Behramji Malabari was a writer and social reformer who wrote out of a social context far removed from the previous two writers. He was part of an Indian social movement of the time that saw several others sail to Britain in the nineteenth century. In Malabari‟s case, the specific motivation behind his travel to Britain was to lobby the British government on the issue of widow remarriage and raising the age of consent for women in India. Born into the small but elite Parsi community in Bombay, Malabari wrote within the era of high colonialism, whereas Taleb and Mahomed wrote out of an age still being imperially shaped. His career as a writer could best be described as interdisciplinary: he can variously be described as anthropologist, journalist, poet, social activist and travel writer. In the opening section of his travelogue, The Indian Eye on English Life: or, Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer, published in 1893, Malabari self-consciously presses his claims as a scholar of reverse Orientalism. He proclaims:
What could be more natural for a student of humanity, a pilgrim in search of the truths of life, than that he should now wish for a look at the other world, beyond the seas, whose fortunes are so closely knit with those of his own country? (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 1-2)
He instantly asserts himself within the grand narrative of modernity by professing that „no study is so absorbing for a man as a study of human progress; no method so successful for it as the comparative method.‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 2) However, Malabari shifts the centre ground from the metropole to the colony: Britain is balanced against India, British manners are compared to Indian social mores, both societies are probed for their similarities as well as their differences; however, the „gaze‟ is directed from within the colony. The power structure of
colonial representation is reversed, but not imitated. Malabari acts as critic for British society but India is not framed as a yardstick in the way the classic Orientalist would reference his criticisms of the Other against a civilised, moral, progressive, stable and ultimately superior West.
Social and political analysis is embedded within the text but the text is not constructed as a social tract or commentary, it is a series of episodes and sketches that describe Malabari‟s wanderings in the city, interspersed with social criticism. However, it always remains faithful to the conventions of European travel writing. Simonti Sen argues that the appropriation of certain Western forms perversely empowered travellers like Malabari to turn their eye critically on to their imperial „masters.‟124
Although Simonti Sen‟s focus was specifically Bengali travel literature, it is indeed apposite when applied to Malabari‟s The Indian Eye; his narration expresses deep concern and reservation about the spread of industrialisation. He proclaims, „fierce is the struggle for existence in the West. Life and health are being ground down under the wheels of modern civilisation.‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 122) Capitalism is chided for the social inequality inflicted upon the lower classes, „due to the arrogance of capital in its dealing with labour, especially with unskilled labour.‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 122-23) Indian society is portrayed as more innocent and altruistic than the modernising British social order. Malabari objects to British culture and its cult of individualism when he pleads:
Let us remain ignorant in India. I had much rather that India remained superstitious enough to worship her stone-God. That means something of self-sacrifice; it lifts the worshipper out of himself. The worship of self is the worst form of idolatry. (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 75)
British conceptions of progress are rejected by Malabari as wholly applicable to the various communities in India. Instead, he reverses the „gaze‟ of judgement that
would denounce India as a society riven by inequality within the lexicon of Orientalism, and pleads for a re-evaluation of the values he views in Europe which conflate self-interest with progress and modernity.
The crucial difference that separates Malabari‟s project from that of the conventional Orientalist, as criticised by Said, is the fervour with which he pursues social reform within India. Indian society and his own cultural roots are cherished and defended at various points but they are also critiqued where modern and Western values are deemed superior. Sen has argued that these contradictory impulses were at the heart of many Indian travellers who made the journey to the West:
The fact of Indianness [was] a fact of shame as well as pride - shame in the subjecthood, backwardness and worldly impotence ... [but also] pride not only in ... reaction or hitting back, but in the more sedate sense of belonging to cultural norms and forms that one cherishes and cannot live without. (Simonti Sen, Travels to Europe Self and Other, 15)
India is variously described as „poor, ignorant and superstitious‟ (Malabari, The
Indian Eye, 125) by Malabari who is not afraid to counterpoint his own society negatively with the social structure of Britain. When praising the charitable nature of British society, he writes: „there is no caste or sect here to slay the hand of charity; workers in the field of humanity work together as brothers and sisters, giving readily unto all that are ready.‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 88) As a travel writer, Malabari is not just reporting back his testimony to the Indian reader on the intricacies of Western modernity, he engages in a complex negotiation with his own connections to European constructs and his alienation from Indian norms. The fact of travel brings into focus his displacement from Indian norms and subsequent commitment to Western modernity; however, this displacement evokes a sense of re-engagement
with what has been left behind; the journey West leads Malabari to a place that complicates his conceptions of home and abroad.
Inderpal Grewal analogously states that „travel, as a mode of understanding and as a discourse of power … constructs authenticity through separation and alienation from what is traditional … [but also as] a means to regain that land‟ and this dynamic of loss and gain „created subjects such as Malabari with complex modes of connection to ... [the West] as well as to an emerging notion of Self and community.‟ (Grewal, Home and Harem, 144) The fact of travel for Malabari, presents a shift in his theoretical assumptions held before his journey; it also leads him to variously challenge colonial pretensions of masculinity. By embarking on a journey to the imperial centre, he is able to expose Britain as unable to fulfil itself within the epistemological framework it presents to colonised people in India. Grewal states that Malabari‟s travelogue challenges Orientalist definitions of the West, not just in its framing of the Orient, but also in that it offers a „critical view of England that does not fulfil the rhetoric of the Colonizers.‟ (Grewal, Home and Harem, 151)
Malabari‟s narration, though hyperbolic at times when comparing India to Britain, exhorts: „poor as India is, I thank god she knows not much of the poverty to which parts of Great Britain have been accustomed – the East end of London, for instance ... and other congested centres of life.‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 85) Malabari picturesquely narrates that „side by side with such heart rending scenes of misery one sees gorgeously dressed, luxury, flaunting ... in the streets ... here, again, one has a vivid picture of the extremes of wealth and poverty.‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 86-7) Western modernity is described as splintering the connection between
„body and soul‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 85) and Britain is „described as a land of extremes,‟ (Malabari, The Indian Eye, 31) again another reversal of Orientalist definitions that would instinctually posit India within such a framework. The next passage probes the varying technologies of sex that were being constructed within Victorian society by asking what effect colonial travellers had on these social constructions. Were these incursions commensurable with or antagonistic to Victorian conceptions of civility and sexual propriety?