2. SUBJECT:
Comparative literature
ASSIGNMENTNO: 2
TOPIC:
Cambridge companion to travel writing
SUBMITTED TO:
Rubia Akram
SUBMITTED BY:
Shamsa Noreen
Bushra aftab
Sonai sana
Haseema zafar
Sana safeer
Mobeen jamshaid
DATE: 07/05/2013
The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing offers a comprehensive introduction to travel
writing in English between 1500 and the present. British came in India for the purpose of trade
so a number of accounts about India were written. In all these accounts, European tradition of

3. writing was used and India was criticized in different ways. Calcutta city became a horrible city
of dreadful night from the glamorous city of palaces. Travelers depict the people of Calcutta as
filthy and diseased but they do not discuss its facts.
This chapter starts with the question how to write about India? That question was raised
in The East India Sketch Book by Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith. Her writing itemizes tropes,
genres like the land of Arabian nights exoticism. Her narrator lacks such kind of description like
breadth, length and height of mountains, palaces and pagodas and travel accounts. She justifies
her choice of form and dramatizes her sense of belatedness by saying that readers can easily
learn such information from many Travels Through Hindustan so her writing does not follow
that description. Early nineteen century writers use convention in their writings that
representation of any country like India was already fixed. They use different kinds of genres and
land description to present that fixed idea of a nation or a country.
By the 1830s, India has been seen through British lens for two centuries. The foundation
of East India Company in 1600 and trade mission to the Mughal gave rise to a number of
accounts by merchants and diplomats. Until the mid of nineteen century, European tradition
writing was used to write different accounts about India. Accounts by travels of other
nationalities was also translated and also reissued like Jean-Beptise Tavernier‟s Six Voyages.
European got most of information about India from missionaries‟ letters. These accounts
established Indian travel writing. They described it as unchanged world where customs of
ancient still persisted there like the rite of sati. By the mid eighteen century, more identifiable
British tradition writing was introduced. By the second half of eighteen century, after getting
control over land avenues and administer civil justice, the East India Company has expanded its
territory control.
Travel writing also played a part in moving from trading to ruling power and its
attendant auxiliaries. Text like Jemimah Kinderley‟s criticized and pointed out many draw backs
like Indian military incompetence and deficiencies of Mughal government in India. With the
defeat of Tipu Sultan, anxieties started to emerge with the emergence of British supremacy.
James Mill has written History of British India in which he attributed debased site of India to
political and religious tyranny. So travel writers wrote about new conquering armies and they
also documented people, customs, flora and fauna. After Gurka‟s war, Himalayan travel

4. narrative appeared. Travel texts by women also published in this era. Writers adopted techniques
of picturesque to represent India like Fanny Parkas did.
In 1857 the revolt of Bengal army creates a great disaster among the Indians. There were
different political powers behind the whole revolt that were leading them. Every were involve in
different dilemmas and want to take vengeance from others. At that time different male and
female writers wrote on the state of affairs that prevailed in India as martyrdom according to
their own perspectives. During these circumstances Mughal reign and East India company met
with their death and India came under the rule of British Empire. Now there was the direct
control in the hands of British on Indians. They introduce their own disciplines. They introduce a
new discipline of anthropology that link with the travel writing. Their main purpose behind this
discipline was just to make the minds of people to investigate the cultures of others is a good
way of study them.
There were different books on anthropology written by Watson and Kaye‟s. One of
which is People of India .Their writings explain the realities of the lives of different casts and
tribes of Indian people. Their writings show that there were criminals among Indian masses but
British wanted trust worthy among Indians. This issue has been explained in the writings of
Bholanath Chandra‟s Travels of a Hinduoo to various parts of upper India. Travel writings were
also described through maps. Through maps travel writers explained the dominance as well as
the past and present of those countries and travel texts about India focus attention on Indian
history and momentum. As well as popular tourists has given the depiction of masterpiece of
Mughals architecture that is Taj Mahal. J.R.Ackerleys also wrote on the conditions of Indian
people in Hindoo Holiday. Instead of focusing on the customs or castes his text focus on what
was the attitude of British towards Indians and Indians towards British.EM Foster was friend of
Ackerley who also explained the policies implement by British on Indians in his writings.
Writers who wrote after 1947 about india,the country demands for the identity of such
writers. It shows the politics that when a person is not a native of a country then how just through
travel he can explain the culture or the traditions of that country. The same case is with Trinidad
born a British resident V.S.Naipaul wrote An Area of Darkness that was his first impression
about his travel writing of subcontinent in which he depicts the picture as explained to him by his
grandfather. He depicts the picture of India same explained by his grandfather as grubby and

5. defected. His second book was also about India A Wounded Civilization in which he presents the
picture of emergency that was declared by Indra Gandhi. He explains the condition of that time
when the people who revolt against government were in prison and when rights were not given
to common people. Although as a travel writer he explains the whole picture according to his
own point of view. Although his third book A Million Mutinies Now shows the picture of the
time when India realize its identity and the people become aware of their self respects. People
become conscious even they come to know how politics is controlling the lives of Indians.
Although in all these writings by Naipaul he wrote from subjective perspective and his
writings are the evidence that all the travel writers wrote according to their own feelings and
thoughts. They show the little reality or as they want. Eric Newby‟s Slowly Down the Ganges
and different other writings are based upon his travelling. Although in travelling writers depicts
the realities of people of different countries and present them according to their own point of
view.
Former imperial capital, Calcutta, officially known as Kolkata has long attracted with the
most contradictory epithets. City became a horrible “city of Dreadful Night” from the glamorous
“City of Palaces”. Situated on the banks of river, Hugli, and grew from a cluster of villages into a
major port, which monopolized the East India Company‟s Trade and dominated Asian
Commerce. The city was divided on racial differences between the black, town of narrow streets
and mud huts, and the White, town of neo-classical huge buildings and broad spaces for walking.
The city developed a distinct and lively culture of European and Bengali.
The interdependence of British and Indians grew mutual attraction and distrust. Early
collaboration of Bengali with the colonial system was succeeded by growing political resistance,
economic discontent and by following the move of the imperial capital to Delhi in 1911. Calcutta
became a symbol to travel writers of British, and while celebrating the city‟s grandeur and
wealth they also describe the anxieties of colonizer, fear of the people and disease.
The 1940‟s brought starvation, communal riots and waves of refugees to Calcutta. In
1971, the city‟s population was once again expanding by the war in East Pakistan. For many
writers, Calcutta, in spite of its intellectual and cultural life, was the most horrible and despairing
city in the world. S.N.Mukherjee, a historian, traced a shift in representation of Calcutta from the

6. city of palaces to the city of dreadful night. Mukherjee argues that, Calcutta‟s glamorous image
of Palladian grandeur is succeeded by one of the chaos, disease and death around the 1850‟s. The
change is not related to any urban condition, but to the man‟s development of popular and
national agitation in 1860‟s.
Mukherjee fails to known about the lingering memory of Black Hole of 1756 and many
anxieties of colonial rule. Danger of cross-cultural proximity and dependence generated by the
inequalities British Govt. Travelers were charmed and impressed by the first view of Calcutta.
The scene of arrival was replayed in 18th
and early 19th
century through different travel texts
Obelisk raised in 1760 by Zephaniah. Holwell narrates the events in which Nawab of
Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah attacked on the British trading base of Calcutta in June 1756. Many
writers and historians told the same history of Calcutta as given by Holwell in their writings.
The myth of the Empire that was told in that time still it is questioned in twentieth century.
Holwell narrates that at the time of the fall of Calcutta 145 prisoners were captivated by Nawab‟s
army including the Holwell himself. All of these prisoners were imprisoned in the black hole for
the whole night. In the next day just 23 prisoners were remained alive while others were dead
because they were unable to survive in that suffocated area.
After some time , British took the revenge of all their sufferings from the Nawab‟ army in
the battle of palasi in 1757. Nawab‟s army was defeated by the Britishers and Siraj-ud-Dullah
himself died in that battle. Battle of Palasi is taken as the starting point of the British rule over
the people of India. All the institutions and industries of India were occupied by the British
people and they were using them according to their own purpose. The myth of Black hole thus
functioned as a starting point of British rule but it is troubling in the sense that in all the writings
of the historians British were depicted as helpless, in pain at the time of Emperor.
When Calcutta city was completely occupied by the British the rebuild the Fort William
in 1778. This fort shows the power of British on the Indians as it was dominant in the whole city.
After the completion of Fort William different writers start writing about the appearance of the
Fort not about its description. By using East India Company as a tool ,British started controlling
the minds of Indians. Adam Smith, one of the critics himself talk against the policy of East India
Company that they used their power in negative and unholy way just for their own purpose to

7. maintain their rule. They used the expenses of common masses for the establishment of
Government house but that Government house was out of common people‟s approach.
Many writers wrote about the description of Government house according to their own
perspective. As James Baillie Fraser writing was influenced by Thomas and William Daniel
writings. He described the picture of Government house by using the word shadowed foreground
sphinxes and lion. According to him it was a great architectural work of British empires.
Another writer Emma Roberts also gives the description of this palace by saying that it was just
like a prison as she says that the entrance from the basement towards the inside was just like as
you are moving to the prison. In this palace there were different tools that were used for
tyrannical purposes.
Peter Stall brass and Allon White say that bourgeois subject continuously defined and
redefined itself by excluding itself from what they refer as “low, dirty, repulsive, noisy,
containment”. The travel writer Geoffrey Moor house, and the French writer of popular histories
and „epics‟, Dominique Lapierrie, return obsessively to the sewers, filth, and disease of Calcutta.
Lapierre‟s book The City of Joy was based on three years‟ research in Calcutta follows
the adventures of a fictitious French Priest who discovers true nobility in the depths of poverty.
In his book, he figures the people of Calcutta primarily as the object of European charity. Despite
of opposition from the Government of West Bengal and the Calcutta press which objected to the
representation of the city, The City of Joy was also filmed in Calcutta by Roland Joffe and both
of its versions were central to Western construction of the city as „the site of urban deprivation‟.
Calcutta came under the epitomize „Third World‟ because of history of post-colonial
Calcutta when it was facing violence, displacement and settlement of newly independent nations
e.g. in 1971, birth of Bangladesh caused massive increase in Calcutta‟s population which is
described as an immense unofficial slum city alongside the official city, of old White
Town/Black Town division.
The crowds of Calcutta became a standard travel-writing topic. Moorhouse devotes an
entire chapter of his book Calcutta (1971) to „People, People‟. One following line shows that
how he has depicted the people of Calcutta in his book: “who are lying like dead things on the

8. pavements, who are drenching themselves with muddy water in the gutters, and who are some
times just standing still as though wondering what to do.” (Page 94-95).
Travelers say that they did not see there European notions of „public‟ and „private‟ because of
very visible bodies on the streets: sleeping, washing, excreting and, indeed, the confusion
extends even to the categories „living‟ and „dead‟, „human‟ and „non-human‟. Such kind of
words evokes menace, an echo of the riots and communal killings of 1946-7.
Calcutta are endlessly, repeated challenged and revised. The city has been haunted by the fear of
racial fear for centuries. The fear of black hole was somehow fuse by the fear of black town and
the threat of the cit of dreadful night. Calcutta‟s paradoxical status reminds us the intimate
relation between travel text and travel industry.
In short travel writing was adopted as a discipline in order to know the specialties of different
countries.travel writers made their writings beautiful by the fake descriptions. We can trace bias
attitude of travel writers in their writings. Although travel writing itself is and surely it was a
good discipline but unfortunately people had used it in negative way.