(De)Eulogizing the Exotic: Blooming Ethnography in Early Colonial Travelogues

Abstract

This paper explores how early British travel writing in India, particularly in the form of travelogues, contributed to the consolidation of colonial power through seemingly neutral acts of observation and documentation. Focusing on Captain Thomas Hardwicke’s 1796 journey to Sirinagar, Uttarakhand—published in Volume 6 of Asiatic Researches—the study examines how descriptions of landscape, flora, fauna, and Indigenous communities were deployed to construct a narrative of India as exotic, sublime, and uncivilized. This rhetoric of aesthetic wonder and scientific curiosity, while appearing benign, functioned as a tool of colonial control, enabling what may retrospectively be understood as "cartographies of control." The early British administrators, often labelled as ‘Indologists,’ demonstrated an eagerness to learn Indian languages, religions, and customs. Their intellectual pursuits, including the creation of antiquarian collections and detailed travelogues, were framed as disinterested scholarship. However, drawing on Bernard Cohn’s critique of colonial knowledge production, this paper argues that these efforts were far from neutral. Instead, they laid the epistemological groundwork for the colonial state, shaping the ideological apparatus that would support imperial governance well into the twentieth century. Rather than engaging broadly with the entire field of colonial knowledge production, this paper focuses specifically on the travelogue as a literary genre. It argues that beneath its descriptive prose lies a subtle but potent framework of authority, classification, and control. Through a close reading of Hardwicke’s account, the paper demonstrates how the natural world and its inhabitants were rendered as both objects of fascination and subjects of imperial order. Ultimately, the study highlights how travel writing served not merely as a record of exploration, but as a quiet yet powerful agent in the imperial project.

DOI: 10.46700/asssr/2025/v7/i1/177