Under Eastern Eyes: Representation of the West in South Asian Travelogues

Abstract

Title: “Under Eastern Eyes”: Representation of the West in South Asian Travelogues. Representation, especially, of the colonized societies and cultures have been the subject of many studies particularly since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism which theorized that the West’s history of the East is, in fact, the history of representation. The present study deals with representation-in-reverse in post-colonialism with special reference to three South Asian Travelogues: Images of the West, Westward Bound and Seamless Boundaries by Munshi Itesamuddin, Mirza Abu Taleb and Lutfullaha Khan respectively. Written in the 18th and 19th centuries these texts function as eyewitnesses to the events that mark the advent, rise and culmination of colonialism in the sub-continent. The travelogues had been aimed at (re)presenting the West or the Occident to the natives of India by the Indian (Muslim) writers so that they could perceive and understand their cultural Others in the West. All these travelogue writers have carried out representation of the colonizers in their literary discourses and their accounts are deeply embedded in the particular socio-political, cultural, religious and literary traditions of their societies. Thus, the empire, in a way, not only writes back but challenges the claims of Eurocentricity and universalism as unearthed by Edward Said. In this research the issue of representation is explored, alongwith its differing connotations and multipronged interpretations and the travelogues have been analyzed in their light. The primary focus, in this dissertation, has been the discursive practices which the East adopted to write back to the West in its efforts to assert its own identity and blur the identity imposed by the West. The theoretical framework is based on Postcolonialism and further delimited to Occidentalism/Reverse-Orientalism. Research questions address the extent, nature and use of the discursive practices to represent the West as the Others of the East. As reverse Orientalists, these writers manifest the religious, cultural, racial, social, and geographical binaries existing between the two halves of the world in their travelogues. Unlike Orientalist discourse, there was no single grand and meta-narrative governing their interaction with their Others. This study may help the future researchers to investigate the phenomenon of Othering in the travelogue writing of different epochs not only about the West but different cultures across the globe.