Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire

Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire studies a variety of travel narratives by Indian kings, evangelists, statesmen, scholars, merchants, leisure travellers and reformers. It identifies the key modes through which the Indian traveller engaged with Europe and the world-from aesthetic evaluations to cosmopolitan nationalist perceptions, from exoticism to a keen sense of connected and global histories. These modes are constitutive of the identity of the traveller. The book demonstrates how the Indian traveller defied the prescriptive category of the 'imperial subject' and fashions himself through this multilayered engagement with England, Europe and the world in different identities.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India, and is also Distinguished Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. His most recent books include Vulnerable Earth (2024), Nuclear Cultures (2023) Alzheimer's Disease Memoirs (2021), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2021), Ecoprecarity (2019), Bhopal's Ecological Gothic (2017), and others. His essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, South Asia, Narrative, Celebrity Studies, Asiatic, Prose Studies, a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, Biography, among others. Nayar also holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad.

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Travel and Self-fashioning in the Age of Empire 2. Colonial Subjects and Their Dislocated Aesthetics 3. The Occidental Exotic 4. Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire 5. The Globalectic Imagination and Connected Histories 6. Conclusion: The Antinomies of Travel in the Age of Empire Bibliography Index About the Author