Faraz Anjum
TRAVEL WRITING, HISTORY AND COLONIALISM: AN
ANALYTICAL STUDY

From remote antiquity, men and women have travelled due to

diverse reasons. Curiosity may be one cause but diplomacy, political
pursuit, military campaigns, trade, business contacts, exile, flight from
persecution, migration, pilgrimage, missionary activities, and the search
for economic or educational opportunities were and still are common
inducements for foreign travel. That is perhaps the reason that travel
has emerged as one of the most popular idiom in the academic
discourse of the modern world. Literature, history, geography, cultural
studies, anthropology, gender and postcolonial studies have engaged
with the study and analysis of travel. In fact, in the past few decades,
literature of and on travel has reached enormous scale.1 A number of
reasons can be assigned for its popularity. Bill Buford attributes it to its
“wonderful ambiguity” lying “between fact and fiction.”2 It can be
considered as “postmodern collage” encompassing and intersecting
diverse pieces.3 Different academic disciplines have employed travel
for different reasons. All those scholars who are working on
colonialism, race, and cultural relations have “rediscovered those travel
narratives that accompanied, described, extended, even made possible,
the expansion of capital and colonialism.” Feminist scholars, working
on women travellers, have focussed on their “texts’ relationship to
male-authored accounts”. While literary critics and biographers have
concentrated on the travel writings of those authors who are famous for
their other works in order to get a glimpse of their lives and motives. In
the similar vein, cultural geographers working on spatiality have found
travel an interesting area of attention. And post-modern theorists have
directed their attention to travel “for its expression of the themes and
condition of exile, migration, nomadism, and boundary-crossings.”4
Thus as a multidisciplinary genre, travel has been subjected to
varied uses and purposes. However, it has developed close relationship
with history and colonialism. The paper explores the inter-relationship
of three concepts: travel, history and colonialism. It points out that,
though travelogues and travel writing have been used as sources of
history in the earlier times, particularly for reconstructing the ancient
and medieval past, more and more attention has been drawn in modern
times towards their mutual relationship. Same is the case with colonial
studies. As (post)colonial studies developed as an area of inquiry in the

191 
 
 JRSP, Vol. 51, No. 2, July-December, 2014 

last decades of the twentieth century, the academics focussed on the

nexus between travels in the early modern and later periods and
emergence of colonialism. However, the connection of travel with
history and colonialism, the paper argues, is quite complex and
problematic and entails a detailed enquiry. The paper is divided into
three parts. First part focuses on the concept of travel and its
multifaceted aspects. The second part explores travel accounts as
sources of history and third part discusses relationship of travel and
colonialism.
Conceptualising Travel and Travel Writing
Travel writing is “enigmatic and influential”5 as well as “fluid
and versatile”6 and its complexity has precluded its exact defining of
contours and boundaries. According to one author, it is “a broad and
ever-shifting genre.”7 One scholar has believes that travel writing, as a
literary form, is a “notoriously raffish open house where different
genres are likely to end up in the same bed. It accommodates the
private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note
and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes
narrative and discursive writing.”8 A French author explains that it is
“discontinuous” and thus “juxtaposes also segments of texts which
differ in tone . . . The text is stratified: it consists of various layers of
voices, vocabulary (the descriptions vary in kind: landscapes, habitats,
clothing, works) and style . . . The travel book combines the
heterogeneous (using all in one the form of memoir, diary and the
letter) and disparity. It aims at the mosaic.”9 There are some who
believe that its definition is an impossible task.10 However, many
scholars have tried to put it in some framework.
One author traces its etymological origin and suggests that
travel in modern English has come from the Middle English word,
travailen (to toil or to make a toilsome journey), which is borrowed
from the Old French travaillier (to labor or to work at strenuous
physical or mental activities). Thus the author opines that this same
root grew into the contemporary travail which connotes “gruelling
labor and misadventure.” In this way, travel in its very essence is not a
vacation as we often conceive, but rather “a serious activity that is
filled with adversity, difficulty, and discomfort: in short, travel is a sort
of work.”11
One scholar defines travel book as “any narrative
characterized by a non-fiction dominant that relates (almost always) in
the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have

192
 
 Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study

taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author,

narrator and principal character are but one or identical.”12 Another
academic focuses on travel literature and defines it as “those texts that
recount the journey of a person from one place to a significantly
different place and that have enduring qualities—be they formal or
content-based—that resonate with readers from different eras with
different interests and backgrounds.”13 Some consider travel “as a
broadly defined practice featuring human movement through culturally
conceived space, normally undertaken with at least some expectation of
an eventual return to the place of origin.”14 According to another
author, travel writing has unlimited forms and he mentions the
examples such as guidebooks, itineraries and routes and even maps to
accounts of journeys over land or by water, or just descriptions of
experiences. He states that such writings can appear both in prose and
poetry, and often include part of historical and (auto)biographical
works. Travel writings can comprise of simple notes and observations
and sometimes letters written during the journey itself, or composed
long afterwards with literary skill. Thus travel writing is “unlimited in
its forms of expression,” and it is “generally understood what it
contains.”15
As one can see, scholars are employing wide range of terms
for travel writing. These include travel book, travel narrative, travel
memoir, journeywork, travel story, travelogue, meta-travelogue, travel
journal, traveller’s account, travel literature, the literature of travel,
travel genre or simply travel. Despite the abundance of different labels,
one is consigned to agree with Jan Borm that travel writing is “a
collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and
non-fictional whose main theme is travel.”16
Despite the euphoria of travel writing in academia, one can
still say that analytical works on travel are quite few and far between.
There are, therefore, a number of issues which still “haunt” any
discussion of travel writing. 17 As Tim Youngs says, “in academic
terms travel writing has travelled. As an object of study it has crossed
disciplines.” Travel writing also corresponds to and overlaps with many
other disciplines. That is the reason that according to Hulme, travel
writing has
“four near neighbours, in generic terms: the
novel (literature), ethnography (anthropology), the
document (history), and reportage (sociology) . . . Despite
the variety of material under consideration, key themes
emerge. Like autobiography, with which travel writing

193 
 
 JRSP, Vol. 51, No. 2, July-December, 2014 

shares some features, travel narrative is always controlled

by the first-person singular. Predictably, therefore,
questions of identity are frequently to the fore, suggesting
the degree to which physical travel often tends, in its
writing, to become symbolic of interior journeys of the
mind or soul: the first person in question. But travellers
have also often been important witnesses, reporting on
other cultures or distant places, and the first person is also
therefore always under question: the matter of authority
is rarely far from the surface in travel writing.”18
Some scholars believe that travel writing is a multiple genre in
itself which consists of other genres. “This is a genre [travel literature]
composed of other genres, as well as one that importantly contributed
to the genesis of the modern novel and the renaissance of
autobiography. It is a genre that confronts, at their extreme limit,
representational tasks proper to a number of literary kinds: the
translation of experience into narrative and description, of the strange
into the visible, of observation into the verbal construct of fact; the
deployment of personal voice in the service of transmitting information
(or of creating devotional texts); the manipulation of rhetorical figures
for ends other than ornaments. Some of these demands are familiar to
the ‘participant-observers’ of ethnography, others to writers and critics
of fictional realism or historiography. All of them are important to the
analysis of travel writing.”19 Similarly, “insights from sociology and
cultural studies into the experience and consequences of travel are
relevant to colleagues across a range of subjects, including Literature.
The textual detail of travel writing itself, however, has now become the
focus of scholars in many fields besides literary criticism.”20 So one is
bound to agree with Speake that travel writing over the years “has
taken on a bewildering multiplicity of forms and functions” and it has
“an extraordinary rich and varied landscape.”21
What are the effects of travel on the personality of traveller?
There are a number of answers to this question. Roxanne Euben
believes that “direct exposure to what is culturally unfamiliar is just as
likely to engender alienation or antagonism as openness.” She thinks
that “direct observation cannot guarantee depth of insight into one’s
own nomoi (customs, laws) or that of others, and that vicarious or
imaginative travel does not by definition prohibit it. The kinds of
blindnesses that attend physical travel on the one hand and, on the
other, the insights available to those who journey imaginatively,
suggest that what is crucial to ‘travel’ is not bodily presence but the

194
 
 Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study

dislocating character of the encounter. . . . texts that reflect and enact

such dislocating mediations between the familiar and unfamiliar can
serve as an invaluable resource for those who do not or cannot travel, in
part by enabling imagination of and reflection on modes of life other
than their own.”22 Travel, in the words of Euben, “signals estrangement
from the moorings that impart solidity and definition to human life; a
loss, not just of a familiar place but of a world comprised of family,
friends, customs, and institutions, which both nurture and sustain its
inhabitants. Such loss is captured by Descartes when he cautions that
‘when one spends too much time travelling, one finally becomes a
stranger in one’ own country.’”23
It has long been conceived that travel and writing are
inextricably connected.24 As one author has explained that the travellers
“travel in order to write, they travel while writing, because, for them,
travel is writing.”25 However, there is another subtle aspect which
relates travel and writing. Every traveller to an unknown land wants to
leave his traces behind and most of which are in the form of writing. As
Michel Butor explains that “to leave a trace of our passing is to belong
to a spot, to become ourselves a Roman, Athenian, Cairote; therefore,
we do it not only to return home with the light of these place-ideograms
within us, but also to make our very existence a hopefully indelible
‘stroke’ on a visited spot.”26 However, this apparently innocent
phenomenon of marking leads to the way where “crosses, monuments,
tombs are erected and inscribed. . . . Where the textual fabric of the
new land is already quite dense, the explorer will bring home the names
taught him by native instructors, but even more often, he, the new
Adam, will untiringly name each identifiable site; so, world maps will
become covered with names. . . . Even before the conqueror, the
explorer seizes with his language the land he crosses.”27
Many scholars believe that any “good travel” which is “heroic,
educational, scientific, adventurous, ennobling” as a “distinctively
Western activity.”28 However, many scholars have contested this
Eurocentric view and claim that travel is a universal phenomenon.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam contests this viewpoint and believes that
European era of exploration in the early modern period “witnesses the
expansion in a number of cultures of travel, as well as the concomitant
development of travel-literature as a literary genre, whether the routes
explored are overland (trans-Saharan, trans-Central Asian) or maritime.
The notion of ‘discovery’ thus applies as much to [Chinese] Zheng
He’s Indian Ocean voyages in the early fifteenth century as those of
Cabral or Magellan a century later.”29

195 
 
 JRSP, Vol. 51, No. 2, July-December, 2014 

Travel Writing and History

History in itself is a sort of travel. As past is metaphorically a
foreign country, historians travel to this alien land to explore and
understand it. It does not mean physical journey of the historian to that
land but it does imply engaging with different interests and varied
perspectives of the past people. In that sense, historian is a voyager and
a traveller. However, beyond that metaphor, history and travel writing
are interconnected in many ways.
Travel writing has traditionally been accepted as an important
source of historiography. In a number of ways, travel accounts can be
helpful to the historian. The travellers generally provide such
information which the local writers ignore as being ordinary and
commonplace. Some educated and refined travellers have at times been
able to offer unusual insights into the political events and social
customs of foreign lands. Travel accounts are important not simply
because they are windows on distant places but they are also mirrors
that reflect the values of the travellers and throw back light on their
own societies. However, there are diverse issues concerned with the
nexus between travel and history writing. Mary Campbell has raised the
following questions:
“How, for instance, does one distinguish fact from
fiction, either as writer or as reader, in the case of unverifiable
records of private experience taking place in profoundly
unfamiliar surroundings? How do the pressures of audience
expectation and the writer’s predispositions transform the
language and content of such records? Are they records at all,
or only literary occasions for compensatory fantasies on the
part of the disillusioned, the nostalgic, the bewildered?”30
One is bound to accept the position that traveller is “a kind of
witness” and he generally tries to speak the truth. Mary Campbell
contends that “neither power nor talent gives a travel writer his or her
authority, which comes only and crucially from experience.”31 The
traveller in foreign land is faced with a world for which his language is
not prepared. The traveller, therefore, has to employ the means of
cultural translation.
Travel and translation32 are also quite interrelated. According
to Mary Campbell, travel writing is “a literary instrument of
consciousness, a genre of cultural translation.”33 Translation means
“transposing something (words, ideas, images) from somewhere into
somewhere else, not just moving sentences from one language into

196
 
 Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study

another, but also physical realities into verbal utterances, . . . And

travellers who return home become translators of some sort, mediators
and exegetes of a distant, inexplicable world for their listeners.”34 The
author then goes on to give the example of Christian mission in China.
The Jesuit priest in China, Matteo Ricci, discovered that if he dressed
as a priest no one would take him seriously, so he dressed like a
Confucian scholar instead, “thus ‘translating’ his social position into
Chinese.” He also gave permission to the converted Chinese to pay
reverence to their ancestors in the traditional manner, on the plea that it
was a social rather than a religious custom. When Ricci translated the
word ‘God’ by the Tianzhu, which literally meant ‘Lord of Heaven’,
and allowed Chinese Christians to refer to heaven as simply Tian, as
Confucius had done. The overall effect of such a strategy was that in
Rome, the Jesuits were accused of having been converted to the
religion of the Chinese rather than converting them to Christianity.
Thus according to Peter Burke, “what appeared in Beijing to be a good
cultural translation looked more like a mistranslation in Rome.” Thus
travellers often have to face the problems of both “interlingual and
intercultural translation.”35 Peter Burke points out another dimension of
travel as translation. He contends that it is a “double process of
decontexualization and recontextualization, first reaching out to
appropriate something alien and then domesticating it.” He believes
that this process should be looked at “from a double viewpoint. From
the receiver’s point of view it is a form of gain, enriching the host
culture as a result of skilful adaptation. From the donor’s point of view,
on the other hand, translation is a form of loss, leading to
misunderstanding and doing violence to the original.”36
Relating to history, the issue of authenticity of information
provided by the traveller becomes important. Even the father of history,
the Greek writer Herodotus has been accused of providing “a mélange
of myth, history, and geography.”37 It is generally assumed that the
travel writers often crisscross “the boundaries between eyewitness
testimony, second-hand information, and outright invention,” and the
readers cannot say with surety whether what they were reading is truth
or fiction.38 It is also a fact that sometimes the readers’ expectation of
complete truth and their imagination about the place come into conflict
and create a serious situation for the traveller. If the latter speaks the
truth, he would disappoint his readers and endanger his own position.
Sometimes the traveller has to embellish the truth to fulfil the
expectations of his readers. But as one author comments, “for this,
considerable skill is needed, and only with help of fictional elements—
or ‘white lies’, if one prefers—can the writer attain the necessary

197 
 
 JRSP, Vol. 51, No. 2, July-December, 2014 

verisimilitude for creating a bridge of understanding between his own

wide knowledge of the subject and the narrower expectations of the
reader.”39
It is also an acknowledged fact that travellers borrow much
material from their predecessors. Most travellers before or during their
travels study and keep with them journals of other travellers and their
works hardly seem original. Sometimes, travellers produce their
travelogues many years after their return to their home country and
these may be based solely on memory. The historian must be on guard
against lapses of memory which can serious affect the turn of events.
Sometimes, the traveller relying on his memory would confuse the
names of places and persons.
The notion of travel lies40 is an old one and traditionally
travellers were accepted as telling lies.41 Percy Adams has produced a
study of ‘travel liars’ and has also traced the close relationship between
the genres of the novel and of travel literature.42 However, one cannot
always be sure whether a lie is the result of ignorance or intention. It is
often difficult to say with authority why the traveller has lied. There
can be a multiple of motives for telling lies. As Percy G. Adams states:
“Although the chief causes of travel fabrications,
whether of complete books or short passages, were money and
vanity, prejudice was also a widespread motive for distorting
the truth, both for the voyager who reported the distortions and
for the reader who accepted them. And since it was—and is—
a more subtle motive, the effects of which are often very hard
to determine.”43
However, there are certain ways to find out the falsehood. A
historian can ferret them out by his painstaking labour. The preceding
travel literature, newspapers and journals of the time can give him clues
and by comparing various accounts from the original text of the author,
most of the travelling lies can fairly be identified. It also often happens
that an innocent traveller may be the victim of a fireside editor or
translator, either contemporary or of a later period. Such an editor or
translator feeling that the original journal must be made “more
attractive to the public or must be tailored to fit the needs of what is
considered to be a more sophisticated or a more robust time” makes
significant changes in the original draft of the author.44 Such
contributions can also by identified by an acute observer by comparing
the different parts of the same work and identifying changes in the
syntax, diction and tone.

198
 
 Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study

There is another aspect to it. There is the realization that

“travel writing is always necessarily a product of a particular time and a
particular culture” and “the world informed by the voyage reports is a
world informed by their subjectivity as well.”45 According to
Campbelll, this point needs to be stressed because “the voyage report
was to play in the development of an extremely interventionist
ethnology, now justifiably under attack from many quarters.”46 This
issue lands us to the relationship of travel with colonialism.
Travel Writing and Colonialism
During the past few decades, as colonialism47 emerged as the
focus of many disciplines, and postcolonial studies48 developed as a
multidisciplinary field, interest in the role of travel and exploration
literature in contributing to and reflecting the colonial past has
increased steadily. It is now generally recognized that travel writing is
directly or indirectly linked with the European project of colonialism.
As the traveller makes cultural comparisons, there emerges a
judgmental hierarchy. Such apparently innocent comments as ‘We do it
this way, they do it that way’ may sound neutral but may also contain a
“subtext” of superiority and inferiority. And thus travel writing has
been accepted as “one of the ideological apparatuses of empire.”49
European travellers, as they recorded their observations of
other lands and peoples, contributed to the “growth of a new,
empirically informed discourse about both man and nature.” It is
apparent that the travellers and travel writing was instrumental in the
institutionalisation of new science through books and reviews, learned
academics and journals, and at the universities. The Royal Society of
London was interested in travel accounts in order to promote natural
knowledge. The travellers, though, generally undertook to travel mainly
to satisfy intellectual urge and curiosity, often also took abroad “precise
intellectual aims backed by systematic readings and carefully drawn
instructions.”50
May Louis Pratt’s Imperial Eyes51 is particularly important as
it shows how travel writing has produced ‘the rest of the world’ for
European readerships. It investigates into how the European people got
engaged with expansionist enterprises of colonial powers. For that
purpose, she studied particular corpus of travel writing related to the
period and then established connections from travel writing to forms of
knowledge and expressions that were produced at that time. She uses
the concept of transculturation to introduce questions about the ways in
which modes of representation from the metropolis are received and

199 
 
 JRSP, Vol. 51, No. 2, July-December, 2014 

appropriated by groups on the periphery—and how transculturation

from the colonies to the metropolis takes place. She also uses the
concept of ‘contact zones’ to refer to the space of colonial encounters,
the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated
come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations,
usually involving conditions of coercion, racial inequality, and
intractable conflict.52 Thus Bill Ashcroft explains:
“European societies, at least, have combined the urge
to travel with the urge to possess. This has not always meant
physical possession. Long before the rush to build empires, a
strange link between discovery and knowing characterized the
urge for possession. This urge has, in turn, been actualized in
acts of description—in writing—, the material record of which
gives both permanence and availability to the object
described.”53

Pramod K. Nayar believes that the European encounter with

India often occurred as a three part process. First, the traveller was
prepared in his imagination for India through the cultural imaginary of
already circulating fables and narratives such as travel reports of
wealth, excessive eroticism, pleasure, danger and profit. Second, as he
travelled through India he recorded his experience of the actual
‘discovery’ of the East and compiled it into a readable personal
account. Third, he proceeded to inquire about, explain and document
what he observed. Thus the “ ‘proto-colonial’ discourse of discovery
moves from imagining of what could be discovered in the East to the
ordering of what was discovered. These writings therefore mark a
narrative possession—we could think of it as “colonization”—of
India.”54
One has to accept that travel writing is also inextricably linked
with the issue of identity formation. According to Indira Ghose, travel
“serves as an ideal paradigm to study the intersection of different axes
that construct identity.”55 One fundamental question in any travel
account is how the traveller has constituted the other. Ghose has
indicated two contradictory forms of constructing the identity of the
other: “the construction of the other as negation of the self, as
completely other” which was mainly the case in the travel accounts
pertaining to the Americas; and “the assimilation of the other as same
(but lacking)” which was the case in the travel writing concerning the
East, including India.56 However, the common element in both these

200
 
 Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study

constructions is that “they are moulded in the image of the self and
serve the function of self-definition.”57
Thus, one of the significant elements in the encounter between
the West and the non-West in the early modern period was the creation
of the binaries of self and other. The travel accounts at that time,
though not yet directly implicated in colonial imperatives, established a
base of knowledge in which Europe performed the normative function.
As pointed out by Bernard S. Cohn, these accounts “established an
enduring structural relationship” between the East and the West which
considered Europe as “progressive and changing”, while the East as
“static.” For Europeans, East was “a kind of living fossil bed of the
European past, a museum which was to provide Europeans for the next
two hundred years a vast field on which to impose their own visions of
history.” It was a “land of oriental despotism, with its cycles of strong
but lawless rules,” which created political order only by “unbridled
power” and “led inevitably to its own destruction in a war of all against
all, leading to anarchy and chaos.”58
This does not mean to suggest that these European travel
accounts in the early modern period in any direct way brought about
Imperialism or colonisation. However, this encounter between the East
and the West did establish some of the Oriental stereotypes and clichés
which became important during the colonial period. That is the reason
why colonial writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resonate
some of the same images which were in the beginning provided by the
pre-colonial European travellers.59 William Dalrymple calls them
“unwitting contributors to later colonialism.” It is, no doubt, conceded
that these accounts are far more complex and resist a straightforward
label of Orientalist writings. The textual representations are “not
monolithic or univocal” and these “create a network of intersecting and
contending discourses about India.” However, it cannot be denied that
these “competing discourses” lead to a “discursive framework that is
particularly amenable to later colonial use.”60

201 
 
 JRSP, Vol. 51, No. 2, July-December, 2014 

Notes and References

                                                            
1
For introductory works on travel, see, Carl Thompson, Travel Writing: the
New Critical Idiom (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); The Cambridge
Companion to Travel Writing. Eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Perspectives on Travel
Writing. Eds. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate,
2004); Studies in Travel Writing, (Papers from the Essex Symposium on
‘Writing Travels’) Number 1 (Spring 1997).
2
‘Introduction,’ The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 1. Also see,
Peter Hulme’s “Introduction,” in Studies in Travel Writing, (Papers from the
Essex Symposium on ‘Writing Travels’) Number 1 (Spring 1997): 1-8.
3
Colin Thubron, ‘Both Seer and Seen: The Travel Writer as Leftover
Amateur’, TLS, 30 July 1999, no. 5026, p. 12, quoted in ‘Introduction,’ The
Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 10.
4
Tim Youngs, “Editor’s Preface,” Special Issue ‘Placing Travel’ Literature
and History 6 no. 2 (Autumn 1997): v.
5
The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Peter Hulme and Tim
Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), i.
6
Hooper and Youngs, “Introduction,” in Perspectives on Travel Writing, 11.
7
‘Introduction,’ The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 10.
8
Jonathan Raban, For Love and Money: Writing-Reading-Travelling 1968-
1987 (London: Picador, 1988), pp. 253-4, quoted in Borm. “Defining Travel:
On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology,” 16.
9
Jean Roudaut, ‘La litterature et le voyage’, le magazine du Centre 94 (Paris:
Centre Georges Pompidous, July/August 1996), pp. 7-8, quoted in Borm.
“Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology,”
20.
10
Tim Youngs notes in his study: ‘Travel writing feeds from and back into
other forms of literature. To try to identify boundaries between various forms
would be impossible and I would be deeply suspicious of any attempt at the
task.’ Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 8.
11
Christopher K. Brown, Encyclopedia of Travel Literature (California: ABC-
Clio, 2000), Introduction, vii.
12
Jan Borm, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and
Terminology,” in Perspectives on Travel Writing, eds. Glenn Hooper and
Tim Youngs (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2004), 17.
13
Brown, Encyclopedia of Travel Literature, Introduction, viii.
14
Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston, eds., In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire
(Peter Lang: New York, ‘Travel writing across the disciplines’ 4, 2002),
quoted in Conroy, ‘Introduction,’xv.
15
Zweder von Martel, “Introduction: The Eye and the Mind’s Eye,” in Travel
Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly
Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing. Ed. Zweder von Martel.
Leiden; New York; Koln: E.J. Brill, 1994, xi.

202
 
 Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study

                                                                                                                       
16
Jan Borm, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and
Terminology,” in Perspectives on Travel Writing, eds. Glenn Hooper and
Tim Youngs (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2004), 13.
17
Mary B. Campbell has identified these issues to be “the truth value of
representations, inexpressibility and ‘translation’, and the difficulty of
imagining or representing the Other”. See, her, there may be others which
can be mentioned.
18
Hulme, “Introduction,” 5.
19
Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European
Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1988), 6.
20
Tim Youngs, “Where Are We Going? Cross-border Approaches to Travel
Writing,” in Perspectives on Travel Writing, eds. Glenn Hooper and Tim
Youngs (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2004), 167.
21
Jennifer Speake, ed. Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia,
3 Vols. (New York & London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), I: vii.
22
Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western
Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006), 18.
23
Ibid., 39.
24
According to Michel Butor, “I have always felt the intense bond that exists
between my travels and my writing; I travel in order to write—not only to
find subject matter, topics or events, . . . –but because to travel, at least in a
certain manner, is to write (first of all because to travel is to read), and to
write is to travel.” “Travel and Writing,” Mosaic: A Journal for the
Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas Vol. VIII/ 1 (Fall 1974): 2.
25
Butor, “Travel and Writing,” 14
26
Ibid.,
27
Ibid., 10.
28
Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 30.
29
Quoted in Ibid., 33. Also see a study of non-Western travel writing by
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam where they challenge the same
Eurocentric view; Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-
1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
30
Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 2.
31
Ibid., 3.
32
The word ‘translation’ has been derived from Latin, tranferre. “In Romance
languages, however, verbs like tradurre, traduire, traducir come from
transducere, that indicates the activity of conveying something across a body
of water, and thus, metaphorically, from one language to another or from a
reality to its verbal or graphic representation. Etymologically, a metaphor
(from the Greek metaphora) is also a form of transferring a descriptive term
from one object to another, different but analogous.” Luigi Monga,
“Translating the Journey: A Literary Perspective on Truth in Cartography,”
in Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy
International Symposium on Literature and Travel, National University of

203 
 
 JRSP, Vol. 51, No. 2, July-December, 2014 

                                                                                                                       
Ireland, Galway, November 2002. (Travel Writing Across the Disciplines,
vol. 7), ed. Jane Conroy (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003), 27
endnote.
33
Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 11.
34
Monga. “Translating the Journey,” p.12. Umberto Eco states that
‘Translation is always a shift not between two languages but between two
cultures’ quoted in Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern
Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke
and R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 7.
35
Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” 9-10.
36
Ibid., 10.
37
Elizabeth A. Bohls, “Introduction,” in Ian Duncan, Travel Writing 1700-
1830: An Anthology (Oxford Worlds Classics Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), xiii.
38
William H. Sherman, “Stirrings and Searchings (1500-1720),” in The
Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31.
39
Zweder von Martel, “Introduction: The Eye and the Mind’s Eye,” in Travel
Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly
Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing, ed. Zweder von Martel
(Leiden; New York; Koln: E.J. Brill, 1994), xvii.
40
“A travel lie may be defined as a tale told by a traveler or pseudo traveler
with intent to deceive. But that is much too (p. 2) simple. In the first place,
just as all classicists were not utterly devoid of romanticism . . . those men
who told untruths about their journeys, the journeys of others, or no journeys
at all, did not usually avoid reality. In fact, as we shall see, they knew the
importance of the dictum, ‘Be careful to mix some truth with your lies’. In
the second place, the authors of travel deceptions are to be separated as
completely as possible from the writers of imaginary voyages, a type of
literature almost as popular in the eighteenth century as were the authentic
travel accounts.” Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 1-2.
41
The tradition of traveller as liar has a long and illustrious history; indeed, a
character from George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Strategem insults a priest by
saying he ‘tells lies as if he had been a traveller from his cradle.’ Adams,
Travelers and Travel Liars, 5. The suspicion of travellers’ tales is echoed in
a French saying, ‘A beau mentir celui qui vient de loin.’ Euben, Journeys to
the Other Shore, 221.
42
Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800; and Travel Literature and
the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983).
43
Ibid., 186. The writer says that it was the Victorian writer Macaulay who is
reported to have coined the expression, ‘Liars by a double right, as travellers
and as Jesuits,’ but the judgment of eighteenth century Englishmen was
equally harsh.” Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 195.
44
Ibid., 80.

204
 
 Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study

                                                                                                                       
45
Susan Bassentt, “Travel Writing and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 239.
46
Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 265.
47
Pramod K. Nayar has comprehensively defined colonialism as “a process by
which European nations found routes to Asian, African and South American
regions; conquered them; undertook trade relations with some of the
countries and kingdoms; settled for a few centuries in these places;
developed administrative, political, and social institutions; exploited the
resources of these regions; and dominated the subject races. Colonialism was
characterized by military conquest; economic exploitation; the imposition of
Western education, languages, Christianity, forms of law and order; the
development of infrastructure for a more efficient administration of the
Empire—railways, roadways, telegraphy; and the documentation of the
subject races’ cultures (history, ethnography, archaeology, the census).”
Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012), 2.
48
For a brief introduction to Postcolonialism, see Robert J.C. Young,
Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
49
Brown, Encyclopedia of Travel Literature, Introduction, x.
50
Joan Pau Rubies, “Travel Writing and Ethnography,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 257-58.
51
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
52
Ibid., 6.
53
Bill Ashcroft, “Afterword: Travel and Power,” in Julia Kuehn and Paul
Smethurst, Travel writing, form, and empire - the poetics and politics of
mobility( London: Routledge, 2009), 229.
54
Colonial Voices, 3.
55
Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female
Gaze (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5.
56
Ibid., 6.
57
Ibid.
58
Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in
India (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 79.
59
“Introduction: Travels, Travel Writing and Mughal India,” in Visions of
Mughal India: An Anthology of European Travel Writing, ed. Michael H.
Fisher (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 14.
60
Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India,
1600-1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2.

205