingdoms,” since all comets are
“grievous to mankind.”16 Thomas Mun’s A Discourse of Trade to the East-Indies
(1621) described the very discovery of navigation to India in terms of miracles
and destinies: “But by the very Providence of almighty God, the discovery of that
navigation, to the East-Indies . . . it has also brought a further happiness to
Christendom in general, and to the realm of England in particular.”17
Together the scientific and exotic approach to India, in Barbara Maria Stafford’s
words, not only “concretized and authenticated the foreign and the remote,” it
also enabled the colonial enterprise to work toward the goal of “total exploration
of universal reality, to an examination of the virtual presence in the world’s frame
of natural yet seemingly supernatural effects.”18 The marvelous was thus a method
of inquiry. The travelers’ marvelous was, on the one hand, an attempt to capture
India within an ordered narrative that derived its model from natural histories and
cast this narrative as a “scientific” explanation/exploration of the new. On the
other hand, their own lack of training in the sciences (as Adas points out) meant
that their explanations frequently swerved into the theological or moral with no
scientific or rational basis.19
This dual form of the marvelous marked a colonial “wonder shift”—from the
effects of the marvelous to the causes of the marvelous.20 The marvelous occasionally
explained strange phenomena by simply linking it to the place of occurrence, a
process Mary Baine Campbell terms “the exoticisation of distance.”21 The strangeness of the event becomes understandable if one accepts that it occurs in another
place. Further, the exoticizing impulse emphasized the unnaturalness of Indian
events and places. If the scientific marvelous sought rational-logical explanations
for India, the exotic retained—even highlighted—the irrational. Thus, the demystifying scientific and the mystifying exotic coexisted within the marvelous of
the 1600–1750 period.
The rhetorical transformation of India is organized into three “moments.” I
use the term to suggest three phases rather than a sequence in the rhetoric of
English India during the seventeenth century. These phases are stages in the English experience of India. Travelogues of the period invariably begin by describing
a landscape of plenty. The English traveler mapped India in terms of its mineral
15
John Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, in the Year 1689 (London, 1696), 348–49.
John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia (London, 1698), 418–19, 446.
17
Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (London, 1621), 9.
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.
16
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wealth, diseases, and markets. In a sense this was a “topographical” ordering,
where attention was paid to specific material/commercial features of particular
places. Topographical drawings were meant to portray physical features in a precise
and exact manner. In the case of the seventeenth-century English traveler, the
precision of locating mineral wealth rendered the description “topographic.” Eventually, this same topography modulates into negative excess. The third moment
is the most crucial one, for it prepares for a later active colonial ideology and
intervention. In this moment the traveler pushes the excess into a lack. It interprets
and explains (thus remaining faithful to the aesthetic of the marvelous) Indian
landscape’s excesses in moral terms. This iconoclastic moral marvelous conflated
moral and physical geography in order to empty native events, places, and symbols
of the their (native) iconic value. Effectively, this is an anterior moment to late
eighteenth-century “re-population” of Indian landscape with English icons. The
three moments are not discrete but frequently merged to effect an overall shift
from the physical to moral landscapes. An aesthetics of profusion, excess, and of
moral lack furnished a set of tropes that, I shall demonstrate, was applied equally
to varied topographical terrain in India. That is, aesthetics helped “level” all cities
and towns, deserts and rivers with the same mode of description. This in itself
becomes a “colonial topography,” where differences and historical/architectural/
cultural specificities between, say, the Deccan and northern India are ignored when
the travelers employed the same set of images and metaphors, and the same tools
of mapping (disease, mineral wealth, markets), to describe both places. This essay
looks at these three moments in the rhetorical transformation of India.
I.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF PLEASURABLE PROFUSION
Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in his The History of the World (1614): “Paradise was a
place created by God . . . this region standing in the most excellent temper of
all other . . . in which climate the most excellent wines, fruits, oil, grain of all
sorts are to this day found in abundance. And there is nothing that better proves
the excellence of this said soil and temper, than the abundant growing of palmtrees, without the care and labour of man.”22 Raleigh’s description of an earthly
paradise anticipated several themes of the travel narratives of the 1600–1750 period. To the English traveler the Indian landscape presented a similar “completeness” in its fertility, thick woods, massive harvests, and commodity-filled markets.23
Here is the EIC chaplain Edward Terry on India:
When the ground there hath been destitute of rain nine months together, and looks
all of it like the barren sands in the deserts of Arabia, where there is not one spire of
22
Walter Raleigh, The History of the World, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1971), 133. On the notion
of paradise as a labor-free space, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973),
30–32. 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.
23
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.
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green grass to be found, within a few days after those fat enriching showers begin to
fall, the face of the earth there (as it were by a new Resurrection) is so revived, and
throughout so renewed, as that it is presently covered all over with a pure green mantle.
And moreover, to confirm that which before I observed concerning the goodness of
that soil, amongst the many hundred acres of corn of diverse kinds I have there
beheld, I never saw any but what was very rich and good, standing as thick on the
ground as the land could well bear it. 24
The wonder and pleasure at the sight of the rich Indian landscape emerges clearly
in the passage. Terry’s description, with its trope of intensification and the evocation of a sense of awe and wonder, exemplifies the narrative mode of several
travelogues of this period.
The rhetoric of the marvelous’s aesthetic has two principal modes: enumeration
and accumulation. Enumeration, allied with the “scientific” cataloging characteristic of early modern Europe and post-Renaissance episteme, itemized India’s
plenty. Enumeration meant the cataloging of objects and detailed accounts in the
form of lists.25 The enumerative technique itemized India’s wealth and emphasized
the uniqueness of every object in the list.26 Such itemization and listing was, in
fact, insisted upon. For instance, the 1607–8 bond executed by EIC factors upon
taking up service stated explicitly that they would “keep true and perfect account
of all such things as is, or shall be committed to [their] charge.”27 The use of the
word “account” in the above document and in the titles of many of the travelogues
is perhaps not entirely innocent. One of the meanings of the word “account,” the
OED (1970) informs us, signified maintaining details of commercial transactions.
The detailed tabulated lists of products and crops, castes, seasons, prices, currency,
and distances in these early travel accounts is an enumeration and evaluation of
the plenty of India in a form that the merchant/investor would understand.28 The
lists, drawn from several categories, became a testimonial to Indian abundance.
Accumulation in these travelogues is the descriptive repetition of examples of
excellence and abundance—whether of women’s jewelry or crops. The accumulative-descriptive in these travelogues invariably embodied the traveler’s wonder,
awe, or revulsion. This mode exoticized India by pointing out its difference from
24
Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London, 1655), 100, emphasis added.
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London, 1992), 140. 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 Bernard Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge:
The British in India (New Delhi, 1997); 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. Carol A.
Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Delhi, 1994).
27
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.
28
Daniel Carey, “Locke, Travel Literature, and the Natural History of Man,” Seventeenth Century
11, no. 2 (1996): 259–80. 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.
25
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England and its singularities. It constructed a marvelous topography, of specific
items of wealth and vegetation. Interestingly, enumeration and accumulation were
used as tropes of intensification to convey both profusion and excess in these
travelogues. Armed with these rhetorical devices and the aesthetic, the English
traveler paid particular attention to India’s fertility and natural produce, to its
population, climate, and natural phenomena, such as monsoons, fauna and flora,
and its material culture.
The English travelers marveled at Indian soil’s fecundity. The fields with their
load of crops, the dense woods, and markets with a variety of fruits and vegetables
attracted their attention. Thomas Bowrey, in his A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal 1669 to 1679, provided detailed descriptions of
India’s prosperity. He noted Bengal’s abundance with its “many fair and pleasant
rivers.”29 Hoogly town, Bowrey described as “a famous and sumptuous place . . .
well furnished with gardens, fine groves, a very large bazar or market place.”30
Edward Terry’s inaugural topographical description of India, troped as accumulation, suggested a cornucopia: “This most spacious and fertile land (called by the
inhabitants Indostan) so much abounds in all necessaries for the use and service of
man, to feed, and cloathe and enrich him, as that it is able to subsist and flourish
of itself, without any help from any neighbour prince or nation.”31 Food, Terry
noted, the Mughal empire produced “in abundance.”32 He then described the
“woods and groves of trees” and fruits.33 Thomas Herbert described the delicious
fruits of India and its woods, and stated: “These negroes you see have no famine
of nature’s gifts and blessings.”34 John Fryer described India’s “coruscant” nature,
“verdant” meadows, and, emphasizing the sense of wonder, states that the sight
is a “matter for admiration.”35 Wheat is produced in “abundance,” and cotton is
“planted all hereabouts,” with “great stacks of hay and corn.”36 Fryer also invoked
a theological image when he commented “and to give the soil its due praise, it
obeys in all things the first commandment, increase and multiply.”37 In his section
on Indian chorography, Fryer got down to specifics. He listed the trees and fruits,
and mentions that the two harvests are “most natural and uncompelled because
of the rain.”38 Similar images of plenty are repeated throughout.39 Alexander Hamilton, a private trader, in his A New Account of the East Indies, also described the
extraordinary fertility of the soil and prodigious produce, and stated at one point:
“To mention all the particular species of goods that this rich country produces,
29
Thomas Bowrey, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679
(1905; repr., New Delhi, 1997), 133–34, 165–68. 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.
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.
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is far beyond my skill.”40 This comment suggests a profusion that defeats even
linguistic/verbal expression. Anthony Hippon and Thomas Best both described
the fertility of and massive produce from India’s soil.41 The descriptions reveal the
geographical narrative’s penchant for precise detailing, while also exhibiting the
highly personalized evaluation characteristic of the general travel account. The
aesthetic of the marvelous facilitates the linkage of the two.
Each of the above descriptions of profusion carefully omitted descriptions of
farming labor. The apparently “magical” flowering of harvests—suggested by the
vocabulary, Terry’s “Resurrection,” Herbert’s “gifts and blessings,” and Fryer’s
“natural and uncompelled”—suggested a land or field that was ripe and fertile
without any human effort. Interestingly, this emphasis on the easy fertility and
productivity of Indian soil was extended into childbirth and femininity. This careful
observation of the fertility of the soil and of the women was something the traveler
was instructed to do. For instance, Robert Boyle in “General Heads for a Natural
History of a Country, Great or Small” recommended that travelers to distant places
pay attention to conditions of childbirth there. Boyle wrote: “Above the ignobler
productions of the earth, there must be a careful account given of the inhabitants
themselves . . . as to their women (besides the other things) may be observed
their fruitfulness or barrenness, their hard or easy labour.”42 Fryer noted that Indian
women were “quick in labour.”43 Fryer’s French contemporary, Gabriel Dellon,
also noted: “Midwives are unknown in these parts, those of a more advanced age
supply this defect in a country where they are delivered with much ease, in comparison to what is done in Europe. For the Malabar as well as the African women
are no sooner delivered, but they wash themselves, and take no further care of
their babes, than to give them suck.”44 Dellon thus effectively linked African and
Indian women in their “ease” of labor and modes of child care. Edward Terry
commented that Indian women have an “easy bringing forth of children into the
world.”45 Nearly a century later the image of easy farming and easy childbirth
persisted. The first historian of the EIC, Robert Orme, whose readers included
Dr. Samuel Johnson, echoed Terry’s and Fryer’s views in his Historical Fragments
of the Mogul Empire (1782), when he stated that Indians were “brought into the
world with a facility unknown to the labours of European women.”46 And, like
Terry and Fryer before him, Orme suggested that native grain was “obtained with
so little labour.”47 He noted that “productions peculiar to the soil of India ex40
Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East-Indies, 2 vols. (1727; repr., New Delhi, 1997),
1:160–61, 2:21.
41
Samuel Purchas, ed., Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625; repr., Glasgow,
1905), 3:83. 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; The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612–1614, ed.
William Foster, series 2 (London, 1934), 85:230–34. See Edney, Mapping an Empire, 44–47.
42
Philosophical Transactions 1, no. 11 (1665–66): 188.
43
Fryer, Account, 198, 94.
44
Dellon, Voyage, 106.
45
Terry, Voyage, 305.
46
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.
47
Ibid., 303.
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ceedingly contribute to the ease of various labours.”48 He then proceeded to focus
on the feminization of labor in India: “The assistance which a wife and family are
capable of affording to the labours of the loom, may have much contributed to
the preference given by a lazy people to this manufacture.”49 He compared the
extraordinary efficiency of the Indian woman laborer with that of the “rigid,
clumsy” Englishman.50 Orme’s description here is worth quoting in some detail,
since it demonstrates a continuity of theme with Edward Terry and John Fryer.
Orme wrote: “To provide this grain, we see a man of no muscular strength carrying
a plough on his shoulder to the field, which the season or reservoirs have overflown
. . . The remaining labour consists in supplying the field with water; which is
generally effected by no greater a toil than undamming the canals.”51 Immediately
prior to this Orme had commented: “The fecundity of the women is extreme.”52
The subsequent comments linked the feminine with the agrarian. William Bolts,
a Calcutta-based Dutchman in his Considerations of Indian Affairs (1772) shared
this English view of “easy” Indian fertility. Bolts wrote: “Hindustan is in many
places greatly favoured by nature for commercial advantages. . . . [Bengal] spontaneously produces, in great abundance, almost everything requisite for the support
and even high enjoyment of mankind. No country can be better watered . . . the
natural fertility of the soil, everywhere assisted by the periodical rains . . . render
the cultivation of the earth an inviting task and so easy, as to afford the husbandman
great leisure for application even to the arts of manufacturing.”53 There is an
intimate link between these descriptions of the labor-less fertility and productivity
of Indian soil and the fecundity and easy labor of childbirth in Indian women.
Raymond Williams argues, in the context of seventeenth-century English country-house poems, that the erasure of the presence of a working class results in the
creation of a magical paradise, a marvelous, wonder-inducing landscape.54 In India
this erasure served three purposes. First, the emphasis on a naturally fertile Indian
land rather than on actual conditions of production becomes the anterior moment
of the colonial theme of native ineptitude and indolence. The wealth of the Indians
was thus undeserved because they did not toil for it, and India was a paradise for
no perceivable reason. Second, the emphasis on the intrinsic goodness of the land
aestheticized it, emptied it of people and their activities, and distanced native/
human threat from the English traveler who was free to perceive the land clearly
and fearlessly. In an allied strategy, these travelers/narratives were more comfortable viewing/describing India’s minerological-botanical marvels rather than its
zoological-anthropological ones.55 For instance, the anthropological scene in these
travelogues is invariably marked by a description of grotesque, abhuman forms
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
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.
54
Williams, The Country and the City, 30–34, 120–26.
55
Campbell, Witness, 69–71.
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(such as the fakirs) or excess crowds of people. These descriptions are couched in
a tone of revulsion and/or anger. Third, the absence of toilers becomes, for the
English traveler, symbolic of an oppressive system where the farmer does not want
to work in a land that he does not own. It enabled the traveler to suggest (as
Terry, Fryer, and Herbert do repeatedly) that the absence of private property in
India was a sign of Oriental despotism. The French physician-traveler, François
Bernier, in his Travels in the Mogul Empire, devoted several pages in his narrative
to the state of the oppressed Indian peasant under a despotic king. Bernier wrote:
“A tyranny . . . that drives the cultivator of the soil from his wretched home to
some neighbouring state . . . as the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by
compulsion. . . . It happens that the whole country is badly cultivated. . . . The
peasant cannot avoid asking himself this question: ‘Why should I toil for a tyrant
who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and
value?’”56 Bernier saw this Indian tyranny as a part of the larger Asiatic malice
when he wrote: “Without confining our remarks to so distant a kingdom, we may
judge of the effects of despotic power unrelentingly exercised, by the present
condition of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Palestine, the once wonderful plains of Antioch.”57 Bernier thus effected a comparative study of Asian/Oriental despotism
here.
The traveler was amazed at the profusion and variety of birds and animals. Terry
wrote of the “sweet music” of the birds in the woods, the “wild apes and monkeys
and baboons,” the birds that “please[d] the eye with their curious colours, and
the ears with their variety of pleasant notes,” and the excellent horses and elephants
of the Mughal rulers.58 Fryer cataloged the animals and expressed amazement at
the Indians’ control over crocodiles and alligators.59 Ovington also cataloged
India’s spices and fruits.60
India also possessed other, more material, forms of wealth. Travelers noted the
amount of jewelry worn by native women and the easy availability of precious
stones in the markets. As early as the 1580s the merchant Ralph Fitch had described
the town of Belgaum entirely in terms of its minerals and precious commodities:
“a great market of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and many other soft stones.”61
William Hawkins, a merchant with the EIC, attempted to compute the annual
income of the Mughal Empire.62 Hawkins, in an illuminating example of the trope
of accumulation, described the Mughal emperor thus: “He is exceeding rich in
diamonds, and all other precious stones, and usually wears every day a fair diamond
of great price, and that which he wears this day, till his time be come about to
wears, he wears not the same: that is to say, all his faire jewels are divided into a
certain quantity or proportion, to wear every day. He also wears a chain of pearl,
56
Bernier, Travels, 226–27.
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
Richard Hakluyt, ed., The Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 8
vols. (1582–89; repr., London, 1925–28), 3:287.
62
Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 3:30–33, 34–35, 41–42. François Bernier
provided a detailed, itemized list of the emperor’s income from various provinces in his Travels, 455–60.
57
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very faire and great, and another chain of emeralds, and . . . rubies.”63 Sir Thomas
Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, commented: “I had
thought all India a China Shop.”64 Terry listed the diamond mines and described
the Mughal emperor as the owner of “unknown treasure, having silver . . . like
stones in the streets.”65 He listed the places to procure the best cloth (especially
silk) and minerals.66 Thomas Herbert described Cambay as possessing “great
wealth . . . [and] . . . extent,” and drew attention to the “ponderousness of [the
women’s] ear jewellery.”67 John Fryer listed the various items of jewelry worn by
the women in Goa, the numerous mines, and the availability of precious stones
and minerals.68 He described the “noble pomp” of the native merchants. Fryer
wrote: “[These men rarely go about] without a great train using many odours
. . . go rich in their apparel, their turbans of gold damasked gold atlas coast to
their heels . . . embroidered sashes and slippers, golden hilted swords and poniards, as also gold embossed targets, silver and gold caparisons for their horses.”69
When Fryer noted that this sort of phenomenon was “not encountered abroad,”
he had underlined the uniqueness (and therefore, marvelousness) of the event.70
Ovington described Surat as “the most fam’d emporium of the Indian empire,”
speculated on the value of the emperor’s crown—he believed it to be around
rupees 300 lakhs (30 million)—and commented on the excess jewelry worn by
the women.71
The first moment of these travelogues thus presents an India of plenty—of
fertility, natural produce, mineral wealth, animal and plant life, and material possessions. While India’s material culture and prosperity, in Michael Adas’s words,
“outweighed its exoticism,” the very scale of this plenty, unique in itself, is a source
of wonder in these travelers.72 The traveler’s attention to the variety and sheer
uniqueness that constituted this plenty inscribed India firmly within an aesthetic
of the marvelous. These very sites of agrarian, botanical-mineral, and material
marvels were also the sites at which the traveler began to effect the rhetorical
transformation of India.
II.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF DEPLORABLE EXCESS
Many harmful beasts of prey, as lions, tigers, wolves, jackals, with others; those
jackals seem to be wild dogs, who in great companies run up and down in the
silent night, much disquieting the peace thereof; by their most hideous noise. Those
most ravenous creatures will not suffer a man to rest quietly in his grave . . . in
63
Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 3:42.
Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, ed. William
Foster (Nendeln/Liechtenstein, 1967), 134.
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.
64
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their rivers are many crocodiles . . . on the land, not a few overgrown snakes, with
other pernicious creatures.73
Terry’s description—couched entirely in a rhetoric of excess—is a good illustration
of how India was viewed in the second moment. In the second moment the traveler
tempered, even negated, his earlier praise with a note of censure. This negation
was the transformation of Indian profusion into excess, a transformation that
enabled the traveler to portray India as a land of uncontrolled and uncontrollable
passion, diseases, cruelty, and ignorance.
The topography and climate—first described as magical and providential, as we
have seen in Terry, Herbert, and Fryer—now transformed into hazards. The fertility of the soil—once symbolized for the traveler in the beautifully thick vegetation—was transformed into excess, when he shifted focus onto the wild and the
overgrown. Terry began his travelogue with descriptions of profusion and then
transformed the plenitude into excess, focusing primarily on the landscape to effect
this change. For instance, his preface opened with this description: “[The] large
territories, a numerous court, most populous, pleasant and rich provinces.”74 Later
this same image of the populous and large territory of the Indian Empire acquired
a negative valence when Terry expressed his unease at the crowds.75 After describing
India’s “great variety of trees,” Terry blunted the symbolic valence (and marvel)
of this variety: “But I never saw any there of those kinds of trees which England
affords.”76 Terry transformed his description of an ideal/Edenic Indian garden
with this statement: “[As] the Garden of Hesperides . . . was guarded by a serpent,
so there are stings here, as well as fruits.” His catalog—a mixture of enumeration
and accumulation—of “the annoyances of these countries” begins with a list of
dangerous animals, before moving on to the climate. Terry wrote “that hot sulphurous air . . . there were no living in that Torrid Zone for us English . . . the
air in that place is so hot to us English that we should be everyday stewed in our
own moisture.”77 Having already described the Indian monsoon as effecting a
“resurrection,” he subsequently deflated its iconic value: “These showers at their
beginning [of the monsoon] season most extremely violent are ushered in, and
usually take their leave with the most fearful tempests of thunder . . . [and]
Lightning, more terrible than I can express.”78 Fryer also referred to the “violence
of the monsoons,” that “convince[s] the incredulous of a possibility of a general
deluge.”79
73
Terry, Voyage, 122, emphasis added.
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
Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern
England (Cambridge, 1998). Descriptions of sickness projected the English fear of their collapse onto
Indians. See Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS
(1988; repr., Baltimore, 1994). 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.
78
Terry, Voyage, 99, emphasis added.
79
Fryer, Account, 46, 76–77.
74
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Terry, after noting an abundance of deer, transformed the image of plenty into
an excess of cruelty and disorder when he wrote: “Their deer are no where imparked, the whole empire being (as it were) a forest for them; for a man can travel
no way but he shall here and there see of them. But because they are everymans
Game that will make them so, they do not multiply to do them much hurt.”80
Here Terry was referring to the English practice of enclosed parks as reserved
places for gentlemen to hunt, while transforming the plenitude of Indian wildlife
to suggest an excess of disorder (lack of parks) and depletion (the deer do not
breed). The description is also paradoxical since it mentioned an excess of freedom
and the imminent death of unenclosed wildlife. Later, describing the woods in
the town of Mandu, Terry wrote: “The city . . . is situated upon a very high
mountain . . . that hill on which Mandu stands, is stuck round (as it were) with
fair trees . . . in those vast and far extended woods, there are lions, tigers, and
other beasts of prey, and many wild elephants.” In the exact center of the above
passage, immediately preceding his description of the dangerous beasts, Terry
commented, “there is much delight in beholding them [the woods] either from
the bottom or top of that hill.”81 Woods and wilderness are pleasant only when
viewed from a distance, and not when the traveler is enclosed within it.
Terry also described the lizards, rats, flies, and mosquitoes, imaging them,
through accumulative description, as excesses: “aboundance of flies . . . their numberless number . . . cover our meat as soon as it was placed on the table.”82
Describing the demographic distribution of flies and mosquitoes, Terry wrote:
“From all of which we were by far more free when we lodged in tents . . . than
when we abode in houses; where in great cities and towns . . . there was such an
abundance of large hungry rats, that some of us were bitten in the night as we
lay in our beds.”83 Fryer, journeying into the Deccan, saw mountains “veiled with
a more benighted darkness.”84 Using the trope of visibility and blindness, Fryer
conveyed the picture of a landscape that appears forbidding. The woods were full
of “busy apes” that troubled travelers. Fryer first admired the beauty of the night,
“the splendour of the moon,” where the hillside appeared “all marble.” Then, this
description of beauty soon elided into a sublime. Fryer wrote: “[The hill] from
whence is beheld the world all furled with clouds, the Caerulean ocean terminating
the horizon, the adjacent islands bordering on the main, the mountains fenced
with horrible gulfs, till strange vertigos prejudicate fancy, not daring longer to be
made spectator: the bandying echo still persecutes with terrible repeated sounds.”85
The images are of a pastoral India, with wild overgrown woods rather than cleanly
80
Terry, Voyage, 93–94. 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. 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.
81
Terry, Voyage, 193–94. 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.
82
Terry, Voyage, 123–24, emphasis added.
83
Ibid.
84
Fryer, Account, 125.
85
Ibid., 129.
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organized gardens. The images of a wild overgrown Indian vegetation set up a
dialectic of landscape description, with georgic England being contrasted with the
wilderness of the pastoral, now treated as the truly “Other.”86 In the absence of
enclosed gardens, the hortus conclusus of safety and refuge (which, apparently, was
the georgic English countryside), the English traveler felt threatened. Thus, Nathaniel Hardy in his 1657 sermon to travelers leaving for the East Indies concluded
with an image of England as a fenced in, organized, and safe hortus conclusus.
Hardy prayed on behalf of all England: “Not only may come to your [the travelers’]
native country in peace, but, that, when you come again, you may find it in peace,
the breaches of Church, and State healed, everyone enjoying the rights in quiet,
sitting under his own fig-tree, and eating the fruit of his labours with joy and
thankfulness.”87
After noting that “the woods are everywhere,” Fryer proceeded to state that
these woods were inhabited by wild beasts (“the fiercest tigers in the world”) and
strange men. These creatures defied classification: satyrs, nereids, creatures “[with]
heads like an owl, bodied like a monkey, without tails; only the first finger of the
right hand was armed with a claw like a birds, otherwise they had hands . . . they
were coloured like a fox.”88 Fryer, rather than taking pleasure at the woods, treated
these as dangerous spots: “a gravelly forest with tall benty grass offers . . . wild
boars, tigers and wild elephants, which are dreaded by travelers . . . the like terror
is conceived by the crashing noise among the woods made by the wild bulls.”89
Fryer referred to “bats and wasps” that were “overgrown and desperately revengeful, following their aggressors till they have wheeled them into contrition
for their unadvised provocation.” He then described how, in order to escape “the
noise of these buzzing hornets,” they fled toward Surat.90 He described the excesses
of sound that disturbed them while traveling through India: “deafened by the
roarings of tigers, cries of jackals, and yellings of baloos, or over-grown wolves
. . . the croaking [of] frogs making so hideous a noise.”91 Such excess of form,
noise, and number mark the second moment of Fryer’s narrative.
In addition to the threat from overgrown vegetation and animals, the English
also feel discomfited by the large crowds of natives. The presence of crowds threatened English travelers in their journey through India. India’s populousness—
praised at an early stage by Terry, as we have already seen—now evoked a sense
of threat. Terry narrated an incident when angry natives surrounded the English
residence.92 He referred to “mountains of prey and tabernacles of robbers” infesting the woods. These “wild” men, wrote Terry, shouted “kill, kill, kill . . . as
loud as they can.”93 The threat of being overwhelmed by numbers is very real
here. Later, traveling with the Mughal emperor’s army, Terry again experienced
a sense of unease. He described the camping site of the army, “which indeed is
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.
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very glorious, as all must confess, who have seen the infinite number of tents, or
pavilions there pitched together, which in a plain make a show equal to a most
spacious and glorious city. These tents I say, when they are altogether, cover such
a great quantity of ground, that I believe it is five English miles at the least . . .
very beautiful to behold from some hill, where they may be all seen at once.”94 Having
already described the vast expanse of the army, Terry’s admission that it looked
beautiful from a distant, panoptical point suggests a sense of insecurity when faced
with the might of an entire native army. Terry, adopting the device of accumulative
description, emphasized the numerical excess of the army repeatedly in the space
of one paragraph. The extraordinary passage is worth quoting in full:
Now to make it appear that the number of people of all sorts is so exceeding great,
which here get, and keep together in the Mogol’s leskar [lashkar], or Camp Royal;
first there are one hundred thousand soldiers, which always wait about that king (as
before observed) and all his Grandees have a great train of followers and servants to
attend them there, and so have all other men according to their several qualities, and
all these carry their wives and children, and whole families with them, which must
needs amount to a very exceeding great number. And further to demonstrate this,
when that King removes from one place to another, for the space of twelve hours, a
broad passage is continually fill’d with passengers, and elephants, and horses, and
asses, and oxen, (on which the manner sort of men and women with their little
children, ride), so full as they may well pass one by the other. Now in such a broad
passage, and in such a long time, a very great number of people, the company continually
moving on forward, may pass.95
Pondering over his own situation, Terry wrote: “Here we often shift our places
and our company, and must do so for our business carrying us up and down, to
and fro, but our felicity hereafter shall consist in rest, in not changing for ever
after, either our company or our place.”96 Terry’s description embodies an anxiety
at this accumulation of natives.
Along with crowds and animals, one of the principal modes of representing an
India of excess was to chart its medical topography. The English faced a whole
new range of diseases when traveling through India. The marvel of disease, occasionally explained by the scientific traveler, enabled the construction of India as
a site of danger.97
John Fryer classified diseases in terms of their geographical specificity, seasons,
and probable causes: cholera, eye inflammations, apoplexy in summer; the relatively
healthier dry weather; and the prevalence of rheumatism and diseases of the throat
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 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.
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in the period of the “variable months.”98 John Ovington also cataloged diseases,
their vectors, and the “bad” seasons in India.99 William Finch, who traveled with
William Hawkins, referred to the “beastly” climate of Bramport, which made it
“a very sickly place,” and attributed it to the bad water in the area.100 Terry
described the link between climate and diseases, and Fryer, having described Indian
climate as “extremely unhealthy,” attempted to explain the reasons for the condition: “I rather impute it to the situation, which causes an infecundity in the
earth, and a putridness in the air, what being produced seldom coming to maturity,
whereby what is eaten is undigested; whence follows fluxes, dropsy, scurvy . . .
which are endemial diseases.”101
Thus the exotic plenty of India—approximating to an earthly paradise full of
plant and animal life—is now imaged as a dangerous wilderness in the second
moment. The English traveler now located a landscape of disease, death, and
deprivation in the same features once imaged as pleasurable profusion. However,
this does not complete the representation of India. The traveler conflated physical
and moral topographies when he read climatic conditions, landscape features, town
planning, and disease as symptomatic of moral conditions. Further, he began to
evacuate the landscape of Indian icons by rejecting, altering, or explaining away
their valence and value to the natives. This is the third moment of representation.
III.
ICONOCLASM AND THE MORAL MARVELOUS
I have demonstrated how the traveler transformed Indian profusion into deplorable
excess. In the third moment of the English traveler’s encounter with the Indian
landscape, he adopted what may be termed a “moral marvelous” aesthetic. This
is a crucial moment, for it prepared the ground for a more overtly colonial discourse
in the later decades of the eighteenth century. The moral marvelous completed
the rhetorical transformation of India from a place of plenty to one of dangerous
excess. It mapped the strange topography of India onto a moral topography and
vice versa. The iconoclasm of this moment transformed valuable native achievements/icons into everyday objects, or attributed negative values to them. The
iconoclastic moral marvelous emptied Indian landscape of all value and thus effectively prepared the ground for a repopulating with English icons (memorials,
constructions, towns) in the late eighteenth century. The third moment is important for a very intricate maneuver executed by these narratives. It set up India
as a site of testing: of the moral fiber, vulnerability, and strength of English character. The numerous references to diseases, deprivation, and danger in these catalogs dovetailed neatly into the moral topography of both Indians and English. A
critique of Indian icons—achieved through the moral marvelous—simultaneously
set up, by implication, the superior character of the Englishman. The iconoclastic
moral marvelous looked at indolence, waste and immoderation, native beliefs, and
such “moral” states. In addition, the third moment is characterized by an attention
to ruins that, to the traveler, are iconic of a general degradation of Indian civilization itself and native aesthetics.
98
Fryer, Account, 113–14.
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.
99
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Here is Fryer describing the great water tanks built by Indian rulers: “The great
tanks or ponds of rain-water, where it wants the other benefits, with deep wells,
of extraordinary costs and charges; some purely for pomp, and to transmit their
names to posterity; others for the good of travelers, but most for the sake of
religion, in which they are extravagantly profuse.”102 Benevolent wealth is transformed into immoderate, and therefore immoral, expense. Later Fryer wrote: “The
plain country is rich in all things necessary . . . cocoas grow all along the seaside round India . . . and betel-nut is in great request.” Then, to dim this picture
of plenty, Fryer described the betel nut: “It exhilarates and makes a kind of pleasant
drunkenness.”103 Fryer has effectually effaced the value of the natural product by
pointing to its negative qualities.
The moral marvelous functioned in precisely this manner—by diminishing the
significance of the event/place/condition by rendering it ordinary, or by denigrating it as morally questionable. For instance, the traveler explained away the
enormous wealth of the native kings by suggesting that this wealth was obtained
through the unremitting oppression of the artisan and the ordinary working class.
Note, as an illustration, Fryer’s comment on the condition: “There is another
thing above all the rest of an unpardonable offence; for banyan or rich broker to
grow wealthy without protection of some great person; for it is so mighty a disquiet
to the governor that he can never be at ease till he have seen the bottom of this
mischief; which is always cured by transfusion of treasure out of the banyans into
the governor’s coffers.”104 The marvel of the emperor’s wealth is thus diminished
to the not very surprising and, finally, to the repulsive. This elision from profusion
to excess and finally to lack (of knowledge, kindness, rights, and freedom) is one
of the central patterns in early colonial writing.
In other cases, the wealth of the natives was presented as grotesque exhibitionism. Terry described the Mughal emperor as “blind” and wealthy, and suggested
that the English king has “more cause to pity, than to envy his greatness.”105
Thomas Herbert commented on the effect of jewelry worn by the native women:
“The women . . . dilacerate their ears to a monstrous proportion, for by the
ponderousness of their ear jewels they tear their ears to that capacity: that I have
easily put my arm through their earholes.”106 Fryer’s description of Indian women’s
jewelry is no mere accumulative description but a subtle transformation of signs
of wealth into signs of excesses. He wrote: “Their women are manacled with
chains of silver (or fetters rather) and hung with ear-rings of gold and jewels, their
noses stretched with weighty jewels.”107 He then commented that, despite their
evident material wealth, the Indian women lived in “a most servile condition.”108
In each of these examples the traveler desacralized signs of India’s prosperity by
pointing to the negative effects—real or perceived—of this wealth.
The traveler paid attention to the religious and symbolic significance of these
natural events for the natives. Fryer, for instance, expressed his disbelief at Hindu
102
Fryer, Account, 188.
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.
103
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interpretations of icons. He visited mountain burrows believed by the natives to
have been built by Alexander and noted that “this place by the Gentiles is much
adored.” Immediately after this, Fryer commented, “but this is contradictory to
the story delivered of Alexander.” He then concluded: “[It is] more probabl[y]
. . . a heathen Fane, or idolatrous Pagod, from the superstitious opinion they still
hold of its sacredness.”109 Later Fryer, a surgeon with the EIC, tried to offer a
scientific explanation for the revered fakir’s feats of bodily asceticism.110 He repeated this rationalizing exercise in the case of “holy” caves and fireflies.111 Native
interpretations of the miraculous/divine nature of these events/places were rejected in favor of rational explanations. The marvelous—which reduced the heightened status of the miraculous, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued—thus also gestured at the irrational, and therefore suspect, native beliefs.112
The English traveler also desacralized native icons by suggesting everyday uses
for the objects sacred to the native. For instance, Terry noted the several old
mosques in the Mughal empire. His description of the scene is worth detailing:
[Mandu] not much inhabited before we came thither, having more ruins by far about
it, than standing houses. But amongst the piles of building that had held up their
heads above ruin, there were not a few unfrequented Mosques or Mahomedan
churches; yet I observed, that though the people who attended the King there, were
marvelously straitened for room, wherein they might dispose of very great numbers
of most excellent horses, which were now at that place, they would not make stables
of any of those churches, though before that time, they had been forsaken, and out
of use.113
Terry thus converted a sacred native site and religious icon into an ordinary object.
John Ovington desacralized the Hindu chants that accompany rituals by offering
a scientific explanation and linking it to the climate. Ovington wrote: “The warmth
of the air, which is apt to stupefy the spirits, and render them unwieldy and dull,
was as likely a reason for introducing this melodious diversion, which is apt to
keep them active and awake at their work, as it was to exercise devotion of their
thoughts.”114 In each of these cases, the traveler has offered a quotidian explanation
approximating to the iconoclastic in its rejection of native beliefs. The ascription
of moral depravity—an integral component of such an explanation, especially when
it comes to native temples—modulates smoothly into iconoclasm.
Terry’s description of the Mughal prince is particularly illustrative of the iconoclastic moral marvelous. Consider this passage: “Where first, for their numerous
109
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 103. For a detailed analysis of European views of Indian iconography, see Partha Mitter’s
Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977). 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 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.
114
Ovington, Surat, 292.
110
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armies, it will appear to be no strange thing, if we consider the Great Mogul to
be what he is, an overgrown Prince in the vast extent of his territories, being like
a huge Pike in a great pond, that preys upon all his neighbours.”115 Here the
description of grotesque excesses, of unsightly bulk (“overgrown”) and of avarice
(“prey”), convert a wealthy native king into a devouring monster and highlight
the moral “flaws” of this person. The image of great wealth and power at the
service of a monster is a moral topography. Terry also transformed the image of
strength (numerical superiority) into one of excessive weakness when he wrote:
“A man of resolution will beat one of these [native soldiers] out of all his weapons,
with a small stick or cane . . . the natives being most strong and valiant in their
base lusts and not otherwise.”116 The threat of the numerically large Mughal army
is neutralized rhetorically with this image of a morally weak army. Years later,
Robert Orme made similar observations. In a section leadingly titled “Effeminacy
of the Inhabitants of Indostan,” Orme wrote: “The sailor no sooner lands on the
coast, than nature dictates to him the full result of this comparison; he brandishes
his stick in sport, and puts fifty Indians to flight in a moment. . . . It is well if
he recollects that the poor Indian is still a man. . . . Two English sawyers have
performed in one day the work of thirty-two Indians.”117 Likewise, the great talents
of the native artists, which Terry himself has praised earlier, were subsequently
reduced in intensity.118 Terry now suggested that the native artist’s greatest talent
is for imitation: “The natives of that monarchy are the best apes for imitation in
the world, so full of ingenuity that they will make any new thing by pattern.” He
added: “It is no marvel if the Natives there make Shoes, and Boots, and Clothes,
and Linen, and Bands and Cuffs of our English fashion.”119 John Ovington made
a similar comment: “The Indians are in many things of matchless ingenuity in
their several employments, and admirable mimics of whatever they affect to copy
after.”120
Even the open air is not left untouched by such iconoclastic moral transformations. Here is Terry’s description of the terraces of Indian houses: “These broad
terraces, or flat roofs, some of them lofty, are places where many people may stand
(and so they often do) early in the morning, and in the evening late . . . to draw
and drink in fresh air; and they are made after this fashion, for prospect as well
as pleasure.” Terry admitted that the terraced house enables the resident to be
out in the fresh air. However, Terry also suggested that such an arrangement of
the houses encourages voyeurism and moral depravity! As an example he cited the
story of David and Bathsheba, whose affair began with David’s sighting of Bathsheba from the roof of his house. Terry thus linked the physical topography with
a moral one and iconoclastically deflated the value of native constructions.121
John Fryer’s attention was drawn to the prevalence of elephantiasis in the St.
Thomas Mount area of Madras city. Fryer offered a remarkable explanation for
this condition. He wrote: “About this Mount lives a caste of people, one of whose
115
Terry, Voyage, 158. Compare François Bernier’s Travels, e.g., 205, 226, 231, 256–59.
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.
116
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legs are as big as an elephant’s; which gives occasion for the divulging it to be a
judgement on them, as the generation of the assassins and murderers of the Blessed
Apostle St Thomas.”122 In this explanation an endemic disease is taken as an
external symptom of a deeper moral malaise of the inhabitants. Ovington also
suggested that the illnesses of the English were partly the results of their own
intemperance and vulnerability to the climate. His description effectively conflated
physical and moral topographies. The rhetoric of inflation and accumulation is
very clear in Ovington’s description: “But there seldom happens any great defect
in the natural world, without some preceding in the moral. . . . I cannot without
horror mention to what a pitch all vicious enormities were grown in this place, . . .
these fatal infelicities which are not wholly imputable to an impure contagion of
the air, or the gross infection of the elements. Their principles of action, and the
consequent evil practices of the English forwarded their miseries, and contributed
to fill the air with those pestilential vapours that seized their vitals . . . luxury,
immodesty, and a prostitute dissolution of manners.”123 Elaborating this theme,
Ovington sketched in the character of the Englishman as dissolute and weak,
susceptible to the many temptations that India offers. Ovington continued: “The
prodigious growth of vermin and of venomous creatures . . . do abundantly likewise
demonstrate the malignant corruption of the air, and then natural cause of its
direful effects upon the Europeans. . . . Its easily seen by these venomous creatures, what encouragement these infectious and pestilential qualities meet with in
this place, and under what a contagious influence all the inhabitants must consequently be seated.”124 Ovington’s linking of the moral and the topographical
emerges clearly in these descriptions. However, Ovington was also careful to represent the native as equally—if not more—dissolute and depraved as the Englishman, as in this passage: “Because of the heat, they eat at eight or nine in the
morning, then at four or five in the afternoon. Then, often at midnight, after their
nocturnal embraces, they recover their spirits by some nourishing food, to excite
them again to fresh amours.”125 He then stated: “They seldom take their repose
without a wench in their arms.”126 Here Ovington has linked three issues: the
climate, the cultural habits (consumption of food), and the morality of the
Indians.127
The discourse of English vulnerability was also imaged in terms of the moral
marvelous. Terry wrote: “The consideration of this might shame and make us to
blush at it . . . shame I say and condemn too, the lightness, and wantonness, the
122
Fryer, Account, 43.
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 John Sekora, Luxury:
The Concept in Western Thought, from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977). 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,
NJ, 1998), esp. chap. 4.
123
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want of sobermindedness, and inconstancy of our people here.”128 He pointed
out the ill effects of the English consuming native liquor and illustrated his arguments by discussing the behavior of a drunken cook.129 Temperance was the
only means of escaping dangerous illness in India.130 Thomas Herbert referred to
the generous hospitality of the natives, which proceeded, he believed, from the
plenitude of resources they possess.131 John Fryer referred to intemperance as the
primary cause of ill health among the English in India.132 Fryer, in fact, attributed
the longevity and good health of the natives to their careful diet and temperance
in alcohol consumption. The suggestion here is of a land where things are dangerously plenty, a site of temptation where the vulnerable Englishman may easily
“fall.” Terry’s reference to India as a “fleshly paradise” was a comment on the
moral threat that India poses.133
By paying attention to ruined buildings, the depravity of the natives, the unhealthy climate of India, and the excessive threat of (native) disease, the traveler
was articulating a very complex discourse of the Indian landscape. These texts are
layered with descriptions of English vulnerability, their adaptability, native immunity, and the native (as) disease. The description of Indian excess, working
along with the tirade against luxury, articulated a discourse of Western morality
versus Eastern temptation and depravity.134
Native religion is imaged as excess growth of unwanted vegetation, with the
potential for inducing illness. The moral marvelous transforms the rich vegetation
into an allegory of blindness and ignorance, of the impenetrable darkness of the
native minds. Here is Fryer on the theme. He first described the groves as “laboratories of . . . fallacious oracles” where the “blinded” natives get “deluded.”
He then continued: “Six miles up stands Palapatam, of building base, it is overgrown with the weeds of Mahommedanism, the Moors planting themselves
here.”135 Later Fryer added: “To this [place] belong two sorts of vermin, the fleas
and banyans, the one harbouring in the sand, fasten upon you as you pass . . .
the other vermin are the banyans themselves, that hang like leeches, till they have
sucked both sanguinem and succum (I mean money) from you . . . as soon as
you have set your foot on shore, they crowd in their service . . . [they] will never
leave till they have drawn out something for their advantage.”136 Here Fryer linked
the large population of tropical life forms with the human and conjoined them in
a symbol that approximates to the moral marvelous, for he mapped the moral
character of the human onto the demography of other life forms. This is a common
mode of shifting the condition of profusion into that of excess in Fryer. He referred
to the Maratha King Shivaji as a “diseased limb of Deccan” and the religion of
128
Terry, Voyage, 219.
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.
129
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Islam as “infection.”137 This explanation/criticism of a new form of architecture
exactly repeats Fryer’s comments on the darkness/blindness of Hindu religion
imaged as dark places (noted above).
The rejection of man-made idols is a particularly illustrative example of the
iconoclastic moral marvelous. William Finch described the ruins of a Hindu King’s
court thus: “In the gallery where the king used to sit are drawn overhead many
pictures of angels, with pictures of banian dews, or rather devils, intermixed in
most ugly shape, with long horns, staring eyes, shaggy hair, great fangs, ugly paws,
long tails, with such horrible deformity that I wonder the poor women are not
frighted therewith.”138 Fryer referred to the “monstrous effigies” in “bawdy postures” in the chapels, where the gods are “cut in horrid shape.” Fryer wrote:
“Their [temples’] outside show workmanship and cost enough, wrought round
with monstrous effigies, . . . pains and cost to no purpose.”139 The criticism of the
aesthetic in terms of a moral condition—“bawdy,” frightening and so on—effectively rejected native symbolism. Fryer’s specific reference to the wastage involved
(“pains and cost to no purpose”) also becomes iconoclastic in its rejection of native
efforts.
Fryer noted that instead of gardens, India has “wilderness, overspread with
trees.”140 On the one occasion where Fryer actually found a pleasant Indian garden,
he transformed this Edenic site into a scene of martial excesses. Fryer wrote:
About the house was a delicate garden, voiced to be the pleasantest in India, intended
rather for wanton dalliance . . . this garden of Eden, or place of terrestrial happiness
. . . the walks which before were covered with Nature’s verdent awning, and lightly
pressed by soft delights, are now open to the sun, and loaded with hardy cannon:
the bowers dedicated to rest and ease, are turned into bold ramparts for watchful
sentinels to look out for, every tree that the airy choristers made their charming choir,
trembles, and is extirpated at the rebounding echo of the alarming drum, and those
slender fences only designed to oppose the sylvan herd, are thrown down to erect
others of a more war-like force.141
Fryer also mentioned that the English had a “neat” garden, but “Shivaji’s coming
destroyed it.”142 Fryer’s description of a flourishing Indian garden illustrates how
the moral marvelous functioned as iconoclasm. Fryer wrote: “Though these people
delight much in gardens, yet they are but rude, compared to ours of Europe; they
make a noble entrance, a banquetting-house in the middle eyeing the four quarters
of the garden, beset with trees like wilderness in every quarter, or else planted
with potatoes, Tawms, Breenjawms, both hot plants, and their coolers . . . and
such like, they are only divided by gravelly walks and water courses; not curiously
137
Ibid., 170–71, 53. For a reading of the “Other” as disease, see Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and
Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999).
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.
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adorned with flowers. Roses would grow here if they would but cultivate them.”143
Referring to the banyan tree, Fryer wrote: “It is possible to be so contrived, if it
be looked after, to make a wood alone of itself.”144 Referring to the tides in the
river, Fryer commented: “The river; it glides by the town in swift tides, and at
Spring Tides (which it would always do, were they industrious enough to keep it in
its banks).”145 In the case of agricultural land in the Karnataka region, Fryer wrote:
“Three quarters of the land lies unmanured, through the tyranny of Seva Gi
[Shivaji].”146 Alexander Hamilton, in a similar move, linked trade, topography,
and morality of natives in his description of Bassein: “It is a place of small trade,
because most of its riches lie dead and buried in their churches, or in the hands
of indolent lazy country gentlemen who loiter away their days in ease, luxury and
pride, without having the least sense of the poverty and calamity of their country.”147 Fryer and Hamilton gestured at native indolence in an iconoclastic critique
that suggested a moral decline of the native. Here the lack of cultivation was also
attributed to a certain moral condition. Fryer suggested that the excessive/disorderly growth, or neglected lands in India, was a direct reflection of the laziness
of their religions. This discourse of native laziness and the resultant wasted landscape in Fryer and others launched a theme that persisted in several eighteenthcentury writers such as Jemima Kindersley, Innes Munro, Thomas Motte, William
Moorcroft, and George Trebeck.148
The ruin, iconic of this general decline in civilization/cultivation, came in for
some special attention by these travelers. The rhetoric of accumulation that enabled
ruin descriptions rendered the Indian landscape into an excess emptiness of decay
and devastation. The word “ruin” and its cognates occur at least once in every
paragraph in William Finch’s narrative.149 Old mosques falling to ruins attracted
Terry’s attention.150 Fryer spoke of how Shivaji’s tyranny left arable land “unmanured” and ruined.151 Seen in contrast with Britain’s old and “fixed” villages
that suggested permanence, these ruins testified to India’s decay.152
India’s human inhabitants are also represented through the aesthetics of the
marvelous. Terry, after describing the gardens of pleasure as filled with “vineyards
that afford marvailous fair and sweet grapes,” transformed the idyllic setting into
a dangerous excess. He noted that for entertainment the natives hire jugglers and
143
Ibid., 105–6, emphasis added.
Ibid., 105, emphasis added.
145
Ibid., 106, emphasis added.
146
Ibid., 183.
147
Hamilton, East-Indies, 105.
148
Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the
East Indies (London, 1777), 181; 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; Thomas Motte, Asiatic Miscellany
(Calcutta, 1786), 13; 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).
149
Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:42–45, 48–49.
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.
144
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mountebanks, who “keep venomous snakes in their baskets.” These jugglers were,
Terry admits, “the cunningest that I have ever seen.”153 The biblical allusion of
gardens and snakes is not lost upon the reader. Terry opened his account of Indian
mendicants with the comment that the natives “call madmen prophets.” With this
he has already consigned the ascetics to the beyond, as the unknowable and the
unreliable. His description of the bodily regimen of these ascetics casts them into
the role of the abhuman, whose body and behavior is the interface of the animal
and the human. They present an excess of the human form itself. The contortions,
corporeal and physiognomic excesses (ash-covered body, long matted hair, overgrown nails, pierced body parts), and ascetic penances of these people suggest a
deformity approximating to the monstrous in Terry, Fryer, Herbert, and others.154
Terry wrote: “They . . . put such massive fetters of iron upon their legs as they
can scarce stir them . . . submitting themselves unto extreme sharp penances, and
all to no purpose.”155 The phrase, “all to no purpose” is the moral marvelous
working its iconoclasm, since it gestures at the futility of the belief and action of
these men. Fryer’s comments on the fakirs and yogis were of the same tenor. Fryer
expended considerable narrative space on descriptions of the ascetics, finally describing them as outlaws, vagrants, and “pests of the nation.”156 William Bruton
and Alexander Hamilton also described the yogis in similar tones of revulsion and
distaste.157 Other Europeans represented the fakirs and yogis in the same way. The
French traveler John Mocquet described them as the “most hideous and monstrous
spectacle that ever was seen.”158 François Bernier talked of “naked fakirs, hideous
to behold.” Bernier commented, “females would often bring them alms with much
devotion, doubtless believing that they were holy personages, more discreet than
other men.”159 The iconoclastic moral marvelous rejects native faith in these figures
and their austerities. When Fryer, for instance, dismissed them as vagabonds and
outlaws, he effectively reduced a native icon to the morally corrupt. With this,
everything of the Indian marvelous—from soil fertility through climate to its
religious icons—has been desacralized.
The traveler thus rhetorically transformed India. Mapping India’s plenty through
enumeration and accumulation, he subsequently altered the profusion to deplorable excess. Finally, with a moral iconoclasm, the traveler painted India as a depraved and morally suspect space. Effectively clearing the landscape of native icons
153
Terry, Voyage, 99–201.
See Michael Hagner, “Enlightened Monsters,” in The Sciences in Enlightenment Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago, 1999), 175–217. 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),
113–43.
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 Andrew Browning, ed., English Historical Documents, 1660–1714
(London, 1953), 465. Also A. L. Beier’s Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640
(London, 1985).
157
Bruton, News from the East-Indies, 27; Hamilton, East-Indies, 1:155–56.
158
John Mocquet, Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West-Indies;
Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy-Land (London, 1696), 244.
159
Bernier, Travels, 317.
154
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238
䡵
NAYAR
by rejecting their symbolic valence, the first generation of travelers prepared for
a colonial appropriation and repopulation. The sublime aesthetic of the late eighteenth century built upon the desacralizing efforts of the marvelous to argue for
and execute a colonial ideology of “improvement.”160
160
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.
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