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Re-Oriented Britain – How British Asian Travellers and Settlers Have Utilised and Reversed Orientalist Discourse 1770-2010

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Re-Oriented Britain – How British Asian Travellers and Settlers Have Utilised and Reversed Orientalist Discourse 1770-2010 CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Warwick Research Archives Portal Repository University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/35727 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Re-Oriented Britain – How British Asian Travellers and Settlers have Utilised and Reversed Orientalist Discourse 1770-2010 By Jagvinder Gill A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literature University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies June 2010 1 Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................... 5 Orientalism and its Reversal .............................................................................. 5 Orientalism Theory ........................................................................................... 7 The Orientalist Critique ................................................................................... 12 My Theory of Reverse Orientalism ................................................................. 19 Post-Colonial Resistance and the Subaltern ..................................................... 31 Methodology ................................................................................................... 39 Literature Review ............................................................................................ 46 Chapter One – Early Settlers ........................................................................ 65 Travel Writing and Colonialism ...................................................................... 69 The Munshi and the Orientalist Project ........................................................... 76 The Wonders of England ................................................................................. 85 Debating the Theological Divide ..................................................................... 93 Dean Mahomed – The Travels of a Reverse Orientalist ................................. 100 Dean Mahomed as Ethnographer ................................................................... 111 Cultural Translation ....................................................................................... 116 Mirza Abu Taleb Khan – The Persian Prince ................................................. 125 Abu Taleb – The Orient Writes Back ............................................................ 134 Re-Rerouting the Exotic/Erotic ..................................................................... 139 Behramji Malabari – Travelling/Home .......................................................... 145 Malabari and the Technologies of Sex ........................................................... 150 Reconstructing the City ................................................................................. 158 Chapter Two – Women Travellers ............................................................. 162 Female Orientalism ....................................................................................... 167 2 The Pioneering Travels of a Hindustani Lady ................................................ 178 Cornelia Sorabji – The Imperialist Sensibility ............................................... 188 The Intrepid Female Traveller ....................................................................... 200 Sorabji as Feminist ........................................................................................ 208 Family History and the Domestic Archive ..................................................... 216 Domestic Historiography ............................................................................... 228 Chapter Three – The Inter- and Post-War Settlement ............................. 237 The Imperial Advocate .................................................................................. 239 A Passage to England .................................................................................... 244 The Anglo-Centric Critique ........................................................................... 254 Mulk Raj Anand – The Inter-War Social Radical .......................................... 261 Challenging the Intellectual Elite................................................................... 272 Chapter Four – Modern Islam and the New Age of Orientalism ............. 287 The Rushdie Affair and the Kureishi Response ............................................. 290 The New Orientalism – Islamophobia ........................................................... 305 Ed Husain – The Islamic Orientalist .............................................................. 309 Islamism as Reverse Orientalism ................................................................... 318 Sarfraz Manzoor – Greetings from a Moderate and British Muslim .............. 327 Imran Ahmad – The Unimagined Return of Missionary Orientalism ............. 338 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 354 Notes…………………………………………………………………365 Bibliography........................................................................................386 3 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Prof. David Dabydeen for his help with the thesis. His advice, humour, intellect and knowledge have all been vital to the composition of my work and the joyful experience I have had whilst writing it. I am especially grateful to Sharmila for being my shade and shelter during the course of my scholastic journey. Also, I offer a special mention to Sanjiev for leading the way. I would also like to thank the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies for their generous sponsoring of my work and the University of Warwick for funding my studies. My eternal thanks are offered to all my wider family for their support during a particularly difficult period that would not have been negotiated successfully without their selfless good nature. I would also like to express my individual thanks to Teerath for his providential correspondence, Talvin for the rising and Parvinder for her love and support. Finally, I offer my inexhaustible gratitude to my Mum and Dad for their loving co-construction of my life and studies. Declaration I declare that the research presented in this thesis is entirely my own work and has not been submitted for a degree at another university. 4 Abstract Beginning with Edward Said‟s seminal text, I will question the assumption of Orientalism as a universal and didactic discourse that was conducted exclusively from the West to and for the East. Said‟s overarching condemnation of Orientalism as an exclusively Western hegemonic structure overlooks the paradigm that Indians were not just collaborative producers of the Orientalist text but selective readers as well. I will argue that the contribution made by the influx of colonised people from the periphery to the colonial centre from the eighteenth century onwards has historically been overlooked. Indian Orientalisms developed along their own particular axes by both utilising and reversing Orientalisms. Through this discursive utilisation, Indians were able to formulate responses to the dominant ideologies of Orientalism and as a consequence created new forms of discourse, both literary and historical. My thesis aims to illustrate that Indians, both in the colony and the metropole, were active and not passive agents in their negotiations of colonial as well as post-colonial space. This legacy needs to be recognised, as it continues to resonate and pose questions in contemporary times where the success of multicultural states in an increasingly globalised world is of paramount importance. Generically, I have adopted non-fiction as the best form in which to convey these hidden histories. Autobiographies, diaries, letters, memoirs and travelogues establish the fluidity and imaginative endeavour that existed between the colony and the metropole. These historical documents illuminate a deeply contested colonial and post-colonial world, where colony became home and home could become the colony. Ultimately, this project aims to identify the Orient within Britain itself and also argue that Indian travellers and settlers have engaged in similar „Orientalising‟ projects to render Britain intelligible for the Oriental mind, in ways that deconstruct the conventional Orientalist power relations associated with not only the high colonial period but also the pre and post colonial eras. 5 Introduction Orientalism and its Reversal What is Orientalism? When one is considering this question it is necessary to locate its inception within the panorama of world history. This location has been deeply contested by a variety of scholars, each with their own subjective leanings. However, in my appraisal of the dynamics of Orientalism in both the East and the West, I will be using Edward Said‟s Orientalism (1978) as my central reference point. Said‟s view is in itself problematic as he consistently states that Orientalism as a „textual attitude‟ can be traced back to antiquity; to the world of Aeschylus and Homer in ancient Greece,
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