The Discursivity of the ‘Hindu’ Gaze: Reading Bholanauth Chunder’s Travelogue

Abstract

The ‘travelogue’ as a genre in late nineteenth-century India is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, literary modernity and the ethos of a nascent Indian nationalism. This paper uses Bholanauth Chunder’s The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India (1869) as a case study to illustrate how travelling practices in colonial India were, among other things, aimed at achieving cultural proximity with the coloniser. It examines how the relationship between the traveller (Chunder) and the ‘travelled’ was mediated by heuristic categories emerging out of Western imperialism, particularly the conceptual category of ‘Hindoo’, that were being fervently invoked in the nineteenth century. I argue that Chunder’s ‘Hindoo’ gaze fostered a communal ethos at a time when cultural histories were being woven from a highly contingent process of political partisanship amid struggles over the meaning of nationhood and citizenship, interacting with (anti-)imperialist ideologies laced with notions of territorialisation.

Keywords:

• Bholanauth Chunder
• colonial episteme
• Hindu
• Indian travelogue
• Muslim
• Santhal

Acknowledgements

A preliminary draft of this paper was presented at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, in March 2017. The audience feedback helped me develop my ideas. The paper has also benefitted from the responses from the anonymous South Asia peer reviewers, to whom I owe my gratitude.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. M. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972); and Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

2. P. Hulme and T. Youngs, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–13; and Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

3. Bholanauth Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vols. 1 & 2 (London: N. Trubner & Co., 1869). The words ‘Hindoo’ and ‘Hindu’ have both been used in this paper. Chunder prefers ‘Hindoo’, while I prefer ‘Hindu’. I have retained ‘Hindoo’ whenever citing Chunder.

4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London/New York: Verso, 1983). Anderson’s hypothesis, however, is not entirely unproblematic. Partha Chatterjee and Amartya Sen, among others, have different takes on it. In order to avoid digression, I am not getting into details concerning the existing critique of Anderson. For details, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (London: Penguin, 2005).

5. Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 99.

6. Simonti Sen, Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives, 1870–1910 (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2005); Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, ‘Writing Home, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of Dwelling in Bengali Modernity’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 44, no. 2 (2002), pp. 293–318; Partha Chatterjee, ‘Five Hundred Years of Fear and Love’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 33, no. 22 (1998), pp. 1330–6; and A. Ray, ‘The Aesthetic Gaze: Siting Nineteenth Century Indian Travel Writing’, in Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol. 8, no. 4 (2016), pp. 122–9.

7. Mukhopadhyay, ‘Writing Home, Writing Travel’, p. 298.

8. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay curiously reminds us: ‘It is remarkable that at least three illustrious Bengalis—Dwarakanath Tagore, Rammohan Roy and Michael Madhusudan Dutt—had been to Europe before the 1870s. Yet, none of them wrote a travelogue’. See Mukhopadhyay, ‘Writing Home, Writing Travel’, p. 298. They did not see the ‘epistemic worth’ of documenting their travel experiences.

9. Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1984); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 2006); and Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

10. Said, Orientalism, p. 54.

11. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.

12. Rochelle Pinto, ‘A Travelling Science: Anthropometry and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean’, in S. Moorthy and A. Jamal (eds), Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 318–38 (p. 320).

13. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vols. 1 & 2.

14. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 312.

15. V. Lal and B. van Loon, Introducing Hinduism (London: Icon Books, 2001), p. 3.

16. Gayatri C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 39.

17. Keith Jenkins, ‘Introduction’, in Keith Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 6.

18. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. II, pp. 356–7 [https://books.google.com.au/books?id=-H4oAAAAYAAJ&dq=editions%3AHARVARD32044088755152&source=gbs_book_other_versions, accessed 25 Feb. 2020].

19. Ibid., p. 356.

20. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 75.

21. Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and Its Implications (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1988), pp. 41–2.

22. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

23. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, p. 278 [https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Travels_of_a_Hindoo_to_Various_Parts.html?id=Q2wBAAAAQAAJ&redir_esc=y, accessed 25 Feb. 2020].

24. S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Punar’ Bisaye Punarbibechana: Hindutter Saltamami (Rethinking the ‘Re’ Question: Genealogy of Hinduism) (Kolkata: Abavash, 1999).

25. For details on nineteenth-century popular print culture in India and how it forged links with nationalism, see Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009); and Anindita Ghosh, ‘An Uncertain “Coming of the Book”: Early Print Cultures in Colonial India’, in Book History, Vol. 6 (2003), pp. 23–55.

26. Jayati Gupta, ‘Modernity and the Global “Hindoo”: The Concept of the Grand Tour in Colonial India’, in The Global South, Vol. 2, no. 1 (2008), pp. 59–70.

27. Ibid.

28. Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). I deliberately use ‘his’ here keeping in view the masculinist practices of leisure travelling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

29. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, p. 182, italics added. Gupta analyses this passage differently from my interpretation to follow. She has already touched upon the physiognomy angle, which I leave aside. See Gupta, ‘Modernity and the Global “Hindoo”’, p. 24.

30. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic; Said, Culture and Imperialism; and Said, Orientalism.

31. In the Rigveda, Mitra and Varuna are deities connected to the solar cult. Of a total of 1,028 hymns, the Rigveda dedicates 46 to Varuna alone, indicating his relative importance among the Vedic pantheon. What is worth noting here is that a deity as important as Varuna was at times called Asura in the Rigveda.

32. Some scholars have cast doubt over the authenticity of the Aryan migration theory. This is why I call Aryanisation a ‘myth’. See ‘Aryan–Dravidian Divide a Myth: Study’, The Times of India (25 Sept. 2009) [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Aryan-Dravidian-divide-a-myth-Study/articleshow/5053274.cms, accessed 10 Jan. 2019].

33. Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India from the Origins to AD 1300 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003); and D. Chattopadhyay, History of Science and Technology in Ancient India (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984). This is true, even though this argument’s very idea of indexing development is problematic. This strand of argumentation does not value (cultural) ‘differences’, but is, rather, concerned with a ‘genealogical fantasy’ that reverses the claim to supremacy. For example, Chattopadhyay’s argument that atheism, secularism, scientificity, technology, etc.—the cultural staples of the ‘modern’ West—historically pre-existed in ‘pre-modern India’ is illustrative of the problem.

34. Romila Thapar, cited in R. Jahanbegloo, India Revisited: Conversations on Continuity and Change (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 16.

35. In 1889, Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay’s seminal travel writing about the region, Palamau Bhraman (in Bangla), depicted the Santhals as the ‘aborigines of India’, and described them as a declining ‘race’ of simple but ‘noble savages’. One wonders if Chunder’s choice of English as his medium of writing—which is reflective of the shift in the nineteenth-century Hindu Bengalis’ world away from the Persianate knowledge system towards the Anglophone knowledge system, and his intention to address a particular audience for travelogues beyond Bengal—would reinforce his class affiliation when he portrayed the Santhals using colonialist vocabulary. See Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay, Palamau Bhraman (Travels in the Palamau) (Kolkata: Bangia Sahitya Parisat, 1945 [1889]).

36. Jenkins, The Postmodern History Reader, p. 8.

37. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

38. Edward Said, ‘Travelling Theory Reconsidered’, in Robert M. Polhemus and Roger Henkle (eds), Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 251–65.

39. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Toronto: Broadview, 2005).

40. This problem of typification is classically illustrated in Herbert Risley’s The People of India. The 35 plates at the end of his book—wherein Risley presents a set of photographs of certain ‘types’ of ‘Indian’—are worth a look in this context. Each full-page photograph is accompanied by a note on the opposite page clearly stating the ‘type’, the ‘tribe’ of the people, and brief ethnographic information on the same. So, for example, plate no. 28 features ‘a group of Kamars, Blacksmiths, Bihar: Mongolo-Dravidian type’. See Herbert Risley, The People of India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co./London: W. Thacker & Co., 1915).

41. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, p. 193, italics added.

42. An anonymous quote in W.W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1868), p. 248.

43. Anindita Mukhopadhyay writes that ‘the exaggerated accounts [of the Rebellion] given by the bhadralok of the fighting and survival skills of the “scoundrels” or “duratmas” were all necessary attributes to successfully juxtapose the lawless disloyalties of other communities with the law-abiding loyalty of the Bengali bhadralok’. See Anindita Mukhopadhyay, Behind the Mask: The Cultural Definition of the Legal Subject in Colonial Bengal, 1715–1911 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 131.

44. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, p. 189.

45. S. Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

46. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (eds), The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London/New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 9.

47. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge; and Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, no. 4 (1982), pp. 777–95.

48. Here, one might wonder how Chunder would differentiate himself from the other people living in ‘Upper India’ (for example, the Hindi or Urdu speakers) whom he observed. The concern for linguistic othering as a trope, though important, would become prominent much later in the twentieth century, so I have not addressed it in this paper. In this connection, the cultural logic of the construction of Bengali identity—predicated upon separation between the Hindu-Bengali and the Muslim-Bengali during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—though germane, is a complex topic worth separate investigation. In this paper, I have confined myself to examining how Chunder pitches his ‘Hindu Indian’ identity against the Muslim ‘Other’, and his ‘Bengalee baboo’ identity against the Santhal ‘Other’, and the specific heuristics that emerged from the quadratic relationships between the Hindu, Indian, Bengali and baboo identities.

49. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 30.

50. J. Talboys Wheeler, ‘Introduction’, in Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, pp. xi–xii.

51. Ibid., p. xii.

52. This is why the later decades of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century became an important era for the emergence and development of different fields of natural history and related fields of ethnology and archaeology as academic disciplines. For details, see P. Pels and O. Salemink (eds), Colonial Subjects (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and D. Lewis, ‘Anthropology and Colonialism’, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 14, no. 5 (1973), pp. 581–91.

53. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 4.

54. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, p. xi, italics added.

55. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge.

56. It is not without reason that Chunder’s book finds passing reference in Bayly’s book on intelligence gathering in colonial India. See Bayly, Empire and Information.

57. David J. Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Washington, DC: University of Washington Press, 2014).

58. It is difficult to determine, though, how Chunder imbibed the ‘survey modality’ practised by the colonial traveller because little is known about whether he was trained by the British or whether he read English-language travelogues. But, on can infer, as a member of the Young Bengal group, he was exposed to the modalities of the Western ‘episteme’.

59. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. II, p. 182.

60. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, p. 22.

61. Ibid., p. 1.

62. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: The Harvester Press, 1980).

63. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Vol. I, p. 428.