Devendranath Tagore: the narrative of a Persianate gentleman

Devendranath Tagore visited Shimla in 1856 and lived there until 1858. A section of his autobiography recounts this visit and tells readers of his travels to the neighbouring mountains. Tagore's autobiography was published in Bengali after his death in 1905. It was subsequently translated into English by his son Satyendranath Tagore and granddaughter Indira Devi and published in 1909 as The Autobiography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore. Macmillan republished the text from London in 1914 and a year later from Calcutta.

Tagore belonged to one of the largest land-owning families of Calcutta that also had commercial interests in banking, insurance, and shipping in partnership with British merchants. Moreover, he was a public intellectual from nineteenth-century Bengal and a notable social reformer. As part of his reforming agenda for Hinduism, Tagore founded the Tattvabodhini Sabha in 1839 to promote discussions on the religion. A few years later, in 1843, Tagore merged his Tattvabodhini Sabha with the Bramho Sabha, founded by Rammohan Roy, to form the Bramho Samaj. Under Tagore's stewardship, the Bramho Samaj would become a major institution advocating the reform of Hinduism in nineteenth-century India.Footnote ¹²

Tagore's lifetime witnessed the momentous transformation of the Indian subcontinent under British colonial rule. Most significantly, the British established a ‘rule of property’ in their dominions in India. This was given juridical form through the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal, the Ryotwari System in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, and the Mahalwari System in northern India during the 1820s. By introducing property rights in India, the British transformed the extant social division of labour and reordered the Indian social formation. Consequently, nineteenth-century British India saw the emergence of new socio-economic classes with their attendant privileges or detriments. In effect, it was a period of the gradual crystallization of colonial capitalist modernity in the Indian subcontinent.

This consolidation of colonial capitalist modernity also attenuated the power of traditional elites associated with the late-Mughal court and the attendant Indo-Persianate culture. Moreover, the promulgation of the English Education Act in 1835 further eroded the ethos of late-Mughal India, as it replaced Persian with English as the official medium of instruction in British India. This helped to create a new class of Anglo-vernacular elites who came from the recently instituted propertied classes of the Indian subcontinent. This class would, by the middle of the nineteenth century, emerge as the pre-eminent indigenous socio-economic group in British India and dominate, within the bounds imposed by British colonization, the Indian subcontinent's political and economic landscape.Footnote ¹³ In addition to supplanting the earlier Indo-Persianate elites represented by Tagore, the colonial Indian middle class would also champion a distinct Anglo-vernacular ethos as well as displaying a rigid demarcation of Hindu and Muslim cultural leanings.

Tagore's writings on the Himalaya articulate the Persianate sensibility of late Mughal India. We understand Tagore as a ‘Persianate gentleman’, borrowing from the exposition of the term munshi by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.Footnote ¹⁴ Alam and Subrahmanyam characterize the munshi as literate, sophisticated registrars employed in the Mughal imperial courts. In Mughal India, many Hindus entered madrasas to learn Persian, the Mughal language of command, and enter into Mughal imperial service as munshis. This training imbued in them an intimate knowledge of Indo-Persian culture prevalent in a zone stretching from Central Asia to the Indo-Gangetic plains.Footnote ¹⁵ Since Persian was the language of official discourse, the earliest ‘Hindu’ reformers such as Rammohan Roy used it as medium of writing (in addition to Bengali, Arabic, Sanskrit, and English). For instance, Roy wrote his 1809 tract Tuhafat-ul-Muwahidin [Gift to Monotheists] in Persian, in which he argued against the belief in many gods; he also founded and published a Persian language journal called the Mirat-ul-Akhbar.

This munshi culture, imbued with an Indo-Persianate ethos, would define the Bengali elite of the late-Mughal era, and Tagore was no exception. As a member of the early nineteenth-century Bengali elite, Tagore was instructed in Sanskrit, Persian, and English. His writings on the Himalaya articulate this Indo-Persianate sensibility most unequivocally. Tagore repeatedly juxtaposes Upanishadic verses with lines from Hafiz, the Persian Sufi poet. In addition to underlining the monotheistic synergies between Sufi Islam, and Vedantic Hinduism, they also express Tagore's pantheistic vision of the mountains.

Tagore's Himalaya is infused with an inner spirituality, a space for meditation and experiencing divinity. His poetic evocation of the mountains exhibit what one critic has described—in the context of William Wordsworth's poems on nature—as ‘natural supernaturalism’.Footnote ¹⁶ Describing his wonder at the forests of the Himalaya, Tagore writes:

This descriptive tenor continues in his sketch of the river Nagari which, for Tagore, is a ‘mighty current . . . fierce and foaming . . . [that] with a thundering sound rolls on to meet the sea, by command of the Almighty’.Footnote ¹⁸ The snow-clad mountains themselves stand ‘with head upraised like an uplifted thunder-bolt [proclaiming] the awful majesty of God’.Footnote ¹⁹ Even the onset of the monsoons in the Himalaya are described as ‘God's waterworks [that] came into play night and day’.Footnote ²⁰

Tagore articulates this idea of the Himalaya as a pantheistic space by simultaneously invoking verses of the Upanishads along with lines from the Sufi poet Hafiz. The Himalayan nights inspire Tagore to meditate on the ‘first principles of the soul’ and remind him of God's ‘intimate companionship’ with creation.Footnote ²¹ Tagore expresses himself by quoting from Hafiz; he writes: ‘Do not bring a lamp into my audience-hall to-day. / To-night, that full moon my Friend is shining here.’Footnote ²² Hafiz's poetry remains the vehicle of his expression of God's mercy when he writes: ‘Thy mercy will endure in my heart and soul for ever and ever. / . . . even though I were to lose my head, it would never depart from within my heart.’Footnote ²³

Towards the end of his Himalayan narrative, Tagore describes his apprehension of the truth of the Upanishads: that the ‘secret Spirit exists in all creatures and in all things; but . . . is not revealed’.Footnote ²⁴ Tagore writes that by ‘pondering deeply . . . I saw God, not with fleshly eyes, but with the inner vision, from these Himalayan Hills, the holy land of Brahma.’Footnote ²⁵ He concludes this section by citing a verse from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad: ‘Henceforward I shall radiate light from my heart upon the world;/ For I have reached the Sun, and darkness has vanished.’Footnote ²⁶ Importantly, by describing the mountains as the ‘holy land of Brahma’, Tagore is not only relating his spiritual experience directly to the Himalaya but also reaffirming the sacral character of that space.

Tagore's pantheism, however, does not extend to his descriptions of the local inhabitants of the mountains who he infantilizes as nature's children. In so doing, Tagore constructs a sense of difference and hierarchy between the locals and his own patrician Bengali self and, by extension, the Bengali Hindu identity. Describing the locals, Tagore writes:

By stressing the ‘great glee’ of the hill people and their ‘simple nature’, Tagore erases traces of pain, danger, and death from the space of the mountains. The idealization of the ‘hill-people’ is further emphasized during Tagore's encounter with a local family. This family, he writes, lived in ‘a cave in the rocks. Here they cooked, and here they slept. I saw [the] wife dancing joyfully with a baby on her back, and another child of hers was running about laughing on a dangerous part of the hill.’Footnote ²⁸ Moreover, Tagore pastoralizes their existence in the Himalayan valley by almost evacuating their quotidian labour. Tagore notes that the man of the family was ‘sowing potatoes in a small field’ but nevertheless follows it up by stating: ‘God . . . [has] provided everything necessary for their happiness here. Kings . . . rarely found such peace and happiness.’Footnote ²⁹

The construction of difference continues in his comment on the local custom of polyandry. Tagore notes that women ‘were scarce in their part of the country . . . [so] all the brothers marry one wife, and the children of that wife call them all father’.Footnote ³⁰ Importantly, however, Tagore's construction of cultural difference is not laced with a sense of moral outrage. This is significantly different from the manner in which the Bengali middle-class travellers, writing about half a century after Tagore, would portray the Himalayan locals and their customs.

Further, Tagore's travel accounts of the Himalaya do not indicate any awareness of an Indian nation-space. Despite writing during the 1857 Rebellion, he does not engage with the question of state power or political subjectivity. In his autobiography, Tagore notes seeing a huge crowd outside Kanpur while travelling back to Calcutta and is told that the British ‘are taking away the Badshah of Delhi [Bahadur Shah Zafar] captive’.Footnote ³¹ Tagore notes:

The shift from Mughal to British rule appears, for Tagore, to be a reminder of the ephemerality of temporal power.

Tagore's comment points towards a notion of sovereignty that was in the process of being radically transformed under colonial British rule. Before the advent of the British, sovereignty was conceived of as a power whose exercise was delegated by the centre to various groups. While the groups drew their authority and legitimacy from the centre—the Mughal emperor, in early nineteenth-century India—their actual exercise of sovereignty was independent of the centre's will. Under colonial rule, the colonizers established what was termed ‘British paramountcy’ over their dominion. The exercise of this notion of sovereignty was the sole preserve of the British, and required a clear delineation of the spatial extent of British dominion. Consequently, the colony had to be conceived of as a bounded space. Writing at the dawn of British crown rule in India, Tagore appears oblivious to the notion of British India as a bounded space. For him, the political transformation of the Indian subcontinent in 1857 remains a divinely ordained transfer of political power from one ruling class to another.

Over the next half a century, colonial capitalist modernity would radically transform the social relations extant in Bengal—and indeed much of India—during Tagore's time. The Indo-Persianate sensibility, with its deep roots in the courtly culture of Mughal India, would be displaced by the Anglo-vernacular ethos championed by the emergent class of Bengali bhadralok in Bengal (and by other middle classes elsewhere in India). The Bengali bhadralok, unlike their eighteenth and mid nineteenth-century predecessors, would not comprise the economic elites but instead an intermediary class in the colonial social formation. Suffering from an anxiety of ‘middleness’, they would engage vigorously in literary and cultural productions to maintain their hegemonic position. To put this in another way: the bhadralok would seek to maintain their position as the dominant indigenous group despite their loss of economic pre-eminence by relying on the cultural sphere. Their writings would display the crystallization of a certain normative Bengali identity, a separation of Hindu and Islamic cultural spheres besides articulating, mediating, and reinforcing the naturalization of a more rigid understanding of political sovereignty rooted in the emergent idea of the nation-space.

The emergence and rise of the Bengali bhadralok

Colonial rule heralded the ascendancy of the Bengali middle class as the dominant indigenous class in the cultural world of colonial Bengal. Crucially, the rise in the stature of this class was intrinsically tied to the emergence of Calcutta as the second city of the British empire during that time.Footnote ³³ By the late nineteenth century Calcutta had become the principal economic centre of British India. It was a crucial transit point for Indian raw materials, labour for overseas colonies, and manufactured products for distribution within India. Moreover, Calcutta was transformed from a commercial city to an industrial centre, particularly with the development of the jute industry in the city's neighbourhood.Footnote ³⁴ Jute not only provided a stimulus to the cash-starved peasant economy of colonial India, it also acted as a cash crop that was traded outside the colony to meet the trade deficit of the British empire vis-à-vis the newly industrializing zones of the North Atlantic.Footnote ³⁵ This rise of colonial capitalism diminished the significance of land revenue for the colonial state. In addition, it facilitated an amalgamation of banking and industrial capital through economic institutions such as managing agency houses. It also assisted in the emergence of new Indian intermediaries in the colonial economy, such as the Marwaris, who would subsequently develop into the indigenous bourgeoisie of Bengal.Footnote ³⁶

The indigenous Hindu Bengali community, however, was not directly involved in this new direction of the colonial economy. This was in stark contrast to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Bengali merchants acted as portfolio capitalists as well as the intellectual leaders of Bengal.Footnote ³⁷ For instance, Dwarakanath Tagore, Rammohan Roy, and other members of Calcutta's Bengali mercantile community were not only intermediary capitalists but also key members in the cultural life of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Calcutta. They were capitalist elites, who were directly involved with the cultural life of the city, either as producers or patrons.Footnote ³⁸ Combining their Indo-Persian education with training in Western knowledge systems, they had helped shape a distinct cultural identity for the city. Importantly, these elites increasingly adopted the progressive bourgeois perspective on global history and sought to fashion themselves as custodians of Indian modernity that was introduced through the agency of the colonial state.Footnote ³⁹

The depression of 1848 radically altered this socio-economic topography of Calcutta. With the collapse of the Union Bank, a pivotal business organization in the city, many pioneering Bengali industrialists lost their fortunes. Consequently, an entire class of indigenous entrepreneurs forfeited their ability to participate in the industrial development of nineteenth-century Bengal.Footnote ⁴⁰ This class of Bengalis sought pecuniary refuge in the land revenue that was guaranteed to them by the Permanent Settlement. Instituted in Bengal in 1793 by the British East India Company, this system gave tenure-holders ownership of the land and right to its revenue. In return, these landlords were expected to pay an annual tax to the British East India Company that was fixed in perpetuity. In the aftermath of 1848, the Permanent Settlement provided a secure source of income for the erstwhile merchant class. Consequently, this class gravitated away from being direct stakeholders in the colonial capitalist economy and, instead, moved towards absentee landlordism. Introduced by the British to foster the rule of property in Bengal and incubate a class of improving yeomen farmers, the Permanent Settlement, ironically, produced an intermediate, tenure-holding social class of rentiers who survived by appropriating the surplus of the Bengal peasantry.Footnote ⁴¹

Constant fragmentation and sale of property—mostly caused by the landlords’ failure to pay taxes to the British—kept ‘the size of the individual rentier income quite small, and increasingly inadequate for the demands of gentility’.Footnote ⁴² Consequently, this intermediary class unreservedly embraced colonial education in order to enter the world of wage labour of British India to supplement their income from land revenue.Footnote ⁴³ High caste Hindu men became the overwhelming majority among professionals and landholding elites living in Calcutta or other urban areas, while Muslims constituted a substantial segment of the peasant, artisanal, and working classes in Calcutta—and more so in the Bengal countryside.Footnote ⁴⁴ By 1872, census reports clearly established non-Muslims as a minority in Bengal proper.

In an attempt to ameliorate their loss of economic status from the earlier era, the bhadralok developed a distinct Bengali culture that they could, and would, dominate. Besides remoulding contemporary elite Bengali society along decisively Hindu and rigid caste lines, they set about ‘improving’ the Bengali language and introduced several words in the Bengali language that spoke of their conception of the colonial Bengali social formation. They coined the term bhadralok (literally, the gentle folk) to define themselves and denote their own middle-class identity suffused with connotations of refinement. This term also set them apart from the abhijatlok (the pre-colonial, as well as the eighteenth-century aristocracy), on the one hand, and the itarjan (the rude or unrefined lot), on the other. Words such as borolok (literally, the big people, but meaning the rich) and chhotolok (literally, the small people, but having the same sense as the English phrase ‘the lower orders’) also gained currency. Acquiring a degree of influence far in excess of their numerical size, the bhadralok constructed ‘new forms of public discourse, laid down new criteria of social respectability, set new aesthetic and moral standards of judgment and . . . fashioned the new forms of political mobilization’.Footnote ⁴⁵ They became the principal agents of nationalism in colonial Bengal and—along with the middle classes elsewhere in India—constituted colonial India's nationalist elite.

Crucially, Calcutta was central to this intermediary class as it provided institutional networks essential for their existence in British India. The city provided the jobs that sustained this class. It also had the schools and colleges that became indispensable entry points into the liberal professions as well as the world of clerical wage labour; in addition, it was centre of print culture in colonial Bengal, an aspect of the city that this class would dominate in order to establish their ideological superiority over the subaltern classes.Footnote ⁴⁶

From the nineteenth century, the bhadralok class faced periodic discontent from the working classes and peasantry, on the one hand, while having to endure the racist attitudes of the colonizers, on the other. This made the intermediary bhadralok class of English-educated, upper caste Hindu men acutely aware of their own location in the social formation of Bengal. This combination of class anxiety, demographic insecurity, and subordinate position within the colonial social hierarchy informed their quest for political modernity, marked by a putative nationalism.

The bhadralok began articulating a sense of Indian nationhood—that is, the idea of an imagined political community that shares a common past—when they started constructing—in response to colonial histories of India—their own narrative histories of the Indian nation. This resulted in the creation of a whole genre of nationalist histories, mostly in Bengali but also in English and various other Indian languages. In their self-fashioning, however, the Bengali bhadralok appropriated the progressive logic of colonial historiography evident in the histories of India written by James Mill, James Tod, Henry Elliot, and Mountstuart Elphinstone. By replicating the colonial ‘territorialization of history’ in nationalist histories, the Bengali bhadralok—like their colonial masters—presented themselves as descendants of the Aryans and the Muslims as tyrannical foreign conquerors of India.Footnote ⁴⁷ As this class shed their Indo-Persianate moorings to adopt an Anglo-vernacular ethos, this mode of historiography, along with pre-colonial Indic myths and legends, constructed Hindus as the principal inhabitants of India. In Bengal, this emergent nationalist historical vision was also transmitted through a variety of popular cultural modes such as novels, plays, poems, songs, as well as travel narratives.

With the advent and expansion of the railways after the 1850s, the Bengali bhadralok began travelling widely across the sub-continent.Footnote ⁴⁸ This growth of travel coincided with their discovery of India's nationhood. More crucially, this spatial practice allowed the bhadralok to experience the spatial expanse of British India as a coherent and unified space, and to conceive of it as the Indian nation-space. Consequently, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a broad corpus of Bengali travel narratives written by the bhadralok. These travelogues provided its readers with a crucial, if vicarious, way of experiencing the history, geography, and nationhood of India.Footnote ⁴⁹

The travel narratives of the bhadralok recounted their experience of the cities in the Indo-Gangetic plains such as Delhi and Agra, as well as of the various centres of Hindu pilgrimage, namely Kashi (Varanasi), Gaya, Mathura, Vrindavan, and Prayag (Allahabad). Gradually, the Bengali bhadralok travellers headed off the proverbial beaten track and into the mountains. Accounts of bhadralok travellers in the Himalaya—especially the Garhwal region, dotted with Hindu shrines of pan-Indian importance such as Kedarnath and Badrinath—began to emerge in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. These texts, of which Sen's Himalay and Bharati's Himaranya are among the earliest, depict the mountains with a political slant. They produce the Himalaya as a spatial metaphor of a national civilization and posit the Anglo-vernacular Bengali bhadralok and other Indian middle classes as its principle claimants. In this socio-spatial project, local inhabitants of Garhwal are ‘othered’ and rendered not quite Indian. Moreover, women are completely excluded from the bhadralok spatial conception of the Himalaya which become, for them, a distinctly homosocial space.

Secularizing the sacred Himalaya: Jaladhar Sen and Ramananda BharatiFootnote ⁵⁰

Himalay by Jaladhar Sen appeared serially in print from 1893 and was subsequently published as a travelogue in 1900. In 1901, Ramananda Bharati's Himaranya was published in serial form. Following Bharati's death later that year, its publication was suspended for unknown reasons.Footnote ⁵¹Himalay recounts Sen's travels in the pilgrim centres of the Garhwal Himalaya while Bharati narrates his experiences of Garhwal, his journey to, and travels within Tibet in Himaranya.

Though set in a region that is central to all conceptions of Hindu sacred geography, these texts engage with the space of the Himalaya in a distinctly secular vein. They underline the pleasures of the natural beauty of the mountains, often move beyond the traditional pilgrim routes to describe for their readers the joys of exploring scarcely visited mountainsides, and portray the local inhabitants of the mountains as not only different from, but also inferior to, the Bengali bhadralok traveller. In effect, these travelogues are imbued with a distinct socio-spatial politics where the depictions of the mountains, the local inhabitants, and the middle-class travellers become a means for articulating a vision of a putative nation-space and its citizenry. This socio-spatial politics of Himalay and Himaranya set these texts apart from earlier depictions of the mountains as evidenced in, for instance, the writings of Tagore.

While Sen and Bharati were pioneers of this emergent genre of the travelogue, they began writing on the Himalaya after following very different trajectories. Sen began his career as a schoolteacher in Faridpur, in eastern Bengal (now in Bangladesh), in 1881. Subsequently, he moved to Dehra Dun, a town in the foothills of the Himalaya and a centre of the British military-bureaucratic establishment to work as a teacher. Sen travelled to the Garhwal Himalaya from there in 1890, an experience he would subsequently recount in Himalay. In 1899, Sen returned to Bengal and began working as a journalist in Calcutta, editing two popular Bengali periodicals, Bangabasi and Hitavadi. He was also a prolific writer and authored over 40 books which included novels, short stories, biographies, children's fiction, essays, and translations as well as his travelogues on northern India and the Himalaya.

Bharati was born into a Bengali Brahmin family as Ramkumar Bhattacharya. Following a traditional education, Ramkumar began working at Calcutta's Wesleyan Mission School as a Sanskrit teacher. During this time he left home after a dispute with his father over the latter's interpretation of Hinduism. Subsequently, Ramkumar became a protégé of Devendranath Tagore and then a preacher for the Bramho Samaj. After the death of his wife in 1888, Ramkumar returned to the more traditional Hindu fold by entering the dasnami order of Hindu monks where he assumed the name of Ramananda Bharati. As a monk, Bharati travelled to Mount Kailash and Manas Sarovar in Tibet during 1898. These travels form the basis of Himaranya.

In the Himalayan travelogues of Sen and Bharati, the sacred space of the mountains is repeatedly inflected by the state-space of British India. The narratives juxtapose descriptions of pilgrims and temples at the various pilgrimage centres with the secular markers of the colonial state. In Himalay, Sen narrates his travels through the various places of religious significance in the Garhwal region, namely Devprayag, Rudraprayag, Karnaprayag, Vishnuprayag, and Joshimath before reaching the temple-town of Badrinath, in the upper Himalaya. Sen's description of these places is always intersected by his awareness of the state-space of British India: he notes that Garhwal was formerly an independent kingdom before coming under British rule, and discusses the Indian National Congress and its senior leader, Surendranath Banerjea, as well as the experience of being under colonial rule, with a police officer in Karnaprayag.Footnote ⁵² He describes the religious significance of the places in Garhwal that he passes through, intermingled with comments about the political facets of these places and their inhabitants. He writes about ordinary villagers and their habitations; describes astrologers and priests trying to earn a living from the pilgrims; mentions tea shops, hospitals, and post offices; and details his conversations with the local people he meets in such places.

Bharati's narrative also depicts the Himalaya by juxtaposing its secular markers with the traditional, sacred aspects of the mountains. Like Sen, his accounts also display a distinct overlap between the space of Hindu sacred geography and the secular space of the colonial Indian state. For instance, Bharati's Himaranya opens with a citation from Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava which depicts the Himalaya as the lord of mountains with a divine soul.Footnote ⁵³ He follows up the Sanskrit lines by idealizing the mountains as a place where ‘the mind becomes tranquil, the life-spirit finds calm; it is where knowledge expands, devotion blossoms, and the senses become still’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the subsequent lines, however, Bharati describes the secular markers of the roads around Joshimath, noting that they are lined with shops, inns, dispensaries, a post office, and a police station.Footnote ⁵⁵

Further, Bharati's travels into Tibet to visit Mount Kailash and Manas Sarovar, considered sacred by both Hindus and Buddhists. However, the account of this journey is interspersed with Bharati providing his readers with details such as the snowfall and altitude of the places he passes through. Moreover, his trip to Tibet in 1898 comes just a few decades after the British spying missions into Tibet as part of the manoeuvres of the ‘Great Game’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Consequently, a spirit of exploration underwrites his narrative. This is best exemplified by Bharati telling his readers about being warned about the physical hardships and the threat of Tibetan bandits on this trip. Bharati notes that a local villager told him:

This is undoubtedly a reference to the British surveillance missions into Tibet, and Bharati is therefore well aware of the political context in which he is undertaking his journey.Footnote ⁵⁸ Bharati, then, is conscious of the notion of the boundary, as well as its importance as a marker of the extent of British territorial sovereignty.

It is important to underline that the concept of the boundary, demarcating the limit of a political territory, crystallized in the Indian subcontinent with the advent of the British. The most crucial insight regarding this comes from the Thai historian, Thongchai Winichakul.Footnote ⁵⁹ Documenting the evolution of the border in the context of Siam, Winichakul notes that ‘the limits of a kingdom could be defined only by [border] townships’ allegiance to the centre of a kingdom [and the] political sphere . . . only by power relationships, not by territorial integrity’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The interactions between the British and the Siamese were rife with discrepant understandings of what a border signified. Winichakul writes that while Siam did not:

Winichakul argues that there was little negotiation between indigenous Thai systems of knowledge and the information regime of modern geography. Over time, modern geographic knowledge completely displaced earlier notions of Buddhist sacred geography. The Thai elites’ awareness of the border as the limit of the state's political sovereignty symbolized a novel understanding of the nation's territoriality.

While the consolidation of British paramountcy and the consequent development of the border-concept did indeed establish a homogenous and bounded colonial state-space of trans-regional labour in South Asia, this space of British India—unlike the case of Thailand—did not supplant earlier, pre-colonial notions of space. Instead, the colonial state-space retained the notions of Hindu sacred geography and ethno-linguistic homelands. The interactions and interpenetrations between these distinct spatialities would lead, eventually, to the emergence of the Indian nation-space.

However, through the course of the nineteenth century, the border-concept did indeed develop into a critical spatial category for distinguishing the space of British India from ‘other’ spaces such as Afghanistan and Tibet. The importance of the border is evident in Bharati's narrative. His description of Tibet stresses its difference from the space and British India. He writes:

Bharati here clearly defines himself as an imperial subject. For him, British India, unlike Tibet, is a space marked by the rule of law as well the markers of welfare such as inns and dispensaries introduced by the colonial state. He therefore projects British India as an antithetical space to Tibet, thereby underlining the importance of the boundary.

Crucially, Bharati calls Victoria bharateshwari which translates as both goddess and empress of India.Footnote ⁶³ Importantly, the suffix ‘-ishwari’ in Bengali is used to describe female divinity, for example, Bhuvaneshwari, the goddess who rules the universe. His invocation of the British queen, then, references both divine and temporal notions of power. Bharati also speaks of his travels ‘across the realm of this blessed queen’ to visit ‘the sacred places of India’. By speaking of the ‘queen's realm’ and the Hindu ‘sacred places’, Bharati is juxtaposing colonial state-space and the space of Hindu sacred geography. Ironically, he is according diving status to the British queen while at the same time secularizing Hindu sacred space.

Crucially, the travelogues of Sen and Bharati also demonstrate that the conceptions of Hindu sacred geography and the colonial state-space are inflected by the authors’ allegiance to the ethno-linguistic homeland of Bengal. This pre-colonial conception of space, typically a function of linguistic territorialism, has existed in the Indian subcontinent alongside the notions of Hindu sacred space and the colonial state-space of abstract labour. Christopher Bayly has termed these homelands ‘patria’, and this sense is conveyed through the Urdu word watan and the Bengali word desh, both coded with an intimate sense of belonging.Footnote ⁶⁴ Recent research on South Asia on spaces beyond Bengal has also demonstrated the profound sense of belonging that exists among the residents of these various ethno-linguistic homelands across the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Bengali, the word desh signifies many levels of spatial abstraction.

Depending on its context, it could refer to a country, a homeland or could convey a more localized sense of belonging.Footnote ⁶⁶ Sen uses this term and its compounds to refer to the space of Bengal. For him, Bengal is swadesh, that is, ‘one's own homeland’; other Bengalis are swajatiya—‘people of one's own ethnicity’—and swadeshi, meaning ‘people belonging to one's own homeland’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, although Sen travels in the Himalayan regions in northern British India, he consistently refers to these places as paschimdesh and paschimanchal, that is, the western lands or regions. Interestingly, these regions of northern India are designated the ‘western’ lands because they are ‘western’ in relation to Bengal. This underlines the centrality of Bengal in the cartographic imagination of Sen and, indeed, other members of the Anglo-vernacular elite of colonial Bengal. In addition, Sen repeatedly mentions to his readers that he is travelling through prabash, the Bengali term designating spaces within the Indian subcontinent that lie outside the space of Bengal. Sen's use of the term is of course instructive as it indicates a spatial conception of ‘India’ that extends beyond the notion of the distinct ethno-linguistic homelands (such as Bengal), while at the same time incorporating them within it.

Further, Sen and Bharati repeatedly invoke Bengal as a homeland; they present themselves as travellers who are ‘out of place’ in the mountains and yearn to return ‘home’. Towards the end of Himaranya, Bharati notes that, as a monk, the entire world is his home. Yet, he writes: ‘I am a Bengali and my heart is pining for the land of Bengal. I am therefore returning to Bengal from Eastern Tibet.’Footnote ⁶⁸ As Sen travels through the mountains, he also writes about pining for the plains of Bengal. Speaking of the homeland in a distinctly nostalgic tenor, he writes:

Sen's invocation of Bengal sets up a contrast between the mountains and the plains. This is underlined as he stresses the difference between his own nature—a cultural product of the space of Bengal—and that of the Himalaya. In other words, Sen sets up a distinction between the ‘natural’ space of the Himalaya that is unmarked by human labour and the ‘cultural’ space of Bengal, a product of, as well as a process in, the interaction between human labour and their environment.

There are two important issues to consider from this extract of Himalay. In Sen's depiction of the Bengal landscape, he is neither a fisherman catching fish in the brook, nor a shepherd tending to the cows. Instead, he represents himself as a distant observer of the Bengal landscape, separated from the people in the land and their social activity. This viewing position of the narrator within the narrative—alienated from the productive social relations of a space, yet appropriating it to define himself and the space—articulates the author's class position, that is, the mediational position of the bhadralok class within the colonial social hierarchy. The space of Bengal is produced, in this instance, through the labour of the peasant (not explicitly mentioned, but indicated by the ‘standing crops’), the fisherman, and the shepherd; however, it is the member of the bhadralok class—surviving by appropriating the surplus of the working classes—who has the power to define, and indeed does define, the space that is produced.

Moreover, the nature–culture distinction also temporalizes the distinct spaces of the Himalaya and Bengal. In other words, the narrative aims to transform the space of the ‘natural’ Himalaya into a ‘cultural’ one; Bengal is posited as what the Himalaya could be. This ambition of the narrative is of course structured by material changes in the space of the Himalaya brought about by the colonial state, such as the expansion of rail and especially road networks, as well as the construction of hill stations across the region during the course of the nineteenth century for the physical and social reproduction of the British colonial elite. However, it is important to underline that the bhadralok travel narratives of Sen and Bharati do not simply replicate the British colonial fantasy of re-forming the Himalaya into a racially pure and environmentally pristine space for the settlement of the British colonial elite in the Indian subcontinent. Instead of focusing on the hill stations such as Shimla and Naini Tal, the Bengali travelogues structure themselves and their spatial imagination by drawing upon the extant pilgrimage centres in the mountains.Footnote ⁷⁰ They contest the colonial spatial production (and imagination) of the mountains by producing (and conceiving) in its stead what could be understood as an indigenous space of the Himalaya.

The indigenous Himalaya in the travelogues of Sen and Bharati, then, are structured by the colonial state-space of British India, and inflected by pre-colonial notions of ethno-linguistic homelands as well as the sacral space of Hindu geography. The travel narratives document not only their authors’ awareness but also their negotiation of these distinct spatial conceptions. The interactions and interpenetrations between the distinct spatial configurations owing to the spatial practice of the bhadralok class, then, ‘secretes’—to use Lefebvre's term—a new space of the indigenous Himalaya. This newly produced space can therefore be understood, following Williams, as a ‘structure of feeling’—an emergent space that is in the process of crystallizing and taking shape, yet to be categorized and classified, one that reflects the developing social relations and spatial practices that engender it.

Though the articulation of the indigenous Himalaya in these travel narratives is structured by pre-colonial spatial configurations, in reality it anchors colonial as well as pre-colonial spatialities. In other words, this new space overlaps with the bounded colonial state-space of abstract labour, subsumes within it the distinct ethno-linguistic homelands, and mystifies its historical constitution by alluding to the ‘eternal’ notion of Hindu sacred geography. By attempting to subsume all extant spatial conceptions under its sign, the bhadralok travel narratives project this emergent space as the hegemonic space of the Indian subcontinent. In so doing, they present the indigenous Himalaya as the spatial metaphor of the Indian nation. They portray the emergent Indian nation-space while it is being produced.

The projection of the indigenous Himalaya as the spatial metaphor of the Indian nation has several critical consequences. Most crucially, this indigenous space (and its attendant indigenous spatial practice) can claim a degree of ‘authenticity’ in relation to the colonial space (and the attendant colonial spatial practice). In other words, an indigenous notion of India can now be posited; an unbroken genealogy between this nation-space and the mythical space of Bharatvarsha of Indic myths and legends can be constructed; this space can now be deployed in an anti-colonial vein to contest the idea of British India. Consequently, the colonial space of British India can be transformed into, and articulated as, the colonized space of India. This conceptual manoeuvre also sets up the Bengali bhadralok (and other Anglo-vernacular elites from elsewhere in the subcontinent)—that is, male, upper caste Hindu middle-class members of the colonial Indian social formation—as the principal claimants of this emergent nation-space. This move is crucial to the middle-class project of constructing their socio-spatial hegemony over the Indian nation-space, a point we shall discuss in detail later in this article.

Both Sen and Bharati anchor their articulation of the Indian nation-space on the conception of Hindu sacred geography. This finds its most cogent expression in Sen's depiction of Joshimath, an important centre of pilgrimage in the Garhwal Himalaya. He notes that Joshimath ‘is among the supreme pilgrimages of the Hindus’ before proceeding to write:

Sen's exposition of the sanctity of Joshimath is significant for several reasons. It posits the Hindu as the norm through which the identity of humanity is expressed. Consequently, the space of Hindu pilgrimage becomes the arbiter of spatial sanctity. More importantly, this move from ‘Hindu’ to ‘humanity’ charts a secularizing impulse that defines the secular in relation to, and in terms of, Hinduism. In effect, this posits Hinduism as the civil religion of the Indian nation-space.Footnote ⁷²

The idea of ‘civil religion’ emerges from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who conceptualized it as an alternative to the Catholicism of France.Footnote ⁷³ This concept has been powerful in the American context as well, indicating a type of bourgeois civic-mindedness that acted as an alternative to an overt religious culture. Dominant strands of Indian anti-colonial nationalism have also deployed this concept. From the nineteenth century onwards, Hinduism (with all its attendant contradictions) was repeatedly articulated and understood as a ‘way of life’. By positing it as a ‘way of life’ and not a religion per se, Indian nationalists projected a particular belief system as the naturalized culture, that is, the civil religion of the Indian nation-space. Significantly, then, his conceptual manoeuvre not only equates Hinduism with Indian cultural life in general, but also attempts to present it as a secular entity. Moreover, in this dispensation, all other belief systems of the Indian sub-continent are conceived of as Hinduism's ‘others’, which are ‘religious’ and ‘non-secular’.

It is of course crucial to note that we are proposing a different reading of the category of the ‘secular’ from its normative Eurocentric understanding.Footnote ⁷⁴ In contradistinction to the notion of the secular as a strict separation between the church and the state, we are suggesting that the ‘secular’ is the normalization of religion in the quotidian world. This charts a process that moves ‘religion’ away from being a mediating category between ‘human’ and ‘supernatural’ realms. Instead, it becomes an organizing device of the realm of the social existence of human beings.Footnote ⁷⁵ Moreover, from being a structuring category of the relationship between present existence and afterlife, it becomes one that shapes everyday life in the present. In the context of the Indian sub-continent, then, the ethos of dominant anti-colonial nationalism gestures towards Hinduism (in contradistinction to other religious systems) not as a religion that articulates a relationship between the past, present, and future through, for instance, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and rebirth. Instead, by enabling a construction of spatio-temporal and cultural continuity between the past and the present, Hinduism becomes a pre-eminent organizational component of culture—‘a whole way of life’—in, and of, the newly imagined and produced nation-space of ‘India’.Footnote ⁷⁶

This idea of Hinduism as the civil religion of India permeates Sen's writings when he speaks of the renowned temple of Badrinath in the Himalaya, dedicated to Vishnu, as ‘the foremost pilgrimage centre of India’.Footnote ⁷⁷ By claiming that the Hindu pilgrimage of Badrinath is sacred for all Indians, Sen once again makes ‘Hindu’ the category for defining ‘Indian’. Such a move secularizes the sacred space of Hindu geography in order to express the space of the Indian nation as secular. However, owing to the projection of Hinduism as the civil religion of India, the secular nation-space remains a secularized notion of Hindu sacral space.

Moreover, Sen's notion of the ‘godlike human’ (see italics in the extract above) in his description of Joshimath refers to the figure of Acharya Shankar (788–820). Shankar was a Hindu philosopher who propagated the Advaita school of Vedanta philosophy. He is credited for establishing the hegemony of Vedanta among the astika philosophical schools and, according to popular tradition, with reviving Hinduism at a time when Buddhism was dominant in South Asia. Hindu oral tradition claims that Shankar—to ensure the continuance of Advaita philosophy in India—established four muths (seats of authority and doctrinal learning) under the supervision of his four disciples in four corners of the Indian subcontinent. These were in Puri, on the eastern coast of India; in Dwaraka, on the western coast of India; in Sringeri in present-day Karnataka in South India; and in Joshimath, in the Himalaya. These muths—which exist even today under individual heads called ‘Shakaracharyas’ after their purported founder—define a certain geographic expanse of Hinduism.Footnote ⁷⁸ Sen's invocation of Shankar to describe the sanctity of Joshimath is therefore another instance in which Hindu sacred space is secularized in the project of articulating the secular space of the Indian nation.

In a subsequent passage of Himalay, Sen describes Shankar as the saviour of Hinduism. Making a distinction between the Advaita philosopher and the contemporary priests of Badrinath, he writes that Shankar was one

Shankar here is presented as the person who rescued India (and Hinduism) from Buddhism. Besides being one of the few instances in the travelogue where Sen mentions ‘India’, this extract also shows the author constructing an equivalence between Hinduism and the space of the Indian nation. This also sets up Shankar as the person who mediated this relation of equivalence and, therefore, as the notional founder of that space. Once again, Hinduism is posited as the civil religion of India, in effect secularizing it as well as the Hindu philosopher.

Interestingly, Ramananda Bharati was a member of the dasnami order of Hindu monks that claim Shankar as their founder. In fact, he identifies himself as such, and explains the lineage of the dasnami order from Shankar in the opening pages of Himaranya. Bharati notes that Shankar had set up the four muths in the ‘four corners across the north and south [of the Indian subcontinent] as the impregnable wall to fortify Hinduism’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Like Sen, Bharati too relies on the conception of Hindu sacred geography to speak of the purportedly secular space of India.

We have been arguing for the importance of pre-colonial spatial conceptions such as Hindu sacred geography and ethno-linguistic homelands in aiding an understanding of the historical constitution of the Indian nation-space. We contend that the mutual interactions of these spatial configurations, both with each other and within the colonial state-space of British India, produce a new spatial entity, that is, the Indian nation-space. In so doing, we are amplifying, as well as marking our divergence from, the theorizations of Manu Goswami. Goswami's intervention in the debates on the origins of the Indian nation is of course crucial. She introduces space as a fundamental category of analysis through an illuminating critique of Partha Chatterjee. It is therefore necessary to outline this debate in brief.

Critiquing Benedict Anderson, Partha Chatterjee has argued against thinking of the post-colonial world as ‘perpetual consumers of modernity [who choose their] imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas’.Footnote ⁸¹ Chatterjee locates the emergence of Indian nationalism within an indigenous ‘spiritual’ realm that is in contradistinction to the colonial ‘material’ domain.Footnote ⁸² Engaging with Chatterjee's analysis, Goswami argues that instead of ‘presupposing an autonomous sociocultural domain exempt from colonial and capitalist mediation or positing indigenous practices as untranslatable in any but local terms [one must think of the colonial and nationalist forms as] coproduced within a common, if asymmetrically structured, social field’.Footnote ⁸³ She claims that Chatterjee's work ‘presupposes what must be accounted for, that is, the sociohistorical constitution of notions of India as a bounded national space’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's conceptualization of the state as a ‘spatial framework of power’ and Nicos Poulantzas's idea of the ‘territorialization of history’, Goswami details how the colonial construction of state-space informed the Indian nationalist elite's conceptions of nation-space.Footnote ⁸⁵ This forms the thrust of her critique of Chatterjee's delineation of the genealogy of the Indian nation.

However, Goswami's emphasis on the colonial Indian state-space is at the expense of any sustained engagement with pre-colonial notions of Indian territoriality. To put this in another way, drawing on Lefebvre, Goswami details the production of the colonial abstract space of British India, that is, the state-space of trans-regional labour. However, she omits from her analysis all forms of pre-colonial absolute space that must necessarily, following Lefebvre, form the condition of possibility of this abstract space. Indeed, the bounded colonial space of British India incorporates within it, and overlaps significantly with, pre-colonial spaces that were produced at earlier historical moments. If the colonial state-space is uneven, as Goswami acknowledges it to be, then this unevenness is a function of a spatial contradiction between pre-colonial and colonial spatial forms. In other words, this spatial contradiction between colonial and pre-colonial spatialities engenders—through the spatial practice of the Indian middle class—a new space that aims to synthesize this inherent contradiction within the bounded space of the British Indian colony. This emergent space is the space of the putative Indian nation.

Goswami of course devotes much analytical energy to the Puranic, that is, the mythical spatio-temporal schemas from pre-colonial India. She demonstrates a ‘complex re-articulation and re-signification [of these mythical spaces that were] sacral, concentric, infinite, and fundamentally open [with] no demarcated or fixed limit’.Footnote ⁸⁶ She concludes that the nation-space of India is produced as a chronotope; through the ‘territorialisation of [Puranic-Itihas, that is, mythical histories (of India)] . . . that marked a modernist and historicist discourse of nationhood [which] identified upper-caste Hindus as the organic, original, core nationals from the standpoint of . . . a fictive unity between past and present’.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, as Goswami herself observes, the Puranic spaces are spatial abstractions, that is, a specific pre-colonial conception of space.

Despite her reliance on Lefebvre, Goswami does not account for the perceived and lived notions of that mythical space. Goswami's analysis, then, omits the material manifestations of Hindu sacred geography within the landmass of the Indian sub-continent from its ambit.Footnote ⁸⁸ Further, Lefebvre reminds us that a society's spatial practice ‘ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion . . . [and] also secretes the society's space’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Goswami locates rail travel as the dominant mode of spatial practice in colonial India. While she discusses the phenomenal growth in the passenger traffic of the railways in late nineteenth-century India, she does not indicate any reason, or constellation of reasons, for it. She also fails to engage with pilgrimage as a spatial practice within the space of Hindu sacred geography.Footnote ⁹⁰

It is important to remind ourselves that the notion of a Hindu sacred geography is not only a spatial abstraction. It was—and continues to be—perceived through its various sites across the Indian subcontinent: cities and towns believed to be patronised by various Hindu divinities; mountains, rivers and lakes considered to be sacred by believers. Pilgrimages to these places can be seen as a form of spatial practice that not only produced (and re-produced) the sacred character of the places but also engendered the notion of a larger sacralized space which contained, and in turn was constituted by, these sites of pilgrimage. The advent of the railways in the 1850s not only connected the important political and commercial centres of colonial India, but also made places of pilgrimage more accessible to the Indians. As rail travel became cheaper, increasing number of Indians—especially middle-class Indians—relied on it to travel for work or for leisure. By the end of the nineteenth century, growing numbers of middle-class travellers were traversing British India for work under the colonial dispensation. These middle-class individuals and their families would also visit and write about their visits to Hindu pilgrimage sites. These forms of spatial practice would eventually lead to the notion of India as a bounded and coherent space.

Moreover, social space, Lefebvre reminds us, is both a social product and a social process.Footnote ⁹¹ It is a product of social relations and, in the last instance, the social relations of production, while at the same time incorporating the social relations that go into its making. Social space is therefore not only an outcome but also a medium of social relations. The bhadralok travelogues underscore this processual aspect of social space. The emergent nation-space of the bhadralok travel narratives is not only a product of their spatial practice which comes out a specific social division of labour within the colonial Indian social formation but also serves as the means for constructing a spatial hegemony of the bhadralok class. The indigenous Himalaya, as a spatial metaphor of the putative Indian nation-space, becomes a means for articulating and settling questions of belonging: who belongs to the nation and to whom the nation belongs. In other words, the bhadralok travelogues deploy the indigenous Himalaya to construct a normative Indian citizenry with its attendant hierarchy.

The construction of bhadralok hegemony in the travelogues is dependent on a number of representational strategies. Most significantly, the indigenous Himalaya—despite being articulated through Hindu sacred geography—is presented as a secular space; the bhadralok becomes a ‘secular’ sojourner in the search for nature's beauty, one who is distinct from the religious pilgrim. Sen reports his conversation with a police officer from Punjab in Karnaprayag. He tells Sen that he cannot believe ‘that a man of culture like you has been taking so much trouble to go see a shrine’.Footnote ⁹² In response, Sen comments:

Importantly, though Sen speaks of the natural world as the object of his devotion, his articulation of nature is decidedly different from Tagore’s. Unlike Tagore's Wordsworthian strain that invested the Himalaya with divinity, Sen sees the natural world as a separate category in its own right. It is this distinct category of nature, shorn of its earlier divine character, that for Sen is worthy of veneration. Moreover, Sen here is not simply outlining the project of his travels in the mountains but also defining himself as a secular traveller in relation to the sacred Himalaya and its pilgrims. This move further secularizes the sacred Himalaya in addition to becoming a space for the self-definition of the bhadralok.

Indeed, Sen's depictions continue to separate out the natural from the divine, while maintaining his adoration of the beauty of nature. Moreover, the process of bhadralok self-fashioning continues with his noting the pilgrims’ lack of curiosity about the beauty of the Himalayan surrounding. He observes that the pilgrims

This foregrounding of natural scenery once again marks him out as a secular traveller, and implicitly suggests the Himalaya as a secular space. More importantly, this allows the secular bhadralok traveller to represent himself as a modern, that is, rational subject with a progressive ethos. It is important to note how the idea of nature in Sen's narrative is both similar to, and different from, Tagore’s. Like Tagore, Sen is foregrounding ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ in his representation of the Himalaya. Crucially, however—and unlike Tagore—the Himalayan ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ surroundings of the mountains do not express the immanence of the divine; instead, it is a distinct category that is separated from the religious domain. In other words, not only is Himalayan ‘nature’ reified into an independent category, it is also transformed and standardized into an independent secular entity.

Besides being a space of bhadralok self-fashioning, the indigenous Himalaya also becomes a space of cooperation between themselves and middle-class elites from elsewhere in British India. Sen's depiction of his interactions with a doctor and a police officer in Karnaprayag illustrates this point quite well. He reports an extensive conversation with the doctor on Indian politics, especially about the nationalist leader, Surendranath Banerjea, as well as on newspapers published by Indians in English such as the Bengali and the Mirror.Footnote ⁹⁵ Subsequently, Sen writes very approvingly of the police officer he meets there. His readers are told that the officer is from Ambala (in Punjab), and has a Bachelor of Arts from Lahore College. Sen and the officer discuss political issues such as the Irish Home Rule and the establishment of the Indian National Congress in addition to talking about the experience of living under colonial rule.Footnote ⁹⁶

Importantly, Sen takes great pains to point out that his conversations with the doctor as well as the police officer took place in English since neither of them is a Bengali. Indeed, the text of Himalay uses English phrases in the original or transliterated into Bengali to underline this. This stress on the knowledge of English among members of the Indian middle class, and their ability to converse is symptomatic of the establishment of the Anglo-vernacular ethos in British India.Footnote ⁹⁷ As Modhumita Roy convincingly argues, for the vast majority of middle-class Indians, acquiring a degree of felicity with the English language was not simply a cultural choice but one structured by economic necessity—the ability to earn a living—in the colonial labour market where English was the medium of transaction.Footnote ⁹⁸ English, then, became a means of production within the colonial Indian middle class. Aijaz Ahmad also reminds us that the main cultural claim of English in colonial India was a decidedly non-literary one: it was a ‘centralising language to sustain . . . [India’s] national unity—the ‘nation’ in this conception was co-terminus with exigencies of administration’.Footnote ⁹⁹ A marker of class position (and privilege) among the natives within the colonial Indian social formation, it also became crucial for the middle classes from the different ethno-linguistic homelands to communicate, and cooperate, within the space of British India.

These observations by Roy and Ahmad have a crucial spatial dimension. English allowed for a social consensus regarding the conception of that unified space by enabling the colonial Indian middle class to communicate and cooperate within the state-space of trans-regional labour. As the Indian middle class (of which the Bengali bhadralok was a constituent) travelled within the state-space of trans-regional labour for work and leisure, their spatial practice produced the unified space of the Indian nation, a space of middle-class cooperation, mediated and reaffirmed through the homogenizing impulse of the English language. Once produced, the nation-space could be deployed as counter-hegemonic to the state space of British India, and against the dominance of the British colonizers.

However, for the space of the Indian nation to be counter-hegemonic, it would have to articulate the hegemony of the middle class, that is, project that class as the dominant group in that space. Indeed, the English language—as a marker of class position and privilege—allows the middle class to underline their cultural hegemony vis-à-vis the other indigenous classes. In other words, knowledge of English separates the middle class, underlines their cultural dominance over the other native classes, and is founded upon the middle class's position of economic superiority in relation to other indigenous classes.

This has a number of important consequences for the Bengali bhadralok travelogues. Foremost, since English is posited as the norm for social intercourse that mediates the middle-class's cooperation, the travel narratives disavow other pre-colonial languages of pan-Indian importance, namely Sanskrit and Persian, which could claim to produce alternative conceptions of a unified and homogenous space of the nation. Consequently, to underline the normative nature of the Anglo-vernacular ethos, Sen repeatedly underscores the redundancy of these languages in his narrative. For instance, Sen notes that his companion, the Bengali monk, Achyutananda Saraswati, is learned in Sanskrit but does not fail to mention the monk's lack of English.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Moreover, throughout his narrative Sen depicts Hindu mendicants and monks as cheats. Not only does this move resonate with the refusal to grant Sanskrit—the language of Hindu scripture and liturgy—the status of the language of cooperation enjoyed by English, it also gestures towards the bhadralok’s misgivings about the social group most familiar with it. Moreover, according to Hindu scripture, taking the vow of renunciation is necessary to enter the fold of Hindu monks. This means that ordained monks not only renounce all property relations and familial ties to become a kind of universal citizen, they also voluntarily give up their place in the labour force and move beyond the pale of wage relationships introduced into the Indian sub-continent through the auspices of colonial capitalist modernity. Hindu monks, by virtue of their unique position within the Indian social formation—appropriators of surplus like the bhadralok but, unlike them, not part of any relationship founded on wage labour—must therefore be denigrated and discursively evacuated from the putative nation-space. In addition, Sen comments repeatedly on his own ignorance of Persian but is quick to emphasize that his knowledge of English trumps this lack.

Further, the bhadralok’s attempts at fashioning their hegemony in the space of the Indian nation lead to the projection of the local inhabitants of the Himalaya as ‘not quite Indian’. This allows them to differentiate themselves from their ‘others’ and establish a hierarchy among the citizenry of the putative Indian nation. Importantly, the bhadralok travellers’ representational means for fashioning this hegemony are singularly unlike those of the colonizers and their travel narratives. Unlike the colonial travelogues that rely on the screening effect of the picturesque mode to evacuate the natives from their land, the Bengali bhadralok deploys a more inclusive strategy.Footnote ¹⁰¹ They depict the local population of the Himalayan lands as different and inferior to themselves. This is most tellingly present in Bharati's description of the inhabitants of the British Indian frontier. Describing the town of Niti as the frontier of British India, he notes that after that town, India ends and Tibet begins.Footnote ¹⁰² For Bharati, the political liminality of Niti seems to manifest itself in the practices of the locals living in and around that town. He refers to them repeatedly as prantobashi (‘border-people’) and, in a virtuoso display of cultural othering, writes:

Bharati's description of the locals portrays them as morally suspect and attempts to undermine their Hindu identity. By depicting them as border dwellers, that is, inhabitants of the periphery of British India, he also projects them as marginal to both the colonial state-space as well as the putative Indian nation-space. Further, through a process of negation of the ‘border-people’, Bharati not only constructs his own elite Anglo-vernacular Bengali identity but also implicitly claims that class's centrality in the emergent Indian nation-space.

The travelogues of Sen and Bharati completely exclude women from the space of their narratives. Apart from stray references to the Himalayan womenfolk, as in the extract above, none of the characters depicted by the authors in the space of the Himalaya are women. Neither does Sen or Bharati mention women from the bhadralok fold. The total absence of women from the Himalaya and, by extension, the space of the putative Indian nation gestures towards the space of middle-class cooperation as one of male homosociality. This space of male companionship, however, serves another function. As a virile space it also allows for the construction and performance of masculinity that allows the Bengali—designated non-martial and effeminate by his colonial masters—to counter their stereotyping by the British.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Sen's account of his being nursed back to health by his companions after being stung by a scorpion is an important instance of male homosociality in his narrative. He notes that when the sting of the scorpion left him in intense pain and with a high fever, it was his (male) companions who took care of him and his wound. In what appears to be the ultimate image of male homosociality, Sen notes that his travelling companion—a Hindu monk—‘not knowing what else to do, placed me on his lap like my mother’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The image of the monk holding the author in his lap evokes the image of care and nurture typically associated with women. However, owing to the absence of women from the narrative, it is performed by another man underlining the homosocial nature of the Himalayan space of cooperation. Moreover, by stressing his endurance of the dangers and vicissitudes of the journey in the Himalaya, Sen gestures towards an ideal of Bengali virility.

The idea of the virile Bengali in the homosocial Himalaya is further underscored when Sen narrates his journey to the cave associated with Veda Vyas, the mythical author of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. He makes it quite clear that his interest in the cave is not religious, and proceeds with his companions despite protests from priests who warn him against the dangers of the way. Sen recounts how he and his companions braved frozen rivers and snow-covered mountainsides to reach the cave, how he feared for his life during this trek. After reaching their destination successfully Sen is quite impressed with his achievement, noting that ‘the sons of Bengal may not have discovered new and dangerous lands like Livingstone or Stanley and it is unlikely we shall ever do that . . . However, if the need arises Bengalis can surely do what Livingstone and Stanley have done.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is crucial to note that Sen comments on the ability of the ‘sons’ of Bengal to achieve the feats of exploration and discovery. By comparing himself and his companions to the renowned Victorian explorers, and the Himalaya to the ‘dark continent’, he constructs the idea of ‘masculinity’ for himself and other members of the male bhadralok class. Such a move serves to underline the exclusion of women—even female members of the bhadralok class—from the space of the putative Indian nation.