Fanny Parkes, Who Lived In India Between 1822 And 1846, Was The Ideal Travel Writer Courageous, Indefatigably Curious And Determinedly Independent. Her Delightful Journal Traces Her Journey From Prim Memsahib, Married To A Minor Civil Servant Of The Raj, To Eccentric Sitar-Playing Indophile, Fluent In Urdu, Critical Of British Rule And Passionate In Her Appreciation Of Indian Culture. Fanny Is Fascinated By Everything, From The Trial Of The Thugs And The Efficacy Of Opium On Headaches To The Adorning Of A Hindu Bride. To Read Her Is To Get As Close As One Can To A True Picture Of Early Colonial India The Sacred And The Profane, The Violent And The Beautiful, The Straight-Laced Sahibs And The More Eccentric White Mughals Who Fell In Love With India And Did Their Best, Like Fanny, To Build Bridges Across Cultures.

Over the last couple of decades there has been a strong academic interest in how individuals interact with each other while en route. Yet, even if various studies have informed us about present-day realities of travel companionships, we know little about the influence of gender both on these realities, as well as on the discourse in which these are being narrated. This book aims to establish an agenda for the study of companionship in travel writing by offering a collection of new essays which study texts that belong to the broad category of pre-modern and modern travel literature. Chapters explore the differences and similarities in the ways that women and men in the past chose to describe their experiences with, and/or their ideas about companionship, and specifically reveals the influence of gender norms, conventions, restrictions, and stereotypes. This is the first book which looks at the long-term, interdisciplinary, and genuinely international history of gendered discourses on companionship in travel writing. It will be of interest to scholars and students from a wide variety of disciplines, including cultural and social history, as well as cultural, literary, gender, travel, and tourism studies.

'Dante's British Public' examines the many and various ways in which the work of the leading poet of medieval Europe has been acquired, represented, and discussed by British readers over the last six centuries.

Discusses the production and circulation of animal narratives in colonial India in order to investigate the constructs of animals played into a variety of forms of othering that took place in England during its imperial venture.

The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

In July 1765 Robert Clive, in a letter to Sir Francis Sykes, compared Gomorrah favourably to Calcutta, then capital of British India. He wrote: 'I will pronounce Calcutta to be one of the most wicked places in the Universe.' Drawing upon the letters, memoirs and journals of traders, travellers, bureaucrats, officials, officers and the occasional bishop, Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar is a chronicle of racial relations between Indians and their last foreign invaders, sometimes infuriating but always compelling. A multitude of vignettes, combined with insight and analysis, reveal the deeply ingrained conviction of 'white superiority' that shaped this history. How deep this conviction was is best illustrated by the fact that the British abandoned a large community of their own children because they were born of Indian mothers. The British took pride in being outsiders, even as their exploitative revenue policy turned periodic drought and famine into horrific catastrophes, killing impoverished Indians in millions. There were also marvellous and heart-warming exceptions in this extraordinary panorama, people who transcended racial prejudice and served as a reminder of what might have been had the British made India a second home and merged with its culture instead of treating it as a fortune-hunter's turf. The power was indisputable-the British had lost just one out of 18 wars between 1757 and 1857. Defeated repeatedly on the battlefield, Indians found innovative and amusing ways of giving expression to resentment in household skirmishes, social mores and economic subversion. When Indians tried to imitate the sahibs, they turned into caricatures; when they absorbed the best that the British brought with them, the confluence was positive and productive. But for the most part, subject and ruler lived parallel lives. From the celebrated writer of the bestselling Gandhi's Hinduism: the Struggle Against Jinnah's Islam comes this extensively researched and utterly engrossing book, which is easy to pick up and difficult to put down.

Nearly all studies of British people living in India during the British Raj examine the population within the context of imperialism, neglecting the sense of displacement, discontinuity, and discomfort that comprised everyday life for Anglo-Indians. In Imperialism as Diaspora, Ralph Crane and Radhika Mohanram set out to understand the real lives of Anglo-Indians from a new, interdisciplinary stance. Moving seamlessly between literature, history, and art—and examining many forgotten works—they show how the lives of Anglo-Indians constituted an intersection of imperalist and diasporic forces, which created a unique set of cultural fissures that played out in issues of race, gender, religion, and power as colonial history progressed.