The itinerant travellee: dubash accounts from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to read the travellee in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel in India with a focus on the nature of their contemporaneity with the traveller. It questions the overarching explanatory power bestowed on religion in colonial-era European travel accounts through an exploration of the itinerance of the Hindu travellee in early colonial India and the changing functions of the rest house, the latter often mentioned exclusively as a sign of Hindu hospitality in European travel texts of the time. Based on a reading of excerpts from dubash narratives interwoven with details from French and British accounts, the analysis sheds light on travellees as mobile and transitional, their paths intersecting with those of travellers. Travel here emerges as differentiated and constituted by being in place, with instances of shared time marking the experience of movement for all involved.