Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel

285 Pages·2017·19.154 MB·English

by  Inderpal Grewal

Acknowledgments
Since this project has taken far too many years, I am particularly
grateful to all those who have been so encouraging over this long
haul. Inparticular,AlfredJessel,whosesupport, encouragement,and
care enable me to enjoy and perform my work; Sukhminder Grewal
and PaulaKavathas,whobelievedthat Icouldbe anacademic; Kirin
and Sonal, who give pleasure and enjoyment and so much love and
keep me centered; friend and coauthor for so many projects, Caren
Kaplan, whose help, understanding, and enthusiasmis never-failing;
Cynthia and WalterJessel, supportive and wonderful; Maninder and
Harkiran and their families; Tejinder and Gurmit, whose hospitality
enabled early research for this book; the Santa Cruz and Berkeley
groups forthecriticalstudyofColonialDiscourseandJim Clifford's
seminars for early inspiration for this project; friends and fellow
coalition workers in the Bay Area Asian American feminist commu
nity who make living in the United States possible: Deanna Jang,
Jayne Lee, Leti Volpp, Beckie Masaki, Mimi Kim, Jacquiline Agtuca,
Nina Kabir, Manuela Albuquerque, Lalita Prasad, Viji Sundaram,
Chic Dabby; Amarpal Dhaliwal and Jasbir Puar, two special allies;
KenWissoker,whohasbeenunfailinglysupportiveandencouraging
at Duke University Press; all the wonderful, special readers for this
projectwho gave me so much encouragement; those who read vari
ous parts and versions of this book: Ella Shohat, Tani Barlow,
Chinosole, Parama Roy, Lisa Bloom, Jenny Sharpe, Mary Layoun,
Uma Chakravarty, Houston Baker Jr., Masao Miyoshi, D. A. Miller,
Paul Rabinow, and Eric Smoodin; research assistants, Arti Kohli and
Randall Williams; a community ofscholars whose inspiration is so
important: Norma Alarcon, Denise Albanese, Janaki Bakhle, Aditya
Behl,Akhil Gupta,DevonHodges,AbdulJanMohammed,LydiaLiu,
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Acknowledgments x
David Lloyd, Donald Lowe, Wahneema Lubiano, Lata Mani, Pur
nimaMankekar, Minoo Moallem, ChandraMohanty,RobertoRivera,
RobertStarn, SusanSung, KamalaVisweswaran. I amappreciativeof
my students at S. F. State who taught me so much and shared their
enthusiasm in three years ofseminars on colonialism, gender, and
travel. My thanks also to San Francisco State University for anAffir
mative Action grant that helped complete this book, and to the Hu
manities CenteratV.C. Davisforafellowship thatenabledquiteabit
ofwritingand research.
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Introduction
In this book I trace the impact ofthe nineteenth-century European
culture oftravel on social divisions in England and India in order to
showtheculturalbasisandeffectsofimperialism. Gainingpowerand
prominence duringthatperiod, this culture is still visible in contem
poraryculturalproductionsoftravel,mediatedinvariouspartsofthe
world through specific agendas inflected by the geopolitics of the
touristindustry.Anycursoryglanceattravelbrochuresorofclothing
cataloguessuchas BananaRepublicorJ. Petermanreveals the desire
for the exotic, a disdain for "natives," a search for the "authentic"
Other,andaneedtomergewiththe"native"cultureandnotbeseen
as a visitor. Other travel narratives that see themselves as outside
colonial frameworks often reveal similarimperial discourses; for ex
ample, the postmodernist mode of travel writing inscribes metro
politandesiresofperipheralizingotherswithinrepresentationalprac
tices markedbyinequalities.l
The rhetoric and discourse ofEuropeantravel was aneighteenth
centuryconstructthatbeganwiththe Grand Tourthatyoungmenof
the English aristocracy undertook as partoftheireducation, a mode
oftravelthatwascentraltoclassandgenderformation.2Bythenine
teenthcentury,asJohn Urrysuggests,travelchangedfromanoppor
tunity for discourse to travel as "eyewitness observation," within
which there was developed avisualization ofexperience and the de
velopment of the "gaze."3 Narratives of exploration, science, dis
covery, and anthropology recoded such class and gender formations
in new forms ofauthority during the nineteenth century. Romantic
discourses of the Self, the "native," and the "savage" performed
suchrecodings. Thedifferencebetween"travel" and "tourism" con-
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Introduction 2
tained important forms of English class and gender divisions that
separated outthe middle- and working-class "day-tripper" from the
"traveler" and the "explorer."4
Many contemporary critics have maintained these distinctions in
problematic ways that reinscribe constructs such as the polarity of
"high culture" and "mass culture"; such a scholarship remains Ar
noldian in its concept of "culture" as aesthetic education.5 In her
importantbookImperialEyes, Mary Louise Prattdescribes this form
oftravel not in terms ofan Arnoldian culture but as a Eurocentric
form of"'planetary' consciousness," as "bourgeoisforms ofauthor
ity"thataremarkedbytheimperialmetropolis's"needtopresentand
re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself."6 Pratt
examines the domestic subject ofEuroimperialism, and no work on
travel can exclude the important matter ofsubject formation, ideol
ogy, and imperialism. The many works that treat travel writing in
terms ofapolitical genre consideration or merely as descriptions of
who went where reiterate imperial gestures ofunreflexive objective,
anthropological, and scientific representation.7
That this mode oftravel became and is hegemonic to this day is
revealed by the deployment ofthe term trayelas auniversal form of
mobility. Such a use erases or conflates those mobilities that are not
partofthis Eurocentric, imperialistformation, whileincludingsome,
like the trope ofexile, that reinscribe European hegemonic aesthetic
forms.8Forinstance,migration,immigration,deportation,indenture,
andslaveryareoftenerasedbytheuniversalizingofEuropeantravel.
In resistance to such aestheticization, this book links scholarly tradi
tionsandmodesofanalysisthatareoftenkeptseparateandisformu
lated through the scholarship on these other forms ofmobility, even
thoughitdoesnotdirectlyaddressthem.
Gainingessentialinsightsfromtheextensiveworkoncolonization,
slavery,andlabormovementscontainedwithinethnicAmericanstud
iesscholarship,thisbookengageswithissuesofraceandcolonization
withoutwhichunderstandingsofimperialism andtravel are impossi
ble.9 Such studies have enabled me to see that the analysis oftravel
requires an awareness ofthe dark side oftravel itself, that is, those
movements and uprootings that colonization's violence demanded
andwithinwhichracial formations are constructed.
Outside ethnic American studies scholarship and in the related
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3 Introduction
fields ofBritishimperialismand India, oneworkthathadaformative
influence on my project was Rozina Visram's Ayahs, Lascars and
Princes: The StoryofIndiansinBritain Z700-Z947. Thisbook,whichis
notatpresentwidelycitedorread, examinestheunequal relationsof
IndiansinBritainintheeighteenthandnineteenthcenturies,describ
ingtheirpresenceinBritainasacontinuousoneforthreecenturies.10
This textenabled me to question the erasures ofEuroimperial travel
and to combinetheanalysisofEuropeantravel withothernotionsof
travel, such as pilgrimagein the contextofIndia and Indianwomen.
Consequently my discussion oftwo Indianwidows' trips to England
andAmericainthesecondpartofthisbookdemonstratesthelimitsof
thediscourseofEuropeantravel. Iwillarguethat,whileToruDuttas
an upper-class, English-educated Bengali woman frames her narra
tivesofhervisitto EnglandwithinthisEuroimperialdiscourse, Pan
dita Ramabai'sand ParvatiAthavale's cannotbeso contained.
Anotherareaofstudythathasinfluencedthisworkistheexamina
tionofcolonialdiasporasandborders. WorksasvariousasJohnBer
ger's representation ofmigrant workers in Europe, A Seventh Man,
Homi Bhabha's essay, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the
Margins ofthe Modern Nation," Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La
Frontera,andD.EmilyHicks'sBorderWritingproblematizetravelasa
consolidationofstableunitaryidentitiesofnation, class,sexuality,or
gender, and suggest forms of Selfhood that evade such consolida
tions.II Yetunlikesomewriterson"border"issues,myintentisnotto
represent border crossings or hybridity as embodying a celebratory
transnationalism but to question notions ofessentialism or authen
ticitythatoftenare containedinworksonthistopic.
Athirdareathatforms thebackgroundofthisbookisthescholar
ship on contemporary issues such as multinational corporations and
themovementsofcapital,labor, objects,andinformation. Suchwork
isessentialtounderstandingforms oftravel andmobilityatthepres
enttime. Intheareaoffeministscholarship,workonfreetradezones,
sex tourism, developmentissues, labor movements, and women's la
borhas created an importanttradition thatilluminates the powerre
lations betweenwomen and addresses questions ofdifference within
feminismsandoffeministpracticesinatransnationalworld.I2Within
this area ofscholarship, "globalizationtheories" enact new forms of
imperial knowledge by privileging the "center" as the "West" and
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Introduction 4
ignoring specific practices ofmobility and consumption that are not
recognizably "Western."13
More than a trope, travel is a metaphor that, I argue, became an
ontologicaldiscoursecentralto therelationsbetweenSelfand Other,
between different forms of alterity, between nationalisms, women,
races, and classes. It remains so to this day, through continuities and
discontinuities.Whethertravelisametaphorofexile,mobility,differ
ence,modernity,orhybridity,itsuggeststheparticularwaysinwhich
knowledgeofaSelf,society,andnationwas,and is,withinEuropean
and North American culture, to be understood and obtained. To
examinesuchusesIworkontextsthatutilizetravel,traveling,andits
culture in order to reveal the ways in which movementwithin space
cametobeideologicallyinscribedinthenineteenthcenturyinBritish
culture, and then to examine how such ideologies were deployed by
non-Europeans. Suchmovementswerealsocrucialforclassandgen
der formation in multipleand linkedlocations.
Unlike MaryLouisePratt'simportantwork,thisbookisnotstrict
lyabouttravelwriting. Ratherthanlookingatorientalisttexts orthe
literatureofcolonialismorofthe"contactzones," as Prattdesignates
thespacesinAsia, Africa, and theAmericas thatwereseenasperiph
eries, Ilook at the effects ofimperialism on cultural formations that
seemtobeunrelatedtoit. Thus,whileIhaveinterspersedallthrough
thebookmanyreferencestothenarrativesoftravel, Ialsopayatten
tion to cultural productions that are not strictly seen as travel narra
tives, such as museum guidebooks, essaysbyEnglishsuffragists, and
eighteenth-century English landscape aesthetics. This methodology
enablesmetoarguethatwhatPrattterms"contactzones," thatis,the
"space ofcolonial encounters," existnot justin the so-calledperiph
eries, butin the colonial metropolisitself.14Bytracingthe discourses
oftravelinwhatIcalltheconstructionsof"home"and"harem,"that
is, the spatial constructions that metaphorically and metonymically
constructhomeand awayorempireand nationatvarious sitesinthe
colonial period through gendered bodies, I argue that the "contact
zones" are everywhere and are contained in particular discursive
spaces that embody and control the narratives of encounters with
difference.
To examine dissimilar deployments oftravel, the book is divided
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5 Introduction
into two parts. The first section concerns what colonial discourse
called "home" or "England," seen as the domestic space ofthe En
glish nation. I examine class and gender formation in the Victorian
periodandEnglishwomen'sdifferentialrelationtoandinsertionwith
in the commodificationsofimperial culture. The second part focuses
onwhatcolonialdiscoursecalledthe"harem," andlooksattheways
in which Indian women, inhabiters of these "harem" spaces, saw
themselves ratherwithinacontentiousand unevenrelationto nation
articulatedas"home." Both"home" and "harem" are, Iargue, rela
tional nationalist constructs that require the deployment ofwomen
and female bodies within the antagonistic and comparative frame
workofcolonialepistemology.
The orientalist discourse of the "harem" has been critiqued by
many scholars in recent years, by Edward Said, Ella Shohat, Malek
Alloula, Mervat Hatem, and others, yet continues to be deployed in
Is
various forms. While Said's landmark work Orientalism influenced
this book and many others, scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Ella
Shohat, Tani Barlow, Mary Layoun, Lata Mani, Nupur Choudhury,
MargaretStrobel, Uma Chakravarty, and othershave pushed further
to examine the various modalities in which such constructs existed
andcontinuetodosoatthepresenttime; EllaShohat'sworkonthe
16
Hollywood cinema is an exemplary instance of such scholarship.I7
Spivak'sworkcontinuestoteachandilluminatethroughherattention
to subalternsubjectsofcolonialand nationalistagendas.
InthisbookIhaveusedinterchangeablytheideaoftheharemwith
thoseofSouthAsianrelatedtermssuchas{enana,purdah,orantahpur.
I have done so to suggest that in colonial discursive practices, all of
these lose theirspecificitiesto markacolonial "phantasm," as Malek
Alloula calls it, ofthe incarcerated "Eastern" woman, lacking free
dom and embodying submission and sexuality as well as an inac
I8
cessibility that colonial powerhopes to penetrate. Though the par
ticularities of these colonial formations vary according to colonial
rule in various regions, they function as a trope that enables subject
formation inmanyplaces. Myintention,therefore,isnotto claimthe
similarities offorms ofveiling or women's lives or locations within
domestic spaces in the Middle Eastor India, butto reveal the utiliza
tionoffemaleincarcerationasaregulativepsychobiography,inGay
atri Spivak's terms, within various patriarchal forms under British
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Introduction 6
colonialism. This narrative operates powerfully within the Roman
tic discourse of "Othering" pervasive within modernist notions of
travel, and enablesimaginings ofthe nationas acommunity, serving
asthe"outside"thatGeoffreyBenningtonarguesisnecessaryforthe
nationto narrateitself.19
"Home" isacrucialcategorywithinEuropeantravelbecauseitisthe
spaceofreturnandofconsolidationoftheSelfenabledbytheencoun
ter with the "Other." In his essay, "Notes on Travel and Theory,"
JamesCliffordrevealsthatinmodernistliteraturethepointsofdepar
ture are clear as are the returns. Home, Clifford states in examining
Paul Fussell's book, Ahroad: British Literary Travelling Between the
Wars, "is a stable place to tell one's story, show one's photos, get
one'sknighthood.... home and abroad are still clearlydivided, self
and otherspatiallydistinct."20 Cliffordgoesonto suggestthatsucha
cartographyis nolongerpossible since the "West" in the "postcolo
nial" moment is a site of"ongoing power and contestation, ofcen
tralityand dispersal."21
CarenKaplancritiquesFussellaswell,arguingthatsuchmodernist
notionsoftravelareforms ofimperialistnostalgiathatconstructboth
an idealized upper-class traveler and a proper native. Kaplan sees
postmodern theories of displacement as problematic, arguing that
withinconstructionsof"postcolonial"hybriditythereexistsaformof
periodization that denies the continuations of modernist forms of
power relations within contemporary cultural productions of"the
22
ory" in the United States. Clifford's notion ofa center as a site of
"ongoingpowerand contestation" would suggestthatsuchcontesta
tionswere not the case in the past, whereas it is ratherthe erasure of
suchcontestationsthatmarksthe dominationofEuropeanmodernist
modes of travel. Such attempts at erasure are obvious within the
discourse ofcontemporary"culturewars" in the U.s. publicsphere.
The work ofLata Mani, Uma Chakravarty, and Partha Chatterjee
has contributed to ourunderstanding ofthe place ofgender in colo
nialism and anticolonial nationalism within India, especially in rela
tion to consolidations ofpatriarchy.23 Lata Mani has argued in her
essay,"ContentiousTraditions,"thatthediscourseofsatiinthenine
teenthcenturyrevealsthatwomenwerethe"grounds"fordebatebe
24
tweencolonizers and the reformists ratherthanthe subjects. Partha
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7 Introduction
Chatterjee, in the essay "The Nationalist Resolution ofthe Woman
Question," argues that the male nationalists "resolved" the issue of
the"womanquestion"byplacingwomeninthespaceofhome/ spiri
tuality in opposition to the male and material world ofthe market
25
place. Nineteenth-century European discourses ofthe female "do
mestic" spaceasabinaryoppositiontothepublicspaceofthemarket
were recuperated within Indian nationalism, enabling the national
ist narrative of the "motherland" of India as independent nation.
Though Chatterjee's analysis simplifies a complex phenomenon by
focusing only on a few elite, male writers, the list ofmovies from
Bombay cinema, novels, essays, and various cultural productions
that use home as a metaphor for nation is endless. The concepts of
"home"asnation,asfeminizedspaceofdomesticity,andasspiritual
itythatwastobekeptpureandsacredthereforelinkupwithmodern
istdiscoursesoftravelwhentheyaredeployedbyIndiannationalists
and reformers. ParthaChatterjeehasstatedthathomeis"notacom
plementarybutrathertheoriginalsiteonwhich thehegemonicproj
ect of nationalism was launched."26 While Chatterjee's aim is to
recuperate"authentic,creativeandpluraldevelopmentofsocialiden
tities" that he argues were made possible through cultural national
ism, hedoesnotsuggestthatone identitypossibleisthatoffeminist.
Myproject,fromafeministviewpoint,presentshomeasaplacemedi
ated in the colonial discursive space through notions ofthe harem. I
see home not only as the original site of nationalism but also of
feminism, sinceitisherethatwomencanresistnationalistformations
byrearticulatingthemasasiteofstruggleratherthanofresolution.27
In the first part of this book, which is devoted to British imperial
culture,mygoalistoshowtheeffectoftravelonanArnoldiannotion
of national "culture." In chapters I and 2 I analyze in detail the
confluenceofgender,class,andimperialdiscourseswithintheculture
oftravelinnineteenth-centuryEngland. Inchapter3,Iexaminehow
the nexus of imperialism, masculinity, and consumerism works to
become part ofthe aesthetic "habitus," as Pierre Bourdieu calls it,
within which the education of the English working class and the
28
formationofanEnglishnationalculturebecomeconcerns. Matthew
Arnold's notion ofhimselfas the representative aesthetic man, cre
atedfromliterarystudythatisbothmoralandpoliticalandcreatinga
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Introduction 8
national culture that is universalist in its scope, indicates the frame
29
workofan Englisheducation thatwas orientalistand imperialist.
Astextsthatrevealclearlytheissueoftheinterpellationofimperial
subjects in the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold's writings show
the hegemonic formation ofa particular form ofnationalist English
culture in the nineteenth century. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold
suggests that to belong to national life, one had to belong to institu
30
tionssuchastheAnglicanChurch. Thisunitaryandmoralnotionof
whatitmeanstohave"culture"attemptstoerasedifferencesinorder
to impose a hegemonic notion ofculture from above. Since Arnold
was the son ofThomas Arnold, one ofthe dominant influences on
Britisheducationformulated asaclassicaleducation,andwasrespon
sible for the introduction ofEnglish literature as a subject in British
schools,31 the impact ofthese ideas cannot be underestimated. Few
whowereeducatedcouldescapeinterpellationascolonizingsubjects;
while some working-class radicals were profoundly suspicious of
such education, many others absorbed it. Yet the notion ofnational
culture was fractured by divisions ofgender and class, and ofprac
tices thatwere, as Philip Dodd notes in an essay on Englishness and
national culture, "within and against those offered to them from
above."32 Mywork suggests that imperialism, through imperial edu
cation, an emerging consumerism, and varied commodifications of
classedand genderedbodies, attemptsto suturethesedivisions.
I examine English culture in the nineteenth century through the
lens ofcolonial discourses. This approach hasbeen utilized in works
such as Patrick Brantlinger's Rule ofDarkness, Lisa Lowe's Critical
Terrains, Sara Suleri's The RhetoricofEnglish India, Gauri Viswana
than's Masks ofConquest, and Jenny Sharpe's Allegories ofEmpire,
which have followed in the footsteps ofEdward Said's Orientalism.33
Mywork in arelated butdifferentveinleaves aside the canon ofEn
glish and colonial literature and pays attention to representations of
subordinategroupsaswell. Bylookingatdiscoursesinternalto both
colonizer and colonized, I suggest that all constructions of"home"
duringthisperiodareimplicatedwithincolonialdiscourses. Mywork
follows onthelinesRobertYoungsuggestsin White Mythologies:
Colonialdiscourseisplacedintheuniquepositionofbeingabletoexamine
English culture, literature and indeed Englishness in itswidestsense, from
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