Authors and Editors

Besides the journal articles, three veterans of the Hanoverian regiments published books on India: Ludwig von Scharnhorst, Carl Conrad Best and Friedrich Ludwig Langstedt. In addition, Karl August Schlegel wrote a military geography of southern India that remained unpublished. These books did not represent the immediate impressions of their authors, since more time elapsed between the Indian experience of the authors and the date of publication. The extreme case was Best's Briefe über Ost-Indien (1807), published fifteen years after its author returned to Germany. Such long preparation periods were quite normal for travel books. Edward Ive's travel to India, published in 1773, recounted the author's travels in the mid-1750s. Although both Scharnhorst's and Best's books were supposed to be based on letters written from India, this was a conventional form that did not necessarily indicate the actual way of producing the text. Even if they were indeed based on actual letters, these texts were edited, in the cases of Best and Scharnhorst by professional editors, and in the cases of Langstedt and Schlegel by the authors themselves, who carefully prepared them for publication. Presumably if Schlegel's manuscript had been published, it would have undergone further editing. In their editing, editors turned to the existing literature on India and thus produced texts more similar to other travel books on India and put the texts in the context of current discourse.