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ABSTRACT
This paper sets out to examine cultural encounters between India and England in an 1885 Bengali travelogue Englandey Bangamahila [A Bengali Lady in England] by Krishnabhabini Das, who travelled to England with her husband at a time when the idea and practice of travelling women was either inconceivable or deemed a taboo in India. The travelogue under study deals with Das's several journeys in England and provides an intriguing account of her understanding of colonial English culture. My prime objective is to underline how Das presents England from the perspective of a female, marginal subject. To this end, I elaborate on foregrounded tensions between London and Calcutta, and Englishwomen and Hindu women as they are represented through the reversed gaze. By highlighting the cross-border connections in the travelogue as a transnational narrative, I aim to shed light on the connective histories of India and England in the long nineteenth century.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 There are several authors who have used the term, the reversed gaze, in different contexts. For instance, in his book Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology (Citation2010), Mwenda Ntarangwi engages with the concept of “reversed gaze” in terms of representation, self-reflexivity, subjectivity and agency, but more importantly he deploys the reversed gaze as a metaphor for studying anthropology from a non-Western perspective. Ntarangwi declares that he seeks to “bring an African perspective into understanding anthropology” in order to introduce news ways of deciphering “the underlying anthropological culture that has so much impacted the ways that Africans are studied and perceived” (Citation2010, 3).
2 It is bell hooks who has first used the term in chapter 7 “The Oppositional Gaze: Black female Spectators” (115–131) of her book Black Looks: Race and Representations where she declares that the “gaze” has always been political in her life (Citation1992, 115).
3 In his book Travel Writing and the Transnational Author, Sam Knowles makes a concrete connection between travel writing and transnationalism when he declares that travelogues serve as “records of travel among – and engagement with – other peoples and cultures” (Citation2014, 4). For Knowles, not only are such forms of writing “valid literary texts in their own right; they also accrue social and politicised significance through their depiction of interactions with foreign cultures, in foreign countries” (Citation2014, 4). Ulf Hannerz, in his study Transnational Connections, takes a step further when he indicates that the mobility of human beings themselves allows a correspondence between travel and transnationalism (Citation1996, 19). Hence, travel and transnationalism are inextricably intertwined, the twin dynamics of which are conspicuous in travel accounts of the nineteenth century as much as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whereas transnationalism today is discussed in relation to postcolonialism, deterritorialization, diaspora, or transmigration (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc Citation1994, 1–48), transnationalism in the nineteenth century was linked to the interconnectedness of distant nations and the experience of thinking beyond the frame of a single nation. Transnationalism may be “new to academic currency”, yet its prevalence in the nineteenth century became increasingly conspicuous as issues of immigration, citizenship, and imperialism began to surface in political debates as Goyal reminds us (Citation2017, 9).
4 The word “Pucca”, originally derived from Hindi and Urdu as pakkā, literally meaning “solid” or “permanent”, but in this context, it indicates “genuine” or “authentic”.
5 Art historian John Berger claims that seeing comes before words. He argues, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled […] The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” (Citation1972, 7–8). Berger’s interpretation of seeing is relevant to Das’s travelogue as Das’s “seeing” is determined by her background, experience and upbringing.
6 Mandal adds, “Unlike their menfolk, middle class Bengali women, living in an era that still primarily assigned them the role of the angel of the house, had to defend their travels” (Citation2010, 144)
7 Pratt highlights “how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it” ([Citation1992] Citation2008, 3).
8 The phrase has been coined by Edward W. Said. (Citation1993, 1).