Ragaviah’s Pictures stages London as realist mobility, revealing elite reformist ambivalence and affective labour placemaking empire’s capital.
Author
Arup K. Chatterjee, Professor,Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Summary
In Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah’s Pictures of England (1876) (the first known English account of a female Indian traveller’s experiences of England and Europe), London represented a stage of realist mobilities of her person and her social and aesthetic identities–a privilege otherwise inaccessible to a swarming majority of nineteenth-century South Asians. The Pictures elucidates a political paradigm when elite (including Brahminical) Indian sensibilities were divided between two potentially incompatible drives. One was to enunciate their will to reform hierarchical inequities of Hindu and Indian society from within, without colonial support. The other was to ally with selective models of Anglican sensibilities, which could invariably prolong such inequities through means other than religion and caste. Nevertheless, the Pictures can still be considered an important specimen to highlight the coproduction of Victoriana by non-British factors, in a kind of unremunerated affective labour of placemaking by Indians of the nineteenth-century imperial capital.
Published in: Studies in Travel Writing
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