|
|
|
Book Review
| The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856. By David Arnold. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. xii + 298 pp. Includes illustrations, notes bibliography, and index. Cloth $50.00.
|
| "Ideas of landscape," David Arnold argues in this rich study of changing British perceptions of India, formed a "central and integrating element in the wider constitution of colonial knowledge" and a "critical ingredient in the larger colonizing process" (p. 5). Indeed, Arnold contends, in the British colonization of India, ideas of landscape were "quite as fundamental as conquering armies" (p. 6). |
1
|
|
To support his case, Arnold recreates the world of British scientific travelers that conquests, steamships, and a vogue for writing about India created during the early nineteenth century. He offers short, useful biographies of, among others, Reginald Heber, John Forbes Royle, William Hooker and his son Joseph Hooker, Nathaniel Wallich, Brian Hodgson, and William Griffith. These scientific travelers—all botanists—pioneered ways of representing India that ultimately helped the British consolidate their control. Whereas earlier Orientalist scholars had, based on their readings of classical religious texts, emphasized India's ancient heritage, this new generation, basing its ideas on their scientific expeditions, emphasized India as a land of death (chapter 2) and of tropical climate and vegetation (chapter 4). Both views of India suggested that the British improvement of India, another component of the scientific travelers' worldview, was both necessary and possible. |
2
|
|
Everything builds to the final chapter, a study of Joseph Hooker's expedition to north India from January, 1848 until January, 1851. To Arnold, Hooker's Himalayan journals, published in 1854, represents the "high point" of travel writing, natural history, and representations of South Asian landscapes and compares with the scientific travel narratives of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace. Hooker embodies many of the book's themes: scientific travel, the networks connecting metropolitan and colonial scientists, the mix of science and Romanticism, the tropicalization of India, and the ideology of improvement. He also stands as Arnold's best evidence that botanical and geographical knowledge helped the British consolidate control over India. Hooker spent most of his time in Sikkim, a Himalayan region kingdom ruled not by the British, but by an independent-minded raja. Much to Hooker's dismay, Sikkim's raja restricted his travel. But Hooker, seeing Sikkim as rightfully a British protectorate, pushed the bounds of the acceptable. The raja, he believed, had no right to obstruct the improvement of his land, which so resembled England in climate and flora. After one thing led to another, Hooker found himself a captive of the raja. When British troops arrived six weeks later, the raja was forced to forfeit Sikkim's southern territory, as well as its yearly allowance. For decades thereafter, the British army used Hooker's maps in its maneuvers in the area. |
3
|
|
Although The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze would be a challenge for undergraduates, it will provide scholars of science and nature in colonial India many new insights about an overlooked period and subject. Arnold's arguments about how scientific travelers of the early nineteenth century reimagined India as a place of death and tropicality are nuanced and useful. His contentions about their connection to growing British power, if more suggestive than conclusive, are also important. |
4
|
|
Thomas Robertson teaches history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has lived and worked in Nepal for over five years and is currently revising for publication his dissertation, "The Population Bomb: Population Growth, Globalization, and American Environmentalism, 1945–1980." |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|