The boundary between lived experience and discursive representation, inherent in the formal division of this book, is in practice neither clearcut nor sustainable, though it serves its purpose as an organising principle. Looking at individual writers’ representations of India, what comes over time and again is the complexity of what they perceive: that is, their sensory engagement with the materiality of India is both shaped by their previously formed expectations, and overlaid with their knowledge of the responses of others. Their expression of these perceptions is equally complex, formulated as it is in negotiation with existing metropolitan, colonial and indigenous tropes and genres.

Such intricate processes are apparent throughout the versions of India discussed in this book, but perhaps especially so in those texts dealing with the issue of sati. The combination of a sensational event (to which the writer may or may not be a direct witness), and the need to interpret that event within a framework of conflicting and intertwining ideas of gender, cultural and racial norms and expectations, creates a situation where both writer and implied reader invest the representation with multiple layers of social and emotional significance. The three examples following demonstrate some of these complexities.

One of the earliest poems written by Emma Roberts soon after her arrival in India, ‘The Suttee’, is a conventional narrative of the sati woman as victim. Suleeni's ‘pensive sorrow’ is evidence of her reluctance to perform the rite, but she is represented as subject to persuasion, if not coercion, from both religious figures and family members, while ‘a fearful warning’ deters her from incurring the scorn of ‘all that she holds dear’. The final stanza adopts a passive narrative voice, recounting actions without ascribing them to human agency, thus setting Suleeni and those who surround her apart from their contemporary social context and into an ongoing timeless present: