Humberto Garcia. England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857.

Abstract

Through a series of original and close readings that reverses the usual order of things, Humberto Garcia argues that (white) East India Company men were the original mimic men who adopted Persianate manners to ingratiate themselves to India’s provincial rulers and business elites. Persian-speaking travelers such as Joseph Emin, Mirza Shaikh I’tesamuddin, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, and Dean Mahomet, who had become acquainted with officials of the East India Company were welcomed to England. Their encounters with British society at various levels were shaped by ideas of hospitality that were widespread in the Persianate cultures of Central and South Asia. Using a “decolonial analytic” (37), Garcia treats the history of the late eighteenth-century British Empire in India as contingent. Rather than position this moment as a precursor to the nineteenth-century presumption that (white) colonizers had a superior culture, Garcia’s arguments offer a corrective to the idea that Central and South Asian travelers felt uncomfortable or inferior in eighteenth-century London. Instead, these engagements between cultivated interlocutors were based on hospitality and homosociality. Until the early nineteenth century, “an imperial homosocial arcadia” thrived, defined by “Persian politeness, bravery, generosity, and true manliness” (15). As British competition for Indian territories escalated, the Englishman became increasingly aligned with an empire that was gendered in ways distinct from Persianate ideals of male friendship. As argued by Mrinalini Sinha, one of the co-editors of this book’s series, by the late nineteenth century, colonial societies were marked by racialized colonial masculinities that differentiated between the putative “manly Englishman” and “effeminate Bengali.” Garcia’s book explains the process by which these distinctions emerged. As he notes, many of these texts are centered on “the friction between sentimental manliness and military aggressiveness” (146).