Inderpal Grewal
“The Culture of Travel”
The trope of mobility
• Mobility—traveller vs native (romanticism and
scientific progress)
• Freedom vs unfreedom (even British women
who could not vote saw themselves as freer,
belonging to the civilized world)
Colonial Modernity
• The experience of modernity under colonial
conditions—external and internal binaries
• English education
• New technologies and modes of travel
• New forms of employment (colonial
bureaucracy)
• Nuclear families
• Production of the middle class; class mobility
When natives travelled
• discourses of travel created new forms of
historical self-consciousness that were modern
(oppositions of freedom/unfreedom; home and
abroad were re-worked)
• Appropriations of European culture of travel,
negotiated by Indian men and women contra
other traditions of travel and combined with local
practices
• Travel seen as bestowing prestige and social
mobility (as against forced travel of the poor—
maids, indentured labour, exotic servants, sailors)
Feeling modern
• Production of gendered selves--reconstitution of
domestic space under colonialism
• Opposition of home and the world (a conceptmetaphor) constitutive of colonial modernity
• Pre-existing caste, class, familial and gender
demarcations reworked (cf taboo on travel)
• Indian men: equality with the British—new
modes of patriarchal power (discovering an
ancient past; mapping the nation); reform
• Emergent historical consciousness
Class divides
• Poor had always crossed the seas as
indentured labour, servants, sailors, etc., as
had Muslim and Jewish traders and merchants
• For hajj
• Now the Hindu elites found new opportunities
through travel—education, professional
attainments
Toru Dutt (1856-1877)
writer, traveller, first Indian woman to
publish poetry in English