The republication of A Princess's Pilgrimage adds richly to our understanding of the Muslim and British Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth century. This account of Nawab Sikandar Begum's 1863 hajj from Bhopal to Mecca provides insights into how Indian Muslim women viewed the geography and culture of the Arabian Peninsula from a diverse set of religious, imperial, and personal assumptions. The editor, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, provides an excellent introduction and afterword to the original text, which was first translated by E. L. Willoughby and published in London in 1870.

Begum's account of her travel is important to historians and literary scholars because it is the first published memoir by an Indian woman partaking in hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. While the book's publication highlights the increasing tendency of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Muslims, whether in India or elsewhere, to write about their pilgrimage experiences, few nineteenth-century women wrote about their experiences, even though women had been active participants in the hajj for centuries. What had changed by the time of Begum's visit to Mecca was the introduction of British imperial rule throughout much of the subcontinent. British rule brought with it its increasingly expansive system of railways, challenges to local cultural and religious practices, and an inquisitive Enlightenment mind-set that sought to classify, categorize, and “improve.” The publication of the book was itself largely a result of empire: Begum traveled to Mecca using British railways and ships, claimed the status of a British subject, wrote the manuscript at the behest of John William Willoughby-Osborne, and, finally, had Willoughby-Osborne's wife translate the Persian into English before its publication.

While British imperialism was a major reason the book was published, Begum's memoir was the result of hundreds of years of women's traveling to Mecca. Women from India had been visiting Mecca since the women of Akbar's family and court went to Mecca while he stayed in India (xxii). During Begum's lifetime, just as today, hajj remained a “scripted visit,” with rituals and routines prescribed by tradition (xxiii). Because of the assumed orthodoxy of hajj, it is therefore revealing that Begum's depiction of the division between Arab and Indian Muslims during her trip to Mecca differed greatly from that of the universalist ideals usually associated with the ummah and hajj.

In addition to revealing the diversity of religious experience, the book helps to reposition our understanding of such concepts as “Orientalism,” “center,” and “periphery.” What becomes apparent is that as a “Muslim,” an “Indian,” and a “British subject,” Begum disliked the Arabs and Turks she met. Begum portrayed her experiences in the Ottoman Empire negatively. She derided the civil servants who sought bribes and angrily criticized the lack of hygiene and cleanliness in the cities. She describes the slave trade with abhorrence. Reading the memoir makes it abundantly clear that while the British Empire around the Indian Ocean basin reinforced hierarchical notions of race and ethnicity, it also contributed, through the idea of “British subjects,” to a more egalitarian conception of movements of people. One cannot help but wonder how the reverberations of the Don Pacifico affair affected Begum's actions in the Ottoman Empire, but she clearly asserts herself a British subject (8) with all of the rights of an English (wo)man. Yet while Begum, and imaginably other Indians, conceived of themselves as British subjects, she angrily decries how Arabs and Turks “consider it a meritorious act to oppress the natives of India” (29). This suggests that the national development of the idea of “India” was also defined against “Arabia,” in addition to the usually discussed binaries of “white”/“Indian” and “Muslim”/“Hindu.”

Any published memoir is valuable both for what it says and for what it does not say. The book connects the Indian Ocean and the Muslim world together intellectually but, surprisingly, reveals nothing of the ocean journey from Bombay to Jeddah (Jidda). This stands in stark contrast to European descriptions of ocean travel, which describe the calling at various ports, the social life on the ship, and the scenes on the sea. Lambert-Hurley astutely notes that the book is also devoid of religious introspection, reading like a classificatory listing instead of a devotional and spiritual journey (xlii–xliii). It is difficult to know whether this is Begum's own interpretation, if it reflects British imperial attitudes in print literature, or if the translator wrote the book that she thought the British audience wanted.

The reader will enjoy the main narrative of Begum's journey, and the scholar will find a nuanced understanding of the complexities of identity, imperialism, and religion in the introduction and afterword. There is little to criticize in the editor's scholarly analysis. If anything, the introduction too easily downplays the fact that Begum herself may have held racist and Orientalist notions about the Arabs and Turks whom she met on her travels. On the whole, Lambert-Hurley's remarks tend to cleave as closely to fact as is possible with a memoir with a difficult provenance. The republication of this book—with its excellent introduction and afterword—should be celebrated by historians studying the Indian Ocean basin, the history of Islam, travel writing, and women's history.