Tanutrushna Panigrahi
Assistant Professor, Humanities Education, International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Email: tanutrushna@iiit-bh.ac.
Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.25
Abstract
The Travels of Dean Mahomet is a 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as a camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company’s army between 1769 and 1784. Mahomet’s Travel includes his journey in India and to the West in which the Indian view of the British rule in India has been recorded. A rereading of the text from the Global South literary perspectives, both contests and agreements, unfolds how the text engages both in colonial and postcolonial concerns simultaneously and create spaces for new literary encounters. The book’s power to negotiate with postcolonial accounts; to demonstrate the existence of multilateral voices, and a multiculturalist’s north-south dialogues comes both from the act of travel and the act of writing. The text plays the victimological narrative take/approach; colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance binaries, non-Eurocentric perspectives and subsequently moves beyond the radical dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized and the imperialist/nationalist divide of the eighteenth century. More importantly, through the very act of writing it provides a shift of focus from postcolonial to the Global South. A significant literary voice from the non-western location needs to be revisited, established and re-established. This paper aims to read the travel narrative of Dean Mahomet in this context, to explore how the non-European perspectives demonstrate the existence of multilateral voices that participated in the process of imperialism.
Keywords: Global South, Colonial India, Cultural Hegemony, Eurocentric, Orientalism