These studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean travel literature, informed by a scholarly and sympathetic but, very properly, unsentimental approach to ten significant English travellers in India between 1579 and 1630, throw considerable light on the India of the great Mughals and reveal the many strands which are interwoven into the ties that have bound and still, in many ways, bind the great and ancient civilisations of the Indian sub-continent with the smaller and shorter civilisations of the British Isles. Professor Ram Chandra Prasad combines the skills and resources of the historian, the literary critic and the student of comparative literature and languages to demonstrate what we may learn of these two countries from the often idiosyncratic but always rich prose of Englishmen abroad in the ages of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. Professor Prasad has chosen for study Thomas Stephens, Ralph Fitch, John Mildenhall, William Hawkins, Thomas Roe, Thomas Coryat, William Finch, Nicholas Withington, Edward Terry, and Henry Lord. He makes just enough reference to non-English travellers, such as Manucci, to keep his readers in the general picture of western exploration , while at the same time he concentrates on his chosen field. The author's practice of quoting long extracts in the original language has a twofold advantage: it makes his narrative more vivid, and it facilitates the determination of what one traveller owes to another. This new, completely revised edition of Early English Travellers in India will continue to fill a long-felt gap in Indo-Anglian literature and it will be greeted as an important achievement by the scholar and the general reader alike.

"Comparing the variant ideologies of the representations of India in seventeenth-century European travelogues, India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives concerns a relatively neglected area of study and often overlooked writers. Relating the narratives to contemporary ideas and beliefs, Rita Banerjee argues that travelwriters, many of them avid Protestants, seek to negativize India by constructing her in opposition to Europe, the supposed norm, by deliberately erasing affinities and indulging in the politics of disavowal. However, some travelogues show a neutral stance by dispassionate ethnographic reporting, indicating a growing empirical trend. Yet others, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of diversity, demonstrate tolerance of alien practices and, occasionally, acceptance of the superior rationality of the other's customs"--

Comparing the variant ideologies of the representations of India in seventeenth-century European travelogues, India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives concerns a relatively neglected area of study and often overlooked writers. Relating the narratives to contemporary ideas and beliefs, Rita Banerjee argues that travel writers, many of them avid Protestants, seek to negativize India by constructing her in opposition to Europe, the supposed norm, by deliberately erasing affinities and indulging in the politics of disavowal. However, some travelogues show a neutral stance by dispassionate ethnographic reporting, indicating a growing empirical trend. Yet others, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of diversity, demonstrate tolerance of alien practices and, occasionally, acceptance of the superior rationality of the other's customs.

This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India—the first book written in English by an Indian—framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole. Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.

This book examines the letters, diaries, and published accounts of English and Scottish travelers to Greece in the seventeenth century, a time of growing interest in ancient texts and the Ottoman Empire. Through these early encounters, this book analyzes the travelers’ construction of Greece in the early modern Mediterranean world and shows how travel became a means of collecting and disseminating knowledge about ancient sites. Focusing on the mobility and exchange of people, artifacts, texts, and opinions between the two countries, it argues that the presence of Britons in Greece and of Greeks in England aroused interest not only in Hellenic antiquity, but also in Greece’s contemporary geopolitical role. Exploring myth, perception, and trope with clarity and precision, this book offers new insight into the connections between Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and the West.