Billie Melman has pointed out the connection between Middle East ‘travellers’ individual quests and their particular searches for personal redemption in the desert' with the ‘political dimension’ that developed as a result of their journeys (Melman 2002, p. 114). At the heart of Westerners' travel narratives frequently lay what Behdad calls ‘the travelers’ solitary quest for elsewhere as a response to the onset of modernity in Europe’ (Behdad 1994, p.16). The non-European world also exercised a fascination of connection that cohered around notions of race, history and culture. Behdad's term ‘belatedness’ can be stretched further so as to define a formative aspect of imperial thinking that was imbricated in notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development‘. Habituated to thinking in linearities, such thought placed western society at the head of the continuum and consigned the Oriental, as one might a grown up but very backward pupil, to an elementary class. Nineteenth-century thought in the fields of new human sciences such as sociology and anthropology, not to speak of older areas like history and the philosophy of history, busily erected periodicities establishing ‘phases, stages of evolution in a single line of development, starting from the same point and leading to the same end’ (Lévi-Strauss 1958, p. 13). While they might appear to accord full recognition to the diversity of cultures, Lévi-Strauss argued, such theories constituted a ‘false evolutionism’ that in reality wiped cultural diversity out, conforming all the so-called stages in human development to the Western model.

Introduction: women travellers, Muslim travellers

Between July and October 2004, the National Portrait Gallery in London featured a special exhibition entitled ‘Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers’. It highlighted the journeys of predominantly British women as they travelled to other parts of the globe between the 1660s and the 1960s. Only in the final section of the exhibition, in a small corner to itself, did it recognize women travelling in other directions, specifically ‘a selection of the world's women who made Britain their destination’. Of these twelve, four hailed from the Indian sub-continent, while just two were Muslims. That these women were included at all is certainly to be commended for its recognition of South Asian and Muslim women's participation in the culture of travel, yet their few numbers and bounded location suggest the marginalization of their experiences.

Over the past two decades, some scholars have sought to redirect attention to these and other marginalized figures. A pioneering effort in this direction was Rozina Visram's Ayahs, Lascars and Princes (1986) which documented the substantial numbers of Indians, many of whom were Muslim and some of whom were female, who resided in Britain as servants, sailors and labourers from the early eighteenth century.

Introduction

We begin with a tantalising question: how do you make a man? This chapter deals with some apparently unproblematic ethnography of processes by which boys are ‘made’ into men—male initiation rituals, practised across south Asia, among Hindu middle and higher castes. This ethnography prompts us to reflect on classic approaches to gender and maturity, such as theories that stress the importance of social role in making gender. Such approaches take us part of the way but they are not helpful across the board. Firstly, only certain communities practise rites of passage, and secondly, we sense that gender is not amenable to one-off ‘achievement’. Lately, following the influence of several theorists, but notably Judith Butler, anthropologists have come to think of gender as more precarious and less straightforward than a status attained.

Societies and cultures often deal with processes of physical maturity, growth and decay through what are commonly called ‘rites of passage’, following the French turn of the 20th-century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. As rituals that deal with transition from one social status to another, rites of passage are often explicitly tied to physiological or maturational milestones in the life-course such as birth, puberty or death. Van Gennep (orig. 1908) undertook the sort of vast cross-cultural survey based upon secondary sources that was common for the proto-anthropology of the time, before the ‘discovery’ of fieldwork.

Kerala's Heterosexual Hegemony

The terrain of south Asian male sexuality and attitudes towards women has been over-determined, since the 1950s, by Freudian psychoanalytic approaches and by one conclusion—that heterosexual relations are approached, from the male side at least, with little short of dread. This we find rather odd, given that it is already clear from what we have said earlier about men's life histories and goals that marriage, fatherhood and householder status are valorized. Heterosexuality across south Asia is presumed, carefully cultivated, strictly policed and utterly naturalized, in a reproductive-based nexus of compulsory (arranged) marriage and parenthood, which is a great example of Rubin's ‘traffic in women’—the means by which gender and sexuality have been yoked together and then, as a system, serve the perpetuation of inequality and power relations (Rubin 1975). We have written elsewhere about the process of arranging and celebrating a marriage, paying a dowry and so on (Osella and Osella 2000a: 81ff). Here, we are more interested in exploring some moments of interaction in which heterosexuality is produced and explored. We follow local usage, which refers to unmarried young men and women as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, though they may be up to 30-years-old. Such terminology is an infantilising move common right across south Asia, which serves to reinforce age hierarchies in general and parental control in particular.

Paradise found

‘Madam’, Dr Johnson rebuked Boswell's wife, who had objected to the two men's Scottish tour, ‘we do not go there as to a paradise. We go to see something different from what we are accustomed to see’ (Johnson 1775, p. 19). His remark summarizes the empirical spirit idealized by eighteenthcentury travellers, but the denial it offers highlights the interpretive temptations beguiling travellers faced with unaccustomed scenes. Inevitably they resorted to descriptive strategies derived from pre-existing ideas, and so it was that when Joseph Banks stepped ashore at Tahiti he hailed it as an ‘Arcadia of which we were to be kings’ (Banks 1962, I, p. 252). The notion of terrestrial paradise was never far from the ocean-weary sailor's imagination, and even in the scientifically-minded ‘season for observing’ (Dening 1996, p. 109) following Captain Wallis's 1767 ‘discovery’ of Tahiti, the discourse of paradise, Eden, Elysium punctuated accounts of South Sea landfalls. Within a few years Wallis was followed by the French gentleman-explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville and then Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage, which served both as England's prototype of a new sort of scientific exploration and as the Grand Tour of a wealthy and imaginative young gentleman, Joseph Banks. Banks and Bougainville had been educated, as the sea captains who traditionally undertook voyages of discovery had not, in the classics and in the primitivist philosophy of Rousseau, and they thus brought to the South Seas a set of cultural assumptions that reinflected sailors’ age-old preoccupation with the paradisal qualities of landfalls.

There is something surreal about these remarks by an aristocratic guest at the inauguration of the Congo railway on 1 July 1898. Did their author really believe that a colony soon to be exposed as perpetrating genocide might become a destination popular with package tourists? What would such a tour have been like? An ‘excursion to hell’, perhaps, as the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus would later call sightseeing trips to the Western Front (Kraus 1921, p. 93)? Or a version of the latterday ‘gonzo tourism’ whose gazetteers have titles like The World's Most Dangerous Places (Pelton 2003)? The very idea that anyone might have wanted to make a pleasure trip to the Belgianrun Congo at the end of the nineteenth century, let alone publish their experiences under the title ‘Impressions of a Tourist’, strikes the modern reader as not just absurd but obscene.

People from India have been travelling to England about as long as Englishmen have been sailing to India, from about 1600 onward. Yet, while from their earliest visits Englishmen began writing travel narratives about what they found in India, to our knowledge, Indians began writing such works about Britain only 150 years later. By the mid-nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Indians had made this voyage, but only thirteen booklength autobiographical accounts of their travels appear to have survived — some were published, others remain in manuscript even today. Consequently, British written representations and knowledge of India rapidly accumulated over the centuries, becoming a powerful base for colonialism; in contrast, Indians travelling to Britain had access to very limited written evidence from their precursors, at least until the early nineteenth century. This chapter considers the two earliest instructional travel guides written by Indians about Britain.

In their books, which they published in London in 1840–41, these authors — Ardaseer Cursetjee (1808-77), Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee (1817–83), and Jehangeer Nowrojee (1821–66) — revealed their particularly complex identities: technically trained professional men who went to Britain as students; proud Indians but of a minority community that originally immigrated from Iran; both foreigners in Britain and loyal subjects of Queen Victoria; ‘the colonized’ who both had pride in the burgeoning Empire but also wanted to lead India toward progress while avoiding British moral flaws. They also wrote for disparate audiences.

In November 1824, the Reverend Daniel Tyerman wrote from Sydney to fellow religious men in Britain extolling the opportunities that Australia and the Pacific region offered. The region, he enthused, will ‘form an interesting branch of the Missionary Tree which is growing — and flourishing — and stretching its branches over the whole Earth — and the leaves of it, are for the healing of the Nations’. As late eighteenth-century additions to Britain's imperial fold, the Pacific Islands and Australian colonies seemed to Tyerman to sit at the nexus of imperial and evangelical interests. Despite the fluid and de facto colonial relations between the Islands and Britain, and the unpromising penal origins of the Southern continent, the region offered missionaries and their supporters a whole new field of evangelical activity, particularly when conceived as a geographical totality. This Southern part of the world offered a tabula rasa where Protestant Evangelicals could spread the gospel alongside British enterprise, a zone where Protestantism seemed assured of unimpeded access to virgin territory, territory that was not also being claimed by Catholicism. The Southern Cross constellation, which emblazoned the Southern skies, seemed a prophetic metaphor for the spread of religion and empire under British Protestant guidance.

This chapter examines the contribution that religious travel writing about nineteenth-century Australasia made to British understandings of the region.

The Victorian traveller Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) became famous for his sensational narrative of a journey to Mecca in disguise in 1853, published in 1855–56. Less well-known is Burton's account of his travels in Sindh, in present-day Pakistan, from 1844 to 1849. Before embarking on his career as one of the leading explorers and adventurers in the nineteenth century, Burton was stationed in Gujarat as an officer in the Indian Army. It was here that his voracious appetite for Oriental languages and Oriental knowledge was whetted. Burton was transferred from Gujarat to the Indian Survey in Sindh, where he came to the attention of Sir Charles Napier (1809–54), who had conquered the province of Sindh in 1843. Napier required surveillance reports about the morale among the population. It was during the five years he spent in Sindh that Burton first tried his hand at impersonating natives, working as an undercover agent in disguise.

Burton's book Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley was published in two volumes by Richard Bentley in 1851. As was customary in nineteenthcentury travel writing, it appeared together with a more ethnographic account, Sindh and The Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus; with Notices of the Topography and History of the Province, published by William H Allen & Co.

Introduction

We move on to discuss the role of work in the production and assertion of Malayali male subjectivities. To suggest that colonial and post-colonial modernity—and concomitant processes of capitalist development and state-formation—not only impact the lives of men and women in different ways but also entail a substantial redefinition of gender relations is perhaps to argue the obvious. Over the past 20 years these issues have been explored extensively in the historiography and sociology of south Asia, but, as we have seen in the Introduction, debates and discussions have been somewhat lopsided, focusing primarily on women and more specifically on the (re)production of subordination and inequalities within historical configurations of patriarchy. Research on work from the perspective of gender has followed a similar path. We know a great deal about how women's working lives—in the fields, households or factories—are shaped by and in turn transform specific gender ideologies in that they are inflected by historically contingent hierarchies of class and caste/community (see e.g. Fernandes 1997; Sen 1999; Kapadia 1999). Yet in their relationship to work, men have been generally treated, as Cecile Jackson argues, as ‘universal ungendered subjects, rather than as gendered beings in which male identities shape relations with other men and women’ (2000: 7; cf. Heuzé 1992; Parry, Breman and Kapadia 2000).