Colonial Desires: The Fantasy of Empire and Elizabeth Hamilton's "Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah"

Abstract

IN THE EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW S SPECIAL ISSUE ON BRITISH ROMATICISM: Global Crossings, Anne Mellor, in her introduction to a subsection titled Gender and the Anxieties of asks an important question, Do the female writers of the Romantic era construct the East--whether the Near East of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East of India, or the Far East of Malay and China--differently from the male Romantic-era writers? If so, in what way? (1) Recent work such as Saree Makdisi's on Romantic Imperialism, Nigel Leask's on how male Romantic writers wrote of and responded to the East, and Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson's collection have done much to advance our understanding of the nexus between Romanticism and Colonialism. The groundbreaking collection, Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, also explores in part women writers' involvement in and responses to Imperialism. However, most of these studies have largely focused on a general rather than gender-specific discussion of Romantic English writers' exploration of the East. (2) Yet as feminist scholars such as Nancy Armstrong, Laura Brown and Jenny Sharpe have reminded us, the figure of the woman and of gender difference played a central role in eighteenth-century social and political ideology. (3) Mellor's question, then, has resonant valence in Romantic Studies as scholars continue to study Romantic women writers' gendered response to Imperialism. In the same spirit, I take her question as a point of departure to interrogate how one Romantic woman writer, Elizabeth Hamilton, constructed the East in one of the first novels written about India and the English adventure of Empire: her Translations off the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, published in 1796. (4) It is an Tale purportedly written by a Hindu Rajah about his encounters with the English in both India and England. In the 1790s, not surprisingly since English imperial ventures were rapidly expanding abroad, the popularity of Oriental accounts increased dramatically with the English public. The last three decades of the eighteenth-century saw an explosion in the publication of Tales, wildly popular with an ever desirous reading public wanting to know more about the East. Of course as Edward Said and others have argued, English writers' exotic fictional locations, like Dryden's India or Samuel Johnson's Abyssinia, bore little resemblance to the realities of the geographical places their writing conjured up for the romantic imagination of the English reading public. Instead these tales allegorized the exotic. They created imaginative landscapes that provided answers to England's search for a coherent identity of its own at the specific time when its colonial encounters with other cultures were increasing exponentially. Indeed, Marilyn Butler has pointed out that with regard to the East, these re-imagined places were the sites of a pragmatic contest among nations for world power in the period. (5) In more broad terms, then, this essay is about myriad colonial desires--the desire for symbolic and concrete consumption of the East by an increasingly capitalist eighteenth-century English society; the desire for authenticity at a time when the very terms of what is genuine became debatable; the desire for self-reflection about what it means to be English when one continually encounters Others; and the desire to critique an imperial venture that predicated itself on humanist ideals but often slipped from its high moral grounds, as the much publicized 1788 trial of Warren Hastings for high crimes against his Indian subjects revealed to the English public. I suggest that it is such ambivalent colonial desires that produced one of the most powerful myths that ensured the success of the English Empire--the myth of an authentic, homogeneous, benevolent English nation certain of its ascendancy over its colonies. Yet as scholars such as Robert Young have argued, this myth of a fixed English identity, so loudly proclaimed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in fact became more and more contested. …