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).

Discovering, describing, purchasing

The nineteenth-century discovery and excavation of the Maya monuments of Central America is inseparably linked with the name of the US explorer and travel writer John Lloyd Stephens. Unlike many of the pre-disciplinary precursors of modern archaeology, Stephens is still revered by modern practitioners; for instance, distinguished Maya scholar Michael D Coe describes his travel books as ‘marking the very genesis of serious Maya research’, containing ‘almost prophetic insights’ into the lost civilization of Central America (Coe 1994, pp. 84–85). The present essay is, however, less concerned with echoing these well-deserved accolades, and more with analysing the literary, aesthetic and ideological concerns of Stephens’ two Latin American travel narratives, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and its sequel, Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan (1843). For although primarily remembered today as a pioneer of modern Mesoamerican archaeology, Stephens achieved celebrity in his lifetime as one of the most commercially successful travel writers of the nineteenth century.

Maya archaeology to this day enjoys a privileged place in the North American academy, and part of Stephens' seminal importance for this scholarly tradition doubtless lies in his establishment of what might be termed an ‘Americanist’ ideology in interpreting Maya high culture.

As science turned its focus towards ‘man’, new disciplines emerged with the aim of utilizing scientific methods to understand and regulate human behaviour. Rather than understanding this scientific inquiry into human behaviour as a unique historical phenomenon with an identifiable moment of origin, we must recognize its continuity with a long tradition through which it found momentum yet against which it would struggle for authority. The search for knowledge about human existence and behaviour clearly did not begin with the emergence of science as a discrete discipline in the eighteenth century; instead, through a complex network of intellectual and social reconfigurations, it was incorporated into an emerging disciplinary structure and found legitimization through its relation to science. During this time of change in how knowledge was produced, valued and circulated, a range of new disciplines contended for authority over self-knowledge. To understand how psychoanalysis would eventually come to function within this network of disciplines and ultimately to undermine the concept of science itself, I want to consider briefly how several of them developed and how they come to contribute to Freud's psychoanalytic project.

As philosophy became focused on metaphysical questions explored primarily through philosophical speculation and reason, physiologists continued to use scientific methods to observe and measure bodily responses as a means of establishing the basic foundations for sensory physiology. Despite their attempts to understand all perceptual phenomena in terms of mechanistic bodily operations, however, physiologists were increasingly confronted with a factor that they seemed unable to explain.

Introduction: Visual Worldmaking

Leading, primarily, a visual existence, man's main orientations are focused on light and perception of light. The optical channels of a human being are superior to the rest of his sensory inputs, as long as quantity and complexity of data are under question. With regard to linguistic design, metaphors of light hold an eminent position in human discourse, connected especially to fields of knowledge, learning, moral quality and aesthetic perfection. As a consequence, they stand out in all ideological terrains of human self-constitution, concerning basic religious concepts, their narrative transformations as well as rationalistic sublimations of these models, during modernity's development towards the age of enlightenment.

This essay deals with the interrelationship between scientific–especially physical–theories and the ideological groundwork of a given culture. Centring on influences emerging from pre-formal concepts of reality, the problem will be raised if any explicit physical theory will succeed in keeping a constitutive distance from such pre-scientific forms of worldmaking. It will need to be asked if modern quantifying approaches to nature fall under the clandestine seizure of intersubjective and intracultural dynamics, importing a basic matrix of anthropomorphic worldmaking into those formal and quantified versions of reality we use to call sciences.

Complying with such a project gives good reasons to keep a secure distance from positions which take the social construction of all forms of reality and worldmaking for granted. It is not the structuring idea of this paper to underline the presumable irrelevance of scientific hopes for objective truths – a tendency one might call ‘epistemic relativism’.

The search for health is a constant in all societies, but the increasing wealth of Victorian society made it a realizable priority for an ever-widening clientele. And given the limitations of conventional medicine, with its reliance on techniques such as bleeding or drastic drug regimes, it was not surprising that a galaxy of alternative therapies offered themselves, which were then denounced as quackery by the profession. Some of the fringe movements were chimeras that flourished briefly and faded as quickly. Others showed more staying power, and among the weightier was hydropathy, a system centred on the use of a series of water treatments which originated in Austria in the 1820s at the Gräfenberg establishment of Vincent Priessnitz. Hydropathy was but one of several unorthodox medical therapies on offer in early Victorian Britain. Where it differed from the other fringe movements – mesmerism, galvanism, botanism and even homeopathy – is that it attracted substantial long-term commercial investment. Whereas homeopathy, the most successful of its competitors on the medical margin, remained almost entirely a clinic and surgery bound enthusiasm, hydropathy established its place on both the therapeutic and the physical landscape. The first hydropathic, or water-cure, establishments in Britain appeared in the early 1840s in and around London, subsequently spreading west and north. In England, it was, however, to become an increasingly provincial interest, surviving in its original curative form by the 1880s only at a few northern outposts such as Stockport.

The past two hundred years have seen naturalistic and often materialistic modes of scientific inquiry (as advocated by, for example, John Tyndall and Richard Dawkins) superseding the teleological and theistic methods used by earlier non-specialists. This hardening of the scientific viewpoint (though not absolute, particularly in physics) is interesting when one considers the concomitant increase in the acceptability to the general public of evolutionary explanations, the increase in the popularization of what was seen as ‘good science’, and the parallel reduction of extra-epistemic factors in evolutionary theorizing. In this essay I briefly examine two episodes within the development of a professional Victorian geology: the rejection of ‘scriptural geology’ by the emerging geological community and the controversy over the 1844 publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Both of these episodes nicely illustrate the boundary work that went into delineating the emerging community from those that used, and what would become, sidelined modes of discourse. As a part of this delineation – and over the course of the early part of the century – geology was characterized as a practical, specialized, active, ‘masculine’ endeavour that was amenable to Christianity. Such rhetoric allowed the community to distance themselves from both Biblical literalists and the amateurs who in many ways founded the field, thus moving the adjudication of scientific claims out of the public sphere into the hands of what would eventually become the scientific profession.

In 1859, Prince Albert addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) as its President and attempted to assess the place of science in the modern State. In his description of science, he says:

A little over a year later Albert was dead, but his vision of the material location for the operations of science was beginning to be accomplished.

In early May 1868, the correspondence pages of the Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) were the scene of a heated debate between two of the most well known figures of the day, Professor John Tyndall and Mr Daniel Dunglas Home. Each man was the recognized leader of his field, but their fields were apparently diametrically opposed. Tyndall was head of the Royal Institution and the natural heir to the late Michael Faraday as experimental philosopher and materialist scientist; Home was celebrated across Europe and America as a gifted spiritualist medium, whose physical phenomena were unsurpassed. Their topic was a séance proposed in 1861, at which Faraday was to have examined spiritualist phenomena produced by Home, but which had not ultimately taken place. The two men began a stiffly polite dialogue within the correspondence columns, but rapidly degenerated into personal attacks and self-vindicating reasoning. By the time they called a truce in late May, the debate had clearly demonstrated the strength of the barriers constructed between established scientific practice and areas of investigation still regarded as beyond the scientific pale.