On empire’s behalf: the unveiling of Kashmir valley in the early nineteenth-century travel writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Kashmir region figures prominently in the orientalist imagination of nineteenth-century European travel writers. Travellers explored this region amid colonial anxieties by largely sounding pro- British. Their interest and exploration of Kashmir as travel trope was an import part of colonial knowledge formation. Most of the current scholarship however understands the appearance of the ‘Kashmir trope’ in European travel writing was due to the nineteenth-century romantic outpouring in England. They ignore the complexity of cultural encounters and the critical nexus between travel writing and what Michel Foucault describes as an ‘objectivization’ of space Foucault [1995. The language of space. In geography, history, and social sciences. In B. George’s (Ed.), Benko and Ulf Strohmayer. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers] and Henri Lefebvre as Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1991). Early nineteenth-century travel writing on Kashmir region was pragmatic and utilitarian in nature, seldom straying from the promotion of colonial ambitions. By analysing a selected number of travel texts of early nineteenth century on Kashmir region, this paper argues the surfacing of the ‘Kashmir trope’ during the early nineteenth century was an integral part of colonial knowledge formation, and an act of unveiling on behalf of British colonialism.