Traveller as historian

Travel and Ethnography allows us to see the pre-history of imperialist discourse which was driven more by practical concerns than an Orientalist agenda. Travel is not necessarily a prelude to empire, says DILIP MENON.

TRAVEL is seen by postcolonial theory as a prelude to empire, and the traveller is represented as a peculiarly jaundiced individual whose perception is already predetermined by a European demonology of the Orient. What is missing in these accounts is a sense of history - that there is a change in European perceptions of the rest of the world from the 14th to the 19th Century; a sense of diversity - that texts by merchants, monks, ordinary travellers and colonial officials may occupy diverse intellectual worlds; a sense of the context in which knowledge is produced - that travellers may reproduce local knowledges and prejudices as much as import some of their own; and a sense that knowledge is not necessarily cumulative - the 18th Century traveller does not represent the apogee of prejudices honed since the 14th Century.

Rubies's book is an erudite, engaging and lucid account of travel writing in the Renaissance, particularly with regard to South India. Its lightly worn scholarship allows the reader to engage with the sheer diversity of individual representation. Rubies makes three significant arguments. First, that even early missionary discourse could accommodate an appreciation of the civilisation of the Orient while maintaining the possibility of native religion being idolatrous and in need of reform. Second, a lot of the writing on Asia which made its way to Europe was written by laypersons with limited access to law, theology and the emerging scholarly discourse of the superiority of European Christian civilisation. This writing represented the practical concerns of merchants, soldiers and crown officials who, as yet, had no particular axe to grind. Third, there was a general interpretive framework centred on the importance of the city, kingship and rituals. Rubies points out that dismissal of foreign societies on the grounds of incompatible religious ideologies was never an impediment to the discussion of varying laws and customs.

Following the Renaissance, a new empirical geography was beginning to replace the earlier maps of religious pilgrimage influenced by the imagination of the Crusades. The writings of Marco Polo in the 13th Century represent this shift: a lay person's individual observations. Marco Polo also wrote with the assumption not of radical difference but with the idea that "where there is power and law there must also be faith". Rubies is rightly impatient with the idea that Polo was conditioned to see Asia in terms of the marvellous and the monstrous. He shows how Polo tried to evolve an ethnographic approach that tried to engage with legends of unicorns and pigmies keeping their context in mind.

Renaissance geography had begun to question the veracity of the geographical vision of the ancient world - of Ptolemy and Strabo - and even peripatetic merchants and soldiers were being required to meet the critical standards of the humanists. Nicolo Conti's account made travel the structure for geographical, economic and ethnographic description. Following upon the urban experience of the Renaissance, cities became the centres of geographical analysis and the Vijayanagara kingdom begins its life within European discourse as an embodiment of civility. Crucially, the emerging discourse of civilisation centres more on urbanity and kingship and is independent of Christian theology. The Renaissance had seen the reintroduction of pagan gods within the Christian imagination and the discussion even of idolatry in India takes place within an analytical structure seeking parallels with Christianity. The discussion of sati too tries to temper the alienness of the practice by looking at it within the framework of the dignity of choice by the widow. The idea of the traveller as a model of "audacity, survival and self regulation" is central. The traveller presents his account as a "decontextualised individual" and his claim to authority is based on personal experience - however rhetorical this claim may be.

Understanding the Portuguese presence (Portugal has not been mentioned before. Is this book mainly about Portuguese travellers?) in India needs a fragmented approach largely because of the unreliability of the criminal exiles, renegades and humble folk who made up the enterprise. Portugal was hardly a coherent imperial power and Rubies points out that the weaker the Europeans felt, the more they tried to understand with precision. Vijayanagara emerges again as a sophisticated political entity because of its strategic importance in the horse trade, the possibility of its being an ally against Calicut; a melange of reasons presided over by no absolute principle of perception of "the Orient". From 1500, the Portuguese presence generated more information and the Malabar Coast became one of the better-mapped areas of the Renaissance world. Duarte Barbosa's account of what he saw and heard in the Orient abounds in ethnographical description and an attempt to decode indigenous societal rules empirically rather than normatively. As Rubies puts it, human culture was ranked hierarchically according to political and economic success and for Barbosa, Vijayanagara represented a society that could equal or surpass his own.

It is with the crisis of Catholicism following the collapse of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and the influence of the Counter Reformation that a change is perceived. The spate of critical travel accounts by missionaries from the 17th Century takes Christianity as the standard of judgement; gentile religion becomes nothing more than devilish superstition. European colonial expansion would produce its own intemperate discourse from the 18th Century. What Rubies allows us to see is the pre- history of an imperial discourse without allowing us the lazy comfort of a teleology which sees Renaissance travel accounts as a prelude to the Orientalist imagination. This is a stimulating, sophisticated and empirically rich work which needs to be read by everyone concerned with the current Manichaeanism of academic discourse: European discourse bad; native discourse good.

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, Joan Pao Rubies, Cambridge University Press, 2000, price not mentioned.

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