Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire studies a variety of travel narratives by Indian kings, evangelists, statesmen, scholars, merchants, leisure travellers and reformers. It identifies the key modes through which the Indian traveller engaged with Europe and the world-from aesthetic evaluations to cosmopolitan nationalist perceptions, from exoticism to a keen sense of connected and global histories. These modes are constitutive of the identity of the traveller.
The book demonstrates how the Indian traveller defied the prescriptive category of the 'imperial subject' and fashions himself through this multilayered engagement with England, Europe and the world in different identities.
Pramod K. Nayar, FEA, FRHistS, teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His most recent books include Alzheimer's Disease Memoirs (2021), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2021), Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019), Brand Postcolonial:'Third World' Texts and the Global (2018), Bhopal's Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017), Human Rights and Literature: Writing Right (2016) and the edited collection Indian Travel Writing 1830-1947 (2016). His essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, South Asia, Narrative, Celebrity Studies, Asiatic, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Prose Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Biography, Image and Text and Postcolonial Text, among others.
Nayar also holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad.
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Travel and Self-fashioning in the Age of Empire
2. Colonial Subjects and Their Dislocated Aesthetics
3. The Occidental Exotic
4. Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire
5. The Globalectic Imagination and Connected Histories
6. Conclusion: The Antinomies of Travel in the Age of Empire
Bibliography
Index
About the Author