Epilogue

Presumptions about racism and the experience of colonialism often function as unelaborated givens in histories of the British Empire. The archive left behind by colonial travelers making "the voyage in" offers us a valuable opportunity to understand how they discovered themselves as both raced and colonial subjects through a variety of "encounters in social space and historical time" in Victorian Britain itself. It also furnishes us with an ethnography of social relations at the heart of the empire, where colonialism was not just commodified for worldwide markets but was made, contested, and remade in the more local spaces of the everyday—suggesting that the global and the local are mutually dependent in any given historical moment.1 Despite the asymmetries of power that structure the colonial encounter, it is and has historically been dynamic and dialogic, just as it is and has historically been constituted by gender, sexuality, religion, caste, and class, as well as by race. If these categories have become axiomatic in recent scholarly discussions about identity, postcolonialism, and feminism, and if the nature of the colonial encounter appears (therefore) to be self-evident, it behooves us to remember how unstable and, finally, how unpredictable the intersection of history with cultural forms and human agency must invariably be. As the accounts of the three colonial travelers featured in this book suggest, cultural identities are negotiable, contingent, and ever shifting, largely because they are the product not of inheritance or origins alone but of politics at the micro- and the macrolevels, and in the most elastic sense of the word.2

Their variously politicized locations in the metropole meant that, to borrow from Regenia Gagnier, colonial travelers became both participants and antagonists as they encountered imperial culture in Victorian Britain—even while, significantly, their maneuvers often exceeded even that flexible frame of performance.3 Though they thwarted and recast them through small acts and with localized gestures, Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari did not succeed in dismantling the colonial reform projects of which they were the targets or in which they were, at times, the collaborators. The burdens of representation that they bore reflect how readily "the Indian traveler" might be commodified in the late-nineteenth-century metropole, as well as how readily Sorabji and Malabari, at least, sought identification with a certain kind of bourgeois modernity. Unlike that of Ramabai, whose identification was with Indian women in India rather than with British imperial culture, their stories may be read as an attempt to articulate a liberal imperialist position inside the empire—one that resonated with the impulse toward federation that was gaining currency in high imperial politics toward the end of the century.4 In an important sense, however, none of them could ever completely elude the power of empire to construct them as colonial. Moreover, the density of their ethnic, religious, and cultural affiliations, together with the scorn heaped on the very idea of an "Indian nation" in the Great Britain of the 1880s and 1890s, meant that even their identification as "Indian" was itself partly produced by travel to England. Nor could they escape the possibility that movement across the imperial landscape would shape the terms through which they spoke and were spoken about. Someone like Sorabji, who wished to be seen as an "authentic Indian woman" of her own making, ultimately relied upon the discursive frameworks provided by colonialism and its technologies as she both claimed and refused identification with a certain kind of "Hindu woman." Neither could Malabari, or Pandita Ramabai for that matter, circulate at the heart of the empire without reference to the abiding, signing presence of that particular trope.

That image, along with the more generic term "native," was both "historically sedimented" and "unevenly entrenched across social space"—which is to say that neither one had the same resonance in Victorian England as in nineteenth-century India; nor of course, do they have the same meanings today.5 And yet as vestiges of the stock of culturally loaded terms left by Victorian imperialism, concepts like "the native" continue to do their work among displaced South Asian subjects in the present. As Radhika Mohanram, an "Indian national" who has

lived in North America and New Zealand has noted with respect to her diasporic condition in the late twentieth century, "I had to be dislocated from the United States to become an American just as I had to leave India to become an Indian."6 When the native becomes a traveler, a tourist, a student, or even a "resident," is that person still a native? The answer is contingent, of course, on circumstance and relations of power. For Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari, as for many contemporary former colonial peoples laboring under the "new world order" of the modem West, the answer was often, if not always, yes. This is perhaps especially true for anglophiles like Malabari and Sorabji since, as Homi Bhabha has observed, to be anglicized is, in the eyes of many Britons, emphatically not to be English.7 The quest for fixed identities and the sanctification of "national" borders is, of course, part of the crisis of nationhood itself, a crisis set in motion by the border crossings characteristic of colonialism and postcolonialism as well. One effect of that crisis is that people on the move are under surveillance and their access to unmarked identities—which are most often apparently unfragmented national identities—is regulated. As Enoch Powell reminded Britons at the height of the immigration "problem" in the 1960s, "[T]he West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or Asian still."8

Powell's certainties notwithstanding, the ethnographies of Britain that these Indian travelers produced as they walked the streets of London, the halls of Somerville, and the corridors of Cheltenham and Wantage do not and indeed cannot leave the nation either untouched or at center stage. Travel is undoubtedly an enunciative act, producing a here and a there as the basis for identity.9 For Indian travelers the trip to Britain may have mapped a home and an away but it also revealed the plurality, rather than simply the duality, of terrains available for appropriation by colonial subjects—making those terrains visible not just to the travelers themselves but to their English audiences and their Indian compatriots alike. Indians who transgressed the boundaries of empire mapped "domestic" culture as a component of, rather than as an antecedent to, the colonial enterprise, in part because they took that already imperialized territory to be their own. In fact, if travel to Britain defined them as "Indian," Indians making their way across British landscapes helped to define Britain as Britain—especially when "Britain" is seen not as a coherent, originary "national body" but rather as a site of struggle produced in part by contests over the meanings of imperial rule.10

Travel to Britain enabled colonial subjects like Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari to lay claim to a kind of imperial citizenship: to insist that they were mobile subjects at least partly of their own making rather than fixed as the objects of colonial reform projects to which a variety of English patrons tried to harness their futures. In the process, they revealed just how pervasive imperial assumptions were among Britons in Britain, and how readily colonial subjects could provincialize the heart of the empire as well.11 While the exhibitionary effect produced by ethnographies is perhaps most visible in the kinds of displacements that are peculiar to colonial encounters, it is of course also characteristic of the terrain of culture more generally. Given the possibility that the very concept of culture qua culture emerged historically in conjunction with the fact of European colonialism itself, this is no mere historical accident.12 If "culture" is in fact the outsiders' invention—a map made by others—colonial subjects must be counted among the makers of imperial culture in and beyond the parameters of late-nineteenth-century "Britain." Their perambulations troubled the complacency of a comfortably national people like the Victorians, just as their narratives offer modest but nonetheless remarkable challenges to the enduring fiction of Britain's historical insularity from empire.