Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Culture of Travel

This interdisciplinary study examines how the narratives and discourses of travel reveal the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender; and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. In her look at England, the author draws on 19th century aesthetics, landscape art and debates about women's suffrage and working class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad. This work is the first to discuss Indian women travelling West as well as English women travelling East and is a truly transnational study of the interaction of ideas between cultures.