Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah’s “Fairy-land”: a “hindoo Lady of Madras” in Victorian London

Chatterjee, Arup K. (2024) Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah’s “Fairy-land”: a “hindoo Lady of Madras” in Victorian London. Studies in Travel Writing. pp. 1-21. ISSN 1364-5145

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Abstract

In Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah's Pictures of England (1876) (the first known English account of a female Indian traveller's experiences of England and Europe), London represented a stage of realist mobilities of her person and her social and aesthetic identities – a privilege otherwise inaccessible to a swarming majority of nineteenth-century South Asians. The Pictures elucidates a political paradigm when elite (including Brahminical) Indian sensibilities were divided between two potentially incompatible drives. One was to enunciate their will to reform hierarchical inequities of Hindu and Indian society from within, without colonial support. The other was to ally with selective models of Anglican sensibilities, which could invariably prolong such inequities through means other than religion and caste. Nevertheless, the Pictures can still be considered an important specimen to highlight the coproduction of Victoriana by non-British factors, in a kind of unremunerated affective labour of placemaking by Indians of the nineteenth-century imperial capital.

Item Type: Article
Keywords: London | Ragaviah | Victoriana | nineteenth century | Pictures of England | Typogravia
Subjects: Social Sciences and humanities > Arts and Humanities > History
Social Sciences and humanities > Arts and Humanities > Literature and Literary Theory
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Gender Studies
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Social Sciences (General)
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Geography
JGU School/Centre: Jindal Global Law School
Depositing User: Arjun Dinesh
Date Deposited: 17 Feb 2025 07:33
Last Modified: 17 Feb 2025 07:33
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2024.2400990
URI: https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/9131

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