Indo-Muslim Travelers and English Literary Culture, 1760-1820

FAIN: FT-59589-12

Humberto Garcia
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

This book project corrects Edward Said's influential claim that Muslims could not speak for themselves in the West. It argues that the writings of Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, Sake Dean Mahomet, Ghulam Husain, and Mirza Abu Taleb Khan--Indo-Muslim travelers who visited or lived in eighteenth-century England--indirectly shaped the aesthetic, political, and literary sensibilities associated with British Romanticism. By treating these Indo- Muslim writers as central to English literary culture, this project challenges both the belief that Romantic Orientalism was created uniquely in the West and the assumption that it was subsequently diffused, or imposed, elsewhere. It significantly revises British imperial and literary history by stressing the crucial role of circulation, mediation, and translation in the construction of Romantic notions and practices as they moved between continents and communities.

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