Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"'Weary and a Wanderer': Finding a Home within Emma Roberts' Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan (1832)"
Rebecca M. Brown
Department of Art and Art History
St. Mary's College of Maryland
rmbrown@osprey.smcm.edu
Studies of the colonial Indian cities Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay have drawn on travel narrative and British colonial description to support theses regarding the historical climate of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century colonial India. These travel narratives provide insight into the ways in which British colonists lived in these cities, reacted to "native" customs, and negotiated their role in the space of the colony. This paper delves further into the relationship between travel writing and urban history by investigating closely the manner in which one particular text informs our reading of colonial urban space, and more specifically, colonial home-space.
The investigation begins with an analysis of the construction of colonial home-space in Patna, India, a provincial city normally outside the traditional pathways of British travelers and their narratives. Emma Roberts, a traveler in the early nineteenth century, offers an unusually in-depth narrative of Patna which illuminates the contradictions and historical problems facing colonists: were the "White Towns" in the cities home-spaces for the colonists or stops along the weary way? Were the British who stayed in India for several years travelers or residents? For writers such as Emma Roberts, the distinction between these poles blurs and highlights the colonial negotiations of home and travel.
In part, this blurring stems from Roberts' position as a woman traveling within a colonial context; her position as othered within British society conflicts with her own othering of Indian culture. In the context of early-nineteenth century societal positions, she embodies the domestic because of her gender, but undermines that embodiment with her position as a white colonizer in India. Close reading of her descriptions of colonial dwellings, those she inhabits as well as those abandoned by earlier colonists, reveals an understandably conflicted attitude toward home-space in the colony. Moving from the text to the urban space, this paper takes that ambiguous colonial "home" narrative and investigates its relationship to the contradictions within the cityscape itself, where the traditionally separated colonial spaces of White Town and Black Town do not live up to their stark dichotomous promise. Thus, by examining not simply the facts that these travelers communicate, but also by mining their narratives for the discursive constructions of concepts of home and travel, the historical understanding of urban space as itself ambiguous rises to the surface. The paper draws these elements together to conclude that it is this ambiguity that is constitutive of colonialism in early-nineteenth-century India, for both travel writing and the urban landscape.
Rebecca M. Brown
Department of Art and Art History
St. Mary's College of Maryland
rmbrown@osprey.smcm.edu
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