Dean Mahomet’s Travels : multiple borders, cross-cultural spaces, and syncretic identity (Article)

• Main Author: Chakravarty, Chandrava
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148299
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

My study of Dean Mahomet’s Travels, written in 1793–94, highlights the syncretic nature of experiences unleashed by European colonialism. Travels offers a fascinating account of the life, experience, and perspective of an Indian Muslim under the East India Company. Mahomet (also known as Sake Dean Mahomed) traveled extensively through Northern India and wrote about his experiences for a fictitious European friend. This essay studies the text as an example of resistance and self-fashioning through the assimilation and subsequent subversion of Orientalist ethnography. Mahomet’s work is a suitable rejoinder to the historically pertinent question framed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Who speaks of the Indian past?” We hear, perhaps for the first time, the voice of a “subaltern” writer, who manipulates the Eurocentric historiography of the colonial times to challenge the “center” and “margins” of the Western imperial discourse.