– fetching huge prices at auctions today – are often censured for effacing native voices. They’re commonly adjudged to gloss over important geopolitical issues. Apparently they import their own concerns and prejudices and judge the natives harshly for not living up to those standards. But Indian writers do precisely the same when they lambast Londoners for drinking, for being promiscuous and impious. Their books can be read as early manifestations of the Empire writing back but if this is true, their authors objectify and palsy their subjects just as much (or just as little) as their European counterparts did when cartographizing Asia and Africa. It may just be that travel writing – always prone through limited pagination and the need for authors constantly to keep on the move – must always skim the surfaces of the cultures and histories which it intends to illuminate. As a genre, it has always been grossly deficient in being able to relay the myriad plenitudes and fascinating contradictions of individual societies.
But it’s not only in its contribution to debates about the nature of colonial discourse that nineteenth-century Indian travel writing is interesting. The authors’ eagerness to savour all the cultural possibilities that London has to offer anticipates Kureishi’s lust for lapping up the capital’s creative and sensory delights. The Indians in this chapter had the time, the contacts and the money to do so, and this not only distinguishes them from most of the other writers in this book, but also helps to scupper any theory about the relationship between colonials and the metropolis which assumes pre-twentieth-century contact was all as disastrous as that of Gronniosaw and Mary Prince. Their stays in what many of them felt was the centre of the earth were overwhelmingly joyful.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
