Revolution, Rebellion and a Rajah from Rohilkhand: Recontextualizing Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

Abstract

SONJA LAWRENSON Revolution, Rebellion and a Rajah from Rohilkhand: Recontextualizing Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah A ppearing over two centuries after translation of the letters of .a Hindoo Rajah was first published in 1796, Pamela Perkins and Shan­ non Russell’s latest edition ofthis text has undoubtedly succeeded in rekin­ dling interest in an author whose literary reputation was, hitherto, all but extinguished. Indeed, since its republication in 1999, Elizabeth Hamilton’s earliest fiction has increasingly garnered the attention of a small yet bur­ geoning contemporary readership intrigued by the narrative’s forthright and detailed explorations of key Romantic-era debates concerning female education, the revolution in France, and the nine-year-long impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. Presented in an epistolary format, the text fol­ lows the adventures of Zaarmilla, Rajah of Almora and “a native Prince of Rohilcund [Rohilkhand].”1 In the first volume Zaarmilla determines to visit England after a British soldier unveils to him “the grandeur of sublim­ ity and the simplicity oftruth” contained within the bible (TLHR 83). The second volume delineates his voyage to, and period of residence in, Eng­ land, where his encounters with slave owners, capricious aristocrats, skepti­ cal philosophers and belligerent women results in his eventual disillusion­ ment with English culture. By explicitly commenting upon British society The author wishes to acknowledge the receipt of an award from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences in support of this research. 1. Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah, eds. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (1796; Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), 244. Hereafter cited as TLHR. SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) 125 126 SONJA LAWRENSON in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the face of accelerated imperial expansionism in the East, Hamilton’s Translation clearly speaks to recent feminist and postcolonial concerns regarding women’s complex and fraught negotiations with the emerging imperialist and nationalist ideolo­ gies of late eighteenth-century Europe. However, while the critical methodologies applied by both feminist and postcolonial scholars have indubitably opened up a new and vital discursive field for the exploration of female responses to the evolving concepts of empire and nationhood, Hamilton’s location within our literary discussions of this period remains at best problematic and at worst untenable. For, as Anne Mellor observes in a 2005 essay entitled “Romantic Orientalism Be­ gins at Home,” such criticism has “tended to reduce the novel to imperial­ ist and anti-feminist stereotypes, thus erasing the complexity of Hamilton’s satire.”2 Mellor’s observation here serves as a timely reminder of Janice Thaddeus’s earlier objection that second-wave feminism had imposed an anachronistic interpretative lens upon Hamilton’s works, thereby obfuscat­ ing the equivocal and oft-contradictory position of a writer such as Hamil­ ton in relation to the dominant discourses of this period. In “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics” (1994), Thaddeus lambasts these scholars for stereotyping Hamilton’s work as “conservative,” arguing that twentiethcentury feminists’ own ideological investment in the revolutionary debates ofthe 1790s had led to an unscrupulous conflation ofanti-jacobinism, con­ servatism, and patriarchalism on the one hand and Jacobinism, liberalism, and feminism on the other: The fact is that the liberal versus conservative yardstick—no more than the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin one—simply does not adequately meas­ ure women’s politics. To place Hamilton on the liberal conservative continuum, to judge her by these rules, is like trying a woman from one country by the laws of another.3 Here, Thaddeus renders Hamilton’s dislocation from the masculine realm of British politics into a simile of national alterity. Inadvertently, however, she also touches upon an issue that could pose an even greater threat to these neat dichotomies than Hamilton’s gender—namely, the cultural dif­ ference signified by her Ulster-Scots background. Born in Belfast, but raised for the most part in the hinterlands of Stirling, Scotland, Elizabeth Hamilton’s cultural identity and its colonial 2. Anne K. Mellor, “Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Trans­ lation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” SiR 44, no. 2 (2005): 152. 3. Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics,” Studies in EighteenthCentury...