Travel Writing and Empire: A Reading of William Hodges's Travels in India

The history of English travel narratives reveals that its origin and development is closely linked to the British encounter with the colonial ‘other.’ In the ‘golden age’ of European navigation and discovery travel narratives emerged in England in an effort to familiarise the unknown and the strange. Once the initial mapping was done by the navigators, travellers, artists and explorers went to the newly discovered territories and narrated the natural as well as the ethnographic conditions they observed there. Such travel narratives undoubtedly had a role in advancing the colonial and the imperial agenda, though simultaneously, they influenced the growth of modern form of tourism during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. William Hodges was the first European landscape painter to visit India. During his stay in India (1780-85) he travelled extensively and made several sketches for his paintings, forty eight of which were completed and published between 1785 and 1788 as Select Views of India. A few years later he wrote Travels in India, During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, & 1783 (1793). The present article aims to explore how Hodges exceeds his artistic self and becomes an apologist for the emerging British Empire in India.