| Sumario: | This article focuses on Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in India (1812) in order to examine the role of mobility in the configuration of difference in the British Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. It shows how Graham’s reading and representation of bodies in India as frenetically active, directionless or completely still, enabled her to configure Indians as inherently inferior to Europeans, where bodies moved with purpose, effecting ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’. Her characterisation of India as a ‘stagnant’ civilisation drew on, and resonated with, contemporary European accounts of India. Yet unlike her male counterparts, Graham elided a gendered discourse of ‘effeminacy’ and ‘emasculation’, replacing it, instead, with a discourse of mobility as a key signifier of inferiority. Placing Graham’s Journal in the context of the consolidation of East India Company power in Western and Central India, the article argues that Graham’s use of a discourse of mobility formed part of the construction of a ‘grammar of difference’ that provided the cultural foundations of imperial rule.
|
|---|