The Discursivity of the ‘Hindu’ Gaze: Reading Bholanauth Chunder’s Travelogue

Abstract

The ‘travelogue’ as a genre in late nineteenth-century India is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, literary modernity and the ethos of a nascent Indian nationalism. This paper uses Bholanauth Chunder’s The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India (1869) as a case study to illustrate how travelling practices in colonial India were, among other things, aimed at achieving cultural proximity with the coloniser. It examines how the relationship between the traveller (Chunder) and the ‘travelled’ was mediated by heuristic categories emerging out of Western imperialism, particularly the conceptual category of ‘Hindoo’, that were being fervently invoked in the nineteenth century. I argue that Chunder’s ‘Hindoo’ gaze fostered a communal ethos at a time when cultural histories were being woven from a highly contingent process of political partisanship amid struggles over the meaning of nationhood and citizenship, interacting with (anti-)imperialist ideologies laced with notions of territorialisation.