^I. The Topography of Pleasurable Profusion

Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in his The History of the World (1614): “Paradise was a place created by God … this region standing in the most excellent temper of all other … in which climate the most excellent wines, fruits, oil, grain of all sorts are to this day found in abundance. And there is nothing that better proves the excellence of this said soil and temper, than the abundant growing of palm-trees, without the care and labour of man.”Footnote 22 Raleigh's description of an earthly paradise anticipated several themes of the travel narratives of the 1600–1750 period. To the English traveler the Indian landscape presented a similar “completeness” in its fertility, thick woods, massive harvests, and commodity-filled markets.Footnote 23 Here is the EIC chaplain Edward Terry on India:

The wonder and pleasure at the sight of the rich Indian landscape emerges clearly in the passage. Terry's description, with its trope of intensification and the evocation of a sense of awe and wonder, exemplifies the narrative mode of several travelogues of this period.

The rhetoric of the marvelous's aesthetic has two principal modes: enumeration and accumulation. Enumeration, allied with the “scientific” cataloging characteristic of early modern Europe and post-Renaissance episteme, itemized India's plenty. Enumeration meant the cataloging of objects and detailed accounts in the form of lists.Footnote 25 The enumerative technique itemized India's wealth and emphasized the uniqueness of every object in the list.Footnote 26 Such itemization and listing was, in fact, insisted upon. For instance, the 1607–8 bond executed by EIC factors upon taking up service stated explicitly that they would “keep true and perfect account of all such things as is, or shall be committed to [their] charge.”Footnote 27 The use of the word “account” in the above document and in the titles of many of the travelogues is perhaps not entirely innocent. One of the meanings of the word “account,” the OED (1970) informs us, signified maintaining details of commercial transactions. The detailed tabulated lists of products and crops, castes, seasons, prices, currency, and distances in these early travel accounts is an enumeration and evaluation of the plenty of India in a form that the merchant/investor would understand.Footnote 28 The lists, drawn from several categories, became a testimonial to Indian abundance. Accumulation in these travelogues is the descriptive repetition of examples of excellence and abundance—whether of women's jewelry or crops. The accumulative-descriptive in these travelogues invariably embodied the traveler's wonder, awe, or revulsion. This mode exoticized India by pointing out its difference from England and its singularities. It constructed a marvelous topography, of specific items of wealth and vegetation. Interestingly, enumeration and accumulation were used as tropes of intensification to convey both profusion and excess in these travelogues. Armed with these rhetorical devices and the aesthetic, the English traveler paid particular attention to India's fertility and natural produce, to its population, climate, and natural phenomena, such as monsoons, fauna and flora, and its material culture.

The English travelers marveled at Indian soil's fecundity. The fields with their load of crops, the dense woods, and markets with a variety of fruits and vegetables attracted their attention. Thomas Bowrey, in his A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal 1669 to 1679, provided detailed descriptions of India's prosperity. He noted Bengal's abundance with its “many fair and pleasant rivers.”Footnote 29 Hoogly town, Bowrey described as “a famous and sumptuous place … well furnished with gardens, fine groves, a very large bazar or market place.”Footnote 30 Edward Terry's inaugural topographical description of India, troped as accumulation, suggested a cornucopia: “This most spacious and fertile land (called by the inhabitants Indostan) so much abounds in all necessaries for the use and service of man, to feed, and cloathe and enrich him, as that it is able to subsist and flourish of itself, without any help from any neighbour prince or nation.”Footnote 31 Food, Terry noted, the Mughal empire produced “in abundance.”Footnote 32 He then described the “woods and groves of trees” and fruits.Footnote 33 Thomas Herbert described the delicious fruits of India and its woods, and stated: “These negroes you see have no famine of nature's gifts and blessings.”Footnote 34 John Fryer described India's “coruscant” nature, “verdant” meadows, and, emphasizing the sense of wonder, states that the sight is a “matter for admiration.”Footnote 35 Wheat is produced in “abundance,” and cotton is “planted all hereabouts,” with “great stacks of hay and corn.”Footnote 36 Fryer also invoked a theological image when he commented “and to give the soil its due praise, it obeys in all things the first commandment, increase and multiply.”Footnote 37 In his section on Indian chorography, Fryer got down to specifics. He listed the trees and fruits, and mentions that the two harvests are “most natural and uncompelled because of the rain.”Footnote 38 Similar images of plenty are repeated throughout.Footnote 39 Alexander Hamilton, a private trader, in his A New Account of the East Indies, also described the extraordinary fertility of the soil and prodigious produce, and stated at one point: “To mention all the particular species of goods that this rich country produces, is far beyond my skill.”Footnote 40 This comment suggests a profusion that defeats even linguistic/verbal expression. Anthony Hippon and Thomas Best both described the fertility of and massive produce from India's soil.Footnote 41 The descriptions reveal the geographical narrative's penchant for precise detailing, while also exhibiting the highly personalized evaluation characteristic of the general travel account. The aesthetic of the marvelous facilitates the linkage of the two.

Each of the above descriptions of profusion carefully omitted descriptions of farming labor. The apparently “magical” flowering of harvests—suggested by the vocabulary, Terry's “Resurrection,” Herbert's “gifts and blessings,” and Fryer's “natural and uncompelled”—suggested a land or field that was ripe and fertile without any human effort. Interestingly, this emphasis on the easy fertility and productivity of Indian soil was extended into childbirth and femininity. This careful observation of the fertility of the soil and of the women was something the traveler was instructed to do. For instance, Robert Boyle in “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country, Great or Small” recommended that travelers to distant places pay attention to conditions of childbirth there. Boyle wrote: “Above the ignobler productions of the earth, there must be a careful account given of the inhabitants themselves … as to their women (besides the other things) may be observed their fruitfulness or barrenness, their hard or easy labour.”Footnote 42 Fryer noted that Indian women were “quick in labour.”Footnote 43 Fryer's French contemporary, Gabriel Dellon, also noted: “Midwives are unknown in these parts, those of a more advanced age supply this defect in a country where they are delivered with much ease, in comparison to what is done in Europe. For the Malabar as well as the African women are no sooner delivered, but they wash themselves, and take no further care of their babes, than to give them suck.”Footnote 44 Dellon thus effectively linked African and Indian women in their “ease” of labor and modes of child care. Edward Terry commented that Indian women have an “easy bringing forth of children into the world.”Footnote 45 Nearly a century later the image of easy farming and easy childbirth persisted. The first historian of the EIC, Robert Orme, whose readers included Dr. Samuel Johnson, echoed Terry's and Fryer's views in his Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire (1782), when he stated that Indians were “brought into the world with a facility unknown to the labours of European women.”Footnote 46 And, like Terry and Fryer before him, Orme suggested that native grain was “obtained with so little labour.”Footnote 47 He noted that “productions peculiar to the soil of India exceedingly contribute to the ease of various labours.”Footnote 48 He then proceeded to focus on the feminization of labor in India: “The assistance which a wife and family are capable of affording to the labours of the loom, may have much contributed to the preference given by a lazy people to this manufacture.”Footnote 49 He compared the extraordinary efficiency of the Indian woman laborer with that of the “rigid, clumsy” Englishman.Footnote 50 Orme's description here is worth quoting in some detail, since it demonstrates a continuity of theme with Edward Terry and John Fryer. Orme wrote: “To provide this grain, we see a man of no muscular strength carrying a plough on his shoulder to the field, which the season or reservoirs have overflown … The remaining labour consists in supplying the field with water; which is generally effected by no greater a toil than undamming the canals.”Footnote 51 Immediately prior to this Orme had commented: “The fecundity of the women is extreme.”Footnote 52 The subsequent comments linked the feminine with the agrarian. William Bolts, a Calcutta-based Dutchman in his Considerations of Indian Affairs (1772) shared this English view of “easy” Indian fertility. Bolts wrote: “Hindustan is in many places greatly favoured by nature for commercial advantages. … [Bengal] spontaneously produces, in great abundance, almost everything requisite for the support and even high enjoyment of mankind. No country can be better watered … the natural fertility of the soil, everywhere assisted by the periodical rains … render the cultivation of the earth an inviting task and so easy, as to afford the husbandman great leisure for application even to the arts of manufacturing.”Footnote 53 There is an intimate link between these descriptions of the labor-less fertility and productivity of Indian soil and the fecundity and easy labor of childbirth in Indian women.

Raymond Williams argues, in the context of seventeenth-century English country-house poems, that the erasure of the presence of a working class results in the creation of a magical paradise, a marvelous, wonder-inducing landscape.Footnote 54 In India this erasure served three purposes. First, the emphasis on a naturally fertile Indian land rather than on actual conditions of production becomes the anterior moment of the colonial theme of native ineptitude and indolence. The wealth of the Indians was thus undeserved because they did not toil for it, and India was a paradise for no perceivable reason. Second, the emphasis on the intrinsic goodness of the land aestheticized it, emptied it of people and their activities, and distanced native/human threat from the English traveler who was free to perceive the land clearly and fearlessly. In an allied strategy, these travelers/narratives were more comfortable viewing/describing India's minerological-botanical marvels rather than its zoological-anthropological ones.Footnote 55 For instance, the anthropological scene in these travelogues is invariably marked by a description of grotesque, abhuman forms (such as the fakirs) or excess crowds of people. These descriptions are couched in a tone of revulsion and/or anger. Third, the absence of toilers becomes, for the English traveler, symbolic of an oppressive system where the farmer does not want to work in a land that he does not own. It enabled the traveler to suggest (as Terry, Fryer, and Herbert do repeatedly) that the absence of private property in India was a sign of Oriental despotism. The French physician-traveler, François Bernier, in his Travels in the Mogul Empire, devoted several pages in his narrative to the state of the oppressed Indian peasant under a despotic king. Bernier wrote: “A tyranny … that drives the cultivator of the soil from his wretched home to some neighbouring state … as the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsion. … It happens that the whole country is badly cultivated. … The peasant cannot avoid asking himself this question: ‘Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and value?’”Footnote 56 Bernier saw this Indian tyranny as a part of the larger Asiatic malice when he wrote: “Without confining our remarks to so distant a kingdom, we may judge of the effects of despotic power unrelentingly exercised, by the present condition of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Palestine, the once wonderful plains of Antioch.”Footnote 57 Bernier thus effected a comparative study of Asian/Oriental despotism here.

The traveler was amazed at the profusion and variety of birds and animals. Terry wrote of the “sweet music” of the birds in the woods, the “wild apes and monkeys and baboons,” the birds that “please[d] the eye with their curious colours, and the ears with their variety of pleasant notes,” and the excellent horses and elephants of the Mughal rulers.Footnote 58 Fryer cataloged the animals and expressed amazement at the Indians' control over crocodiles and alligators.Footnote 59 Ovington also cataloged India's spices and fruits.Footnote 60

India also possessed other, more material, forms of wealth. Travelers noted the amount of jewelry worn by native women and the easy availability of precious stones in the markets. As early as the 1580s the merchant Ralph Fitch had described the town of Belgaum entirely in terms of its minerals and precious commodities: “a great market of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and many other soft stones.”Footnote 61 William Hawkins, a merchant with the EIC, attempted to compute the annual income of the Mughal Empire.Footnote 62 Hawkins, in an illuminating example of the trope of accumulation, described the Mughal emperor thus: “He is exceeding rich in diamonds, and all other precious stones, and usually wears every day a fair diamond of great price, and that which he wears this day, till his time be come about to wears, he wears not the same: that is to say, all his faire jewels are divided into a certain quantity or proportion, to wear every day. He also wears a chain of pearl, very faire and great, and another chain of emeralds, and … rubies.”Footnote 63 Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, commented: “I had thought all India a China Shop.”Footnote 64 Terry listed the diamond mines and described the Mughal emperor as the owner of “unknown treasure, having silver … like stones in the streets.”Footnote 65 He listed the places to procure the best cloth (especially silk) and minerals.Footnote 66 Thomas Herbert described Cambay as possessing “great wealth … [and] … extent,” and drew attention to the “ponderousness of [the women’s] ear jewellery.”Footnote 67 John Fryer listed the various items of jewelry worn by the women in Goa, the numerous mines, and the availability of precious stones and minerals.Footnote 68 He described the “noble pomp” of the native merchants. Fryer wrote: “[These men rarely go about] without a great train using many odours … go rich in their apparel, their turbans of gold damasked gold atlas coast to their heels … embroidered sashes and slippers, golden hilted swords and poniards, as also gold embossed targets, silver and gold caparisons for their horses.”Footnote 69 When Fryer noted that this sort of phenomenon was “not encountered abroad,” he had underlined the uniqueness (and therefore, marvelousness) of the event.Footnote 70 Ovington described Surat as “the most fam’d emporium of the Indian empire,” speculated on the value of the emperor's crown—he believed it to be around rupees 300 lakhs (30 million)—and commented on the excess jewelry worn by the women.Footnote 71

The first moment of these travelogues thus presents an India of plenty—of fertility, natural produce, mineral wealth, animal and plant life, and material possessions. While India's material culture and prosperity, in Michael Adas's words, “outweighed its exoticism,” the very scale of this plenty, unique in itself, is a source of wonder in these travelers.Footnote 72 The traveler's attention to the variety and sheer uniqueness that constituted this plenty inscribed India firmly within an aesthetic of the marvelous. These very sites of agrarian, botanical-mineral, and material marvels were also the sites at which the traveler began to effect the rhetorical transformation of India.

^II. The Topography of Deplorable Excess

Terry's description—couched entirely in a rhetoric of excess—is a good illustration of how India was viewed in the second moment. In the second moment the traveler tempered, even negated, his earlier praise with a note of censure. This negation was the transformation of Indian profusion into excess, a transformation that enabled the traveler to portray India as a land of uncontrolled and uncontrollable passion, diseases, cruelty, and ignorance.

The topography and climate—first described as magical and providential, as we have seen in Terry, Herbert, and Fryer—now transformed into hazards. The fertility of the soil—once symbolized for the traveler in the beautifully thick vegetation—was transformed into excess, when he shifted focus onto the wild and the overgrown. Terry began his travelogue with descriptions of profusion and then transformed the plenitude into excess, focusing primarily on the landscape to effect this change. For instance, his preface opened with this description: “[The] large territories, a numerous court, most populous, pleasant and rich provinces.”Footnote 74 Later this same image of the populous and large territory of the Indian Empire acquired a negative valence when Terry expressed his unease at the crowds.Footnote 75 After describing India's “great variety of trees,” Terry blunted the symbolic valence (and marvel) of this variety: “But I never saw any there of those kinds of trees which England affords.”Footnote 76 Terry transformed his description of an ideal/Edenic Indian garden with this statement: “[As] the Garden of Hesperides … was guarded by a serpent, so there are stings here, as well as fruits.” His catalog—a mixture of enumeration and accumulation—of “the annoyances of these countries” begins with a list of dangerous animals, before moving on to the climate. Terry wrote “that hot sulphurous air … there were no living in that Torrid Zone for us English … the air in that place is so hot to us English that we should be everyday stewed in our own moisture.”Footnote 77 Having already described the Indian monsoon as effecting a “resurrection,” he subsequently deflated its iconic value: “These showers at their beginning [of the monsoon] season most extremely violent are ushered in, and usually take their leave with the most fearful tempests of thunder … [and] Lightning, more terrible than I can express.”Footnote 78 Fryer also referred to the “violence of the monsoons,” that “convince[s] the incredulous of a possibility of a general deluge.”Footnote 79

Terry, after noting an abundance of deer, transformed the image of plenty into an excess of cruelty and disorder when he wrote: “Their deer are no where imparked, the whole empire being (as it were) a forest for them; for a man can travel no way but he shall here and there see of them. But because they are everymans Game that will make them so, they do not multiply to do them much hurt.”Footnote 80 Here Terry was referring to the English practice of enclosed parks as reserved places for gentlemen to hunt, while transforming the plenitude of Indian wildlife to suggest an excess of disorder (lack of parks) and depletion (the deer do not breed). The description is also paradoxical since it mentioned an excess of freedom and the imminent death of unenclosed wildlife. Later, describing the woods in the town of Mandu, Terry wrote: “The city … is situated upon a very high mountain … that hill on which Mandu stands, is stuck round (as it were) with fair trees … in those vast and far extended woods, there are lions, tigers, and other beasts of prey, and many wild elephants.” In the exact center of the above passage, immediately preceding his description of the dangerous beasts, Terry commented, “there is much delight in beholding them [the woods] either from the bottom or top of that hill.”Footnote 81 Woods and wilderness are pleasant only when viewed from a distance, and not when the traveler is enclosed within it.

Terry also described the lizards, rats, flies, and mosquitoes, imaging them, through accumulative description, as excesses: “aboundance of flies … their numberless number … cover our meat as soon as it was placed on the table.”Footnote 82 Describing the demographic distribution of flies and mosquitoes, Terry wrote: “From all of which we were by far more free when we lodged in tents … than when we abode in houses; where in great cities and towns … there was such an abundance of large hungry rats, that some of us were bitten in the night as we lay in our beds.”Footnote 83 Fryer, journeying into the Deccan, saw mountains “veiled with a more benighted darkness.”Footnote 84 Using the trope of visibility and blindness, Fryer conveyed the picture of a landscape that appears forbidding. The woods were full of “busy apes” that troubled travelers. Fryer first admired the beauty of the night, “the splendour of the moon,” where the hillside appeared “all marble.” Then, this description of beauty soon elided into a sublime. Fryer wrote: “[The hill] from whence is beheld the world all furled with clouds, the Caerulean ocean terminating the horizon, the adjacent islands bordering on the main, the mountains fenced with horrible gulfs, till strange vertigos prejudicate fancy, not daring longer to be made spectator: the bandying echo still persecutes with terrible repeated sounds.”Footnote 85 The images are of a pastoral India, with wild overgrown woods rather than cleanly organized gardens. The images of a wild overgrown Indian vegetation set up a dialectic of landscape description, with georgic England being contrasted with the wilderness of the pastoral, now treated as the truly “Other.”Footnote 86 In the absence of enclosed gardens, the hortus conclusus of safety and refuge (which, apparently, was the georgic English countryside), the English traveler felt threatened. Thus, Nathaniel Hardy in his 1657 sermon to travelers leaving for the East Indies concluded with an image of England as a fenced in, organized, and safe hortus conclusus. Hardy prayed on behalf of all England: “Not only may come to your [the travelers’] native country in peace, but, that, when you come again, you may find it in peace, the breaches of Church, and State healed, everyone enjoying the rights in quiet, sitting under his own fig-tree, and eating the fruit of his labours with joy and thankfulness.”Footnote 87

After noting that “the woods are everywhere,” Fryer proceeded to state that these woods were inhabited by wild beasts (“the fiercest tigers in the world”) and strange men. These creatures defied classification: satyrs, nereids, creatures “[with] heads like an owl, bodied like a monkey, without tails; only the first finger of the right hand was armed with a claw like a birds, otherwise they had hands … they were coloured like a fox.”Footnote 88 Fryer, rather than taking pleasure at the woods, treated these as dangerous spots: “a gravelly forest with tall benty grass offers … wild boars, tigers and wild elephants, which are dreaded by travelers … the like terror is conceived by the crashing noise among the woods made by the wild bulls.”Footnote 89 Fryer referred to “bats and wasps” that were “overgrown and desperately revengeful, following their aggressors till they have wheeled them into contrition for their unadvised provocation.” He then described how, in order to escape “the noise of these buzzing hornets,” they fled toward Surat.Footnote 90 He described the excesses of sound that disturbed them while traveling through India: “deafened by the roarings of tigers, cries of jackals, and yellings of baloos, or over-grown wolves … the croaking [of] frogs making so hideous a noise.”Footnote 91 Such excess of form, noise, and number mark the second moment of Fryer's narrative.

In addition to the threat from overgrown vegetation and animals, the English also feel discomfited by the large crowds of natives. The presence of crowds threatened English travelers in their journey through India. India's populousness—praised at an early stage by Terry, as we have already seen—now evoked a sense of threat. Terry narrated an incident when angry natives surrounded the English residence.Footnote 92 He referred to “mountains of prey and tabernacles of robbers” infesting the woods. These “wild” men, wrote Terry, shouted “kill, kill, kill … as loud as they can.”Footnote 93 The threat of being overwhelmed by numbers is very real here. Later, traveling with the Mughal emperor's army, Terry again experienced a sense of unease. He described the camping site of the army, “which indeed is very glorious, as all must confess, who have seen the infinite number of tents, or pavilions there pitched together, which in a plain make a show equal to a most spacious and glorious city. These tents I say, when they are altogether, cover such a great quantity of ground, that I believe it is five English miles at the least … very beautiful to behold from some hill, where they may be all seen at once.”Footnote 94 Having already described the vast expanse of the army, Terry's admission that it looked beautiful from a distant, panoptical point suggests a sense of insecurity when faced with the might of an entire native army. Terry, adopting the device of accumulative description, emphasized the numerical excess of the army repeatedly in the space of one paragraph. The extraordinary passage is worth quoting in full:

Pondering over his own situation, Terry wrote: “Here we often shift our places and our company, and must do so for our business carrying us up and down, to and fro, but our felicity hereafter shall consist in rest, in not changing for ever after, either our company or our place.”Footnote 96 Terry's description embodies an anxiety at this accumulation of natives.

Along with crowds and animals, one of the principal modes of representing an India of excess was to chart its medical topography. The English faced a whole new range of diseases when traveling through India. The marvel of disease, occasionally explained by the scientific traveler, enabled the construction of India as a site of danger.Footnote 97

John Fryer classified diseases in terms of their geographical specificity, seasons, and probable causes: cholera, eye inflammations, apoplexy in summer; the relatively healthier dry weather; and the prevalence of rheumatism and diseases of the throat in the period of the “variable months.”Footnote 98 John Ovington also cataloged diseases, their vectors, and the “bad” seasons in India.Footnote 99 William Finch, who traveled with William Hawkins, referred to the “beastly” climate of Bramport, which made it “a very sickly place,” and attributed it to the bad water in the area.Footnote 100 Terry described the link between climate and diseases, and Fryer, having described Indian climate as “extremely unhealthy,” attempted to explain the reasons for the condition: “I rather impute it to the situation, which causes an infecundity in the earth, and a putridness in the air, what being produced seldom coming to maturity, whereby what is eaten is undigested; whence follows fluxes, dropsy, scurvy … which are endemial diseases.”Footnote 101

Thus the exotic plenty of India—approximating to an earthly paradise full of plant and animal life—is now imaged as a dangerous wilderness in the second moment. The English traveler now located a landscape of disease, death, and deprivation in the same features once imaged as pleasurable profusion. However, this does not complete the representation of India. The traveler conflated physical and moral topographies when he read climatic conditions, landscape features, town planning, and disease as symptomatic of moral conditions. Further, he began to evacuate the landscape of Indian icons by rejecting, altering, or explaining away their valence and value to the natives. This is the third moment of representation.

^III. Iconoclasm and the Moral Marvelous

I have demonstrated how the traveler transformed Indian profusion into deplorable excess. In the third moment of the English traveler's encounter with the Indian landscape, he adopted what may be termed a “moral marvelous” aesthetic. This is a crucial moment, for it prepared the ground for a more overtly colonial discourse in the later decades of the eighteenth century. The moral marvelous completed the rhetorical transformation of India from a place of plenty to one of dangerous excess. It mapped the strange topography of India onto a moral topography and vice versa. The iconoclasm of this moment transformed valuable native achievements/icons into everyday objects, or attributed negative values to them. The iconoclastic moral marvelous emptied Indian landscape of all value and thus effectively prepared the ground for a repopulating with English icons (memorials, constructions, towns) in the late eighteenth century. The third moment is important for a very intricate maneuver executed by these narratives. It set up India as a site of testing: of the moral fiber, vulnerability, and strength of English character. The numerous references to diseases, deprivation, and danger in these catalogs dovetailed neatly into the moral topography of both Indians and English. A critique of Indian icons—achieved through the moral marvelous—simultaneously set up, by implication, the superior character of the Englishman. The iconoclastic moral marvelous looked at indolence, waste and immoderation, native beliefs, and such “moral” states. In addition, the third moment is characterized by an attention to ruins that, to the traveler, are iconic of a general degradation of Indian civilization itself and native aesthetics.

Here is Fryer describing the great water tanks built by Indian rulers: “The great tanks or ponds of rain-water, where it wants the other benefits, with deep wells, of extraordinary costs and charges; some purely for pomp, and to transmit their names to posterity; others for the good of travelers, but most for the sake of religion, in which they are extravagantly profuse.”Footnote 102 Benevolent wealth is transformed into immoderate, and therefore immoral, expense. Later Fryer wrote: “The plain country is rich in all things necessary … cocoas grow all along the sea-side round India … and betel-nut is in great request.” Then, to dim this picture of plenty, Fryer described the betel nut: “It exhilarates and makes a kind of pleasant drunkenness.”Footnote 103 Fryer has effectually effaced the value of the natural product by pointing to its negative qualities.

The moral marvelous functioned in precisely this manner—by diminishing the significance of the event/place/condition by rendering it ordinary, or by denigrating it as morally questionable. For instance, the traveler explained away the enormous wealth of the native kings by suggesting that this wealth was obtained through the unremitting oppression of the artisan and the ordinary working class. Note, as an illustration, Fryer's comment on the condition: “There is another thing above all the rest of an unpardonable offence; for banyan or rich broker to grow wealthy without protection of some great person; for it is so mighty a disquiet to the governor that he can never be at ease till he have seen the bottom of this mischief; which is always cured by transfusion of treasure out of the banyans into the governor's coffers.”Footnote 104 The marvel of the emperor's wealth is thus diminished to the not very surprising and, finally, to the repulsive. This elision from profusion to excess and finally to lack (of knowledge, kindness, rights, and freedom) is one of the central patterns in early colonial writing.

In other cases, the wealth of the natives was presented as grotesque exhibitionism. Terry described the Mughal emperor as “blind” and wealthy, and suggested that the English king has “more cause to pity, than to envy his greatness.”Footnote 105 Thomas Herbert commented on the effect of jewelry worn by the native women: “The women … dilacerate their ears to a monstrous proportion, for by the ponderousness of their ear jewels they tear their ears to that capacity: that I have easily put my arm through their earholes.”Footnote 106 Fryer's description of Indian women's jewelry is no mere accumulative description but a subtle transformation of signs of wealth into signs of excesses. He wrote: “Their women are manacled with chains of silver (or fetters rather) and hung with ear-rings of gold and jewels, their noses stretched with weighty jewels.”Footnote 107 He then commented that, despite their evident material wealth, the Indian women lived in “a most servile condition.”Footnote 108 In each of these examples the traveler desacralized signs of India's prosperity by pointing to the negative effects—real or perceived—of this wealth.

The traveler paid attention to the religious and symbolic significance of these natural events for the natives. Fryer, for instance, expressed his disbelief at Hindu interpretations of icons. He visited mountain burrows believed by the natives to have been built by Alexander and noted that “this place by the Gentiles is much adored.” Immediately after this, Fryer commented, “but this is contradictory to the story delivered of Alexander.” He then concluded: “[It is] more probabl[y] … a heathen Fane, or idolatrous Pagod, from the superstitious opinion they still hold of its sacredness.”Footnote 109 Later Fryer, a surgeon with the EIC, tried to offer a scientific explanation for the revered fakir's feats of bodily asceticism.Footnote 110 He repeated this rationalizing exercise in the case of “holy” caves and fireflies.Footnote 111 Native interpretations of the miraculous/divine nature of these events/places were rejected in favor of rational explanations. The marvelous—which reduced the heightened status of the miraculous, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued—thus also gestured at the irrational, and therefore suspect, native beliefs.Footnote 112

The English traveler also desacralized native icons by suggesting everyday uses for the objects sacred to the native. For instance, Terry noted the several old mosques in the Mughal empire. His description of the scene is worth detailing:

Terry thus converted a sacred native site and religious icon into an ordinary object. John Ovington desacralized the Hindu chants that accompany rituals by offering a scientific explanation and linking it to the climate. Ovington wrote: “The warmth of the air, which is apt to stupefy the spirits, and render them unwieldy and dull, was as likely a reason for introducing this melodious diversion, which is apt to keep them active and awake at their work, as it was to exercise devotion of their thoughts.”Footnote 114 In each of these cases, the traveler has offered a quotidian explanation approximating to the iconoclastic in its rejection of native beliefs. The ascription of moral depravity—an integral component of such an explanation, especially when it comes to native temples—modulates smoothly into iconoclasm.

Terry's description of the Mughal prince is particularly illustrative of the iconoclastic moral marvelous. Consider this passage: “Where first, for their numerous armies, it will appear to be no strange thing, if we consider the Great Mogul to be what he is, an overgrown Prince in the vast extent of his territories, being like a huge Pike in a great pond, that preys upon all his neighbours.”Footnote 115 Here the description of grotesque excesses, of unsightly bulk (“overgrown”) and of avarice (“prey”), convert a wealthy native king into a devouring monster and highlight the moral “flaws” of this person. The image of great wealth and power at the service of a monster is a moral topography. Terry also transformed the image of strength (numerical superiority) into one of excessive weakness when he wrote: “A man of resolution will beat one of these [native soldiers] out of all his weapons, with a small stick or cane … the natives being most strong and valiant in their base lusts and not otherwise.”Footnote 116 The threat of the numerically large Mughal army is neutralized rhetorically with this image of a morally weak army. Years later, Robert Orme made similar observations. In a section leadingly titled “Effeminacy of the Inhabitants of Indostan,” Orme wrote: “The sailor no sooner lands on the coast, than nature dictates to him the full result of this comparison; he brandishes his stick in sport, and puts fifty Indians to flight in a moment. … It is well if he recollects that the poor Indian is still a man. … Two English sawyers have performed in one day the work of thirty-two Indians.”Footnote 117 Likewise, the great talents of the native artists, which Terry himself has praised earlier, were subsequently reduced in intensity.Footnote 118 Terry now suggested that the native artist's greatest talent is for imitation: “The natives of that monarchy are the best apes for imitation in the world, so full of ingenuity that they will make any new thing by pattern.” He added: “It is no marvel if the Natives there make Shoes, and Boots, and Clothes, and Linen, and Bands and Cuffs of our English fashion.”Footnote 119 John Ovington made a similar comment: “The Indians are in many things of matchless ingenuity in their several employments, and admirable mimics of whatever they affect to copy after.”Footnote 120

Even the open air is not left untouched by such iconoclastic moral transformations. Here is Terry's description of the terraces of Indian houses: “These broad terraces, or flat roofs, some of them lofty, are places where many people may stand (and so they often do) early in the morning, and in the evening late … to draw and drink in fresh air; and they are made after this fashion, for prospect as well as pleasure.” Terry admitted that the terraced house enables the resident to be out in the fresh air. However, Terry also suggested that such an arrangement of the houses encourages voyeurism and moral depravity! As an example he cited the story of David and Bathsheba, whose affair began with David's sighting of Bathsheba from the roof of his house. Terry thus linked the physical topography with a moral one and iconoclastically deflated the value of native constructions.Footnote 121

John Fryer's attention was drawn to the prevalence of elephantiasis in the St. Thomas Mount area of Madras city. Fryer offered a remarkable explanation for this condition. He wrote: “About this Mount lives a caste of people, one of whose legs are as big as an elephant’s; which gives occasion for the divulging it to be a judgement on them, as the generation of the assassins and murderers of the Blessed Apostle St Thomas.”Footnote 122 In this explanation an endemic disease is taken as an external symptom of a deeper moral malaise of the inhabitants. Ovington also suggested that the illnesses of the English were partly the results of their own intemperance and vulnerability to the climate. His description effectively conflated physical and moral topographies. The rhetoric of inflation and accumulation is very clear in Ovington's description: “But there seldom happens any great defect in the natural world, without some preceding in the moral. … I cannot without horror mention to what a pitch all vicious enormities were grown in this place, … these fatal infelicities which are not wholly imputable to an impure contagion of the air, or the gross infection of the elements. Their principles of action, and the consequent evil practices of the English forwarded their miseries, and contributed to fill the air with those pestilential vapours that seized their vitals … luxury, immodesty, and a prostitute dissolution of manners.”Footnote 123 Elaborating this theme, Ovington sketched in the character of the Englishman as dissolute and weak, susceptible to the many temptations that India offers. Ovington continued: “The prodigious growth of vermin and of venomous creatures … do abundantly likewise demonstrate the malignant corruption of the air, and then natural cause of its direful effects upon the Europeans. … Its easily seen by these venomous creatures, what encouragement these infectious and pestilential qualities meet with in this place, and under what a contagious influence all the inhabitants must consequently be seated.”Footnote 124 Ovington's linking of the moral and the topographical emerges clearly in these descriptions. However, Ovington was also careful to represent the native as equally—if not more—dissolute and depraved as the Englishman, as in this passage: “Because of the heat, they eat at eight or nine in the morning, then at four or five in the afternoon. Then, often at midnight, after their nocturnal embraces, they recover their spirits by some nourishing food, to excite them again to fresh amours.”Footnote 125 He then stated: “They seldom take their repose without a wench in their arms.”Footnote 126 Here Ovington has linked three issues: the climate, the cultural habits (consumption of food), and the morality of the Indians.Footnote 127

The discourse of English vulnerability was also imaged in terms of the moral marvelous. Terry wrote: “The consideration of this might shame and make us to blush at it … shame I say and condemn too, the lightness, and wantonness, the want of sobermindedness, and inconstancy of our people here.”Footnote 128 He pointed out the ill effects of the English consuming native liquor and illustrated his arguments by discussing the behavior of a drunken cook.Footnote 129 Temperance was the only means of escaping dangerous illness in India.Footnote 130 Thomas Herbert referred to the generous hospitality of the natives, which proceeded, he believed, from the plenitude of resources they possess.Footnote 131 John Fryer referred to intemperance as the primary cause of ill health among the English in India.Footnote 132 Fryer, in fact, attributed the longevity and good health of the natives to their careful diet and temperance in alcohol consumption. The suggestion here is of a land where things are dangerously plenty, a site of temptation where the vulnerable Englishman may easily “fall.” Terry's reference to India as a “fleshly paradise” was a comment on the moral threat that India poses.Footnote 133

By paying attention to ruined buildings, the depravity of the natives, the unhealthy climate of India, and the excessive threat of (native) disease, the traveler was articulating a very complex discourse of the Indian landscape. These texts are layered with descriptions of English vulnerability, their adaptability, native immunity, and the native (as) disease. The description of Indian excess, working along with the tirade against luxury, articulated a discourse of Western morality versus Eastern temptation and depravity.Footnote 134

Native religion is imaged as excess growth of unwanted vegetation, with the potential for inducing illness. The moral marvelous transforms the rich vegetation into an allegory of blindness and ignorance, of the impenetrable darkness of the native minds. Here is Fryer on the theme. He first described the groves as “laboratories of … fallacious oracles” where the “blinded” natives get “deluded.” He then continued: “Six miles up stands Palapatam, of building base, it is overgrown with the weeds of Mahommedanism, the Moors planting themselves here.”Footnote 135 Later Fryer added: “To this [place] belong two sorts of vermin, the fleas and banyans, the one harbouring in the sand, fasten upon you as you pass … the other vermin are the banyans themselves, that hang like leeches, till they have sucked both sanguinem and succum (I mean money) from you … as soon as you have set your foot on shore, they crowd in their service … [they] will never leave till they have drawn out something for their advantage.”Footnote 136 Here Fryer linked the large population of tropical life forms with the human and conjoined them in a symbol that approximates to the moral marvelous, for he mapped the moral character of the human onto the demography of other life forms. This is a common mode of shifting the condition of profusion into that of excess in Fryer. He referred to the Maratha King Shivaji as a “diseased limb of Deccan” and the religion of Islam as “infection.”Footnote 137 This explanation/criticism of a new form of architecture exactly repeats Fryer's comments on the darkness/blindness of Hindu religion imaged as dark places (noted above).

The rejection of man-made idols is a particularly illustrative example of the iconoclastic moral marvelous. William Finch described the ruins of a Hindu King's court thus: “In the gallery where the king used to sit are drawn overhead many pictures of angels, with pictures of banian dews, or rather devils, intermixed in most ugly shape, with long horns, staring eyes, shaggy hair, great fangs, ugly paws, long tails, with such horrible deformity that I wonder the poor women are not frighted therewith.”Footnote 138 Fryer referred to the “monstrous effigies” in “bawdy postures” in the chapels, where the gods are “cut in horrid shape.” Fryer wrote: “Their [temples’] outside show workmanship and cost enough, wrought round with monstrous effigies, … pains and cost to no purpose.”Footnote 139 The criticism of the aesthetic in terms of a moral condition—“bawdy,” frightening and so on—effectively rejected native symbolism. Fryer's specific reference to the wastage involved (“pains and cost to no purpose”) also becomes iconoclastic in its rejection of native efforts.

Fryer noted that instead of gardens, India has “wilderness, overspread with trees.”Footnote 140 On the one occasion where Fryer actually found a pleasant Indian garden, he transformed this Edenic site into a scene of martial excesses. Fryer wrote:

Fryer also mentioned that the English had a “neat” garden, but “Shivaji's coming destroyed it.”Footnote 142 Fryer's description of a flourishing Indian garden illustrates how the moral marvelous functioned as iconoclasm. Fryer wrote: “Though these people delight much in gardens, yet they are but rude, compared to ours of Europe; they make a noble entrance, a banquetting-house in the middle eyeing the four quarters of the garden, beset with trees like wilderness in every quarter, or else planted with potatoes, Tawms, Breenjawms, both hot plants, and their coolers … and such like, they are only divided by gravelly walks and water courses; not curiously adorned with flowers. Roses would grow here if they would but cultivate them.”Footnote 143 Referring to the banyan tree, Fryer wrote: “It is possible to be so contrived, if it be looked after, to make a wood alone of itself.”Footnote 144 Referring to the tides in the river, Fryer commented: “The river; it glides by the town in swift tides, and at Spring Tides (which it would always do, were they industrious enough to keep it in its banks).”Footnote 145 In the case of agricultural land in the Karnataka region, Fryer wrote: “Three quarters of the land lies unmanured, through the tyranny of Seva Gi [Shivaji].”Footnote 146 Alexander Hamilton, in a similar move, linked trade, topography, and morality of natives in his description of Bassein: “It is a place of small trade, because most of its riches lie dead and buried in their churches, or in the hands of indolent lazy country gentlemen who loiter away their days in ease, luxury and pride, without having the least sense of the poverty and calamity of their country.”Footnote 147 Fryer and Hamilton gestured at native indolence in an iconoclastic critique that suggested a moral decline of the native. Here the lack of cultivation was also attributed to a certain moral condition. Fryer suggested that the excessive/disorderly growth, or neglected lands in India, was a direct reflection of the laziness of their religions. This discourse of native laziness and the resultant wasted landscape in Fryer and others launched a theme that persisted in several eighteenth-century writers such as Jemima Kindersley, Innes Munro, Thomas Motte, William Moorcroft, and George Trebeck.Footnote 148

The ruin, iconic of this general decline in civilization/cultivation, came in for some special attention by these travelers. The rhetoric of accumulation that enabled ruin descriptions rendered the Indian landscape into an excess emptiness of decay and devastation. The word “ruin” and its cognates occur at least once in every paragraph in William Finch's narrative.Footnote 149 Old mosques falling to ruins attracted Terry's attention.Footnote 150 Fryer spoke of how Shivaji's tyranny left arable land “unmanured” and ruined.Footnote 151 Seen in contrast with Britain's old and “fixed” villages that suggested permanence, these ruins testified to India's decay.Footnote 152

India's human inhabitants are also represented through the aesthetics of the marvelous. Terry, after describing the gardens of pleasure as filled with “vineyards that afford marvailous fair and sweet grapes,” transformed the idyllic setting into a dangerous excess. He noted that for entertainment the natives hire jugglers and mountebanks, who “keep venomous snakes in their baskets.” These jugglers were, Terry admits, “the cunningest that I have ever seen.”Footnote 153 The biblical allusion of gardens and snakes is not lost upon the reader. Terry opened his account of Indian mendicants with the comment that the natives “call madmen prophets.” With this he has already consigned the ascetics to the beyond, as the unknowable and the unreliable. His description of the bodily regimen of these ascetics casts them into the role of the abhuman, whose body and behavior is the interface of the animal and the human. They present an excess of the human form itself. The contortions, corporeal and physiognomic excesses (ash-covered body, long matted hair, overgrown nails, pierced body parts), and ascetic penances of these people suggest a deformity approximating to the monstrous in Terry, Fryer, Herbert, and others.Footnote 154 Terry wrote: “They … put such massive fetters of iron upon their legs as they can scarce stir them … submitting themselves unto extreme sharp penances, and all to no purpose.”Footnote 155 The phrase, “all to no purpose” is the moral marvelous working its iconoclasm, since it gestures at the futility of the belief and action of these men. Fryer's comments on the fakirs and yogis were of the same tenor. Fryer expended considerable narrative space on descriptions of the ascetics, finally describing them as outlaws, vagrants, and “pests of the nation.”Footnote 156 William Bruton and Alexander Hamilton also described the yogis in similar tones of revulsion and distaste.Footnote 157 Other Europeans represented the fakirs and yogis in the same way. The French traveler John Mocquet described them as the “most hideous and monstrous spectacle that ever was seen.”Footnote 158 François Bernier talked of “naked fakirs, hideous to behold.” Bernier commented, “females would often bring them alms with much devotion, doubtless believing that they were holy personages, more discreet than other men.”Footnote 159 The iconoclastic moral marvelous rejects native faith in these figures and their austerities. When Fryer, for instance, dismissed them as vagabonds and outlaws, he effectively reduced a native icon to the morally corrupt. With this, everything of the Indian marvelous—from soil fertility through climate to its religious icons—has been desacralized.

The traveler thus rhetorically transformed India. Mapping India's plenty through enumeration and accumulation, he subsequently altered the profusion to deplorable excess. Finally, with a moral iconoclasm, the traveler painted India as a depraved and morally suspect space. Effectively clearing the landscape of native icons by rejecting their symbolic valence, the first generation of travelers prepared for a colonial appropriation and repopulation. The sublime aesthetic of the late eighteenth century built upon the desacralizing efforts of the marvelous to argue for and execute a colonial ideology of “improvement.”Footnote 160