Vol. 8, Issue 7, Part E (2022)

This paper examines three key publications in the historiography of European travel accounts of South Asia: Nicholas Dew’s Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, Jean Pau Rubié’s Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through the European Eyes, 1250-1625 and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800. The paper argues that these works have had a significant impact on the way that European travel accounts are studied and interpreted. Edward Said's Orientalism is a seminal work in postcolonial studies. In this book, Said argues that European representations of the Orient are not objective or neutral but are instead shaped by the power relations between Europe and the Orient. Said's work has been influential in the study of European travel accounts, as it has led scholars to consider the ways in which these accounts are shaped by the author's perspective and the historical context in which they were written. Nicholas Dew’s Orientalism is a study of the ‘Orientalism before Orientalism’, or the prehistory of Said’s Orientalism which took shape when power relations between Europe and India were not the same as after colonisation. Jean Pau Rubié’s work takes us back even further in reconstructing the prehistory of Orientalism to the days of Vijayanagara Empire. Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s book focuses on the period 1500-1800 and includes a variety of European sources (Portuguese, French, English) to argue out how Said’s founding work can be refined further to basically make the same point. The paper concludes by arguing that these three works have had a significant impact on the way that European travel accounts are studied and interpreted. These works have led scholars to consider the ways in which these accounts are shaped by the author’s perspective, the historical context in which they were written, and the author's positionality.