Historic Engagements with Occidental Cultures, Religions, Powers

The volume under review offers a mirror image of Orientalism. It both documents and analyses the perception of the West, including occasional instances of misconceptions, by non-Western writers, especially travellers. Divided into four sections, the book recounts the impressions of travellers from such diverse regions as Northern Africa and Western Asia, Southern Asia, and Eastern and South-Eastern Asia. It succeeds remarkably in capturing the various facets of transcultural encounters, particularly colonial ones, between the West and other communities. As we cannot provide a critical assessment of all the articles comprised in the book, due to constraints of space, we shall focus on one of them written by Masood Ashraf Raja “Aja’ibat-e-Farang: Yusuf Khan Kambalposh’s Metropolitan Journey and the Ways of Seeing the West.” (pp. 133–143) With deep insight, Raja has examined Yusuf Khan’s (1803–1861) travelogue of 1837–1838. The latter’s travelogue belongs to the era of British/Western ascendancy, when Indian/Oriental society was militarily, politically, intellectually and culturally impoverished. For Kambalposh, a colonised traveller, it was a journey to a wondrous and gorgeous seat of power and might, and a land which appeared to him as a place of which even the heavens could be envious. He was struck and stupefied by the astounding materiality of England. His account of the splendour of things English leaves these distinct impressions on his readers: the mightiness of the West, on the one hand, and the inferiority complex and even self-loathing of the natives, on the other.