India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s

Abstract

We argue that India/the Indian subcontinent was part of the cultural and political imaginary of the United States from its inception and performed important ideological work in articulating the nation in the post-Revolutionary period and through the nineteenth century. This introduction frames the “the idea of India” in the American imaginary within a transnational lens that is attentive to global flows of goods, people, and ideas within the circuits of imperial and maritime economies in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. Situating the hitherto understudied protean dimensions of the influence of India on American political and cultural life within the triangulated relationship between Britain, the United States, and India, we trace the ways in which they came to inflect debates on race, religion, gender, and national self-image in the nineteenth century.

Fort St. George is a handsome brick fortification. It appears very strong but is probably too much extended to make as able a defence as might otherwise be done. It contains a regular built town, containing several houses, many stores, shops etc. besides an English Church, the Government offices and accommodations for the troops. In the public square, in the middle of the Fort, is a statue of Marquis Cornwallis, lately brought from England. Not being entirely finished it was kept covered while we were here, but was to be opened with a great parade in a few days, on the anniversary of the victory gained by that nobleman under the walls of Seringapatam , which produced peace with Tippoo. The public buildings attract no attention from their splendour. No black is permitted to go into the Fort in a palanquin; they must walk in from the gates. All the European merchants have their stores in the Fort. They generally live a few miles from the Fort in the country.

—Captain Dudley Leavitt Pickman, The Journal of the Belisarius, 1799–1800

A stranger, the first moment he sees an Indian city is probably more astonished, his curiosity more awakened, perhaps delighted, than it can be in visiting the first European cities. Although the latter may be decorated with more superb palaces and public buildings, although you find in than much more refinement and luxury, yet they cannot in my opinion excite half the emotion that you feel on first seeing the former. To be placed instantaneously in a crowded city, its houses are styled differently, streets thronged with every cast and kind from the pale European resident to the jet black Kauffree/ Caffie. Thousands of men and women almost naked, others though dressed yet so singularly as to exact attention, from the turban’d Turk to the “sans culottes” coolee—in fact English, Americans, French and Portuguese, Armenians and Jews, Parsees, Gentoos and Mahommedans, each wearing the costume of his nation, displaying its peculiar manners. I am sure that when I entered the city of Paris , so famed for wonders, my curiosity was by no means so raised as at Bombay .

—William A. Rogers, Journal containing Remarks and Observations during a Voyage to India: The Journal of the Tartar 1817–1818