Beyond Fellow-Feeling? Anglo-Indian Sympathy in the Travelogues of Eliza Fay, Maria Graham, and Fanny Parks

The article examines the Indian travelogues of Eliza Fay, Maria Graham, and Fanny Parks along the trajectory of a discourse of sympathy that the writers employ as a via media between sentimental participation in and detached appreciation of cultural difference. Thanks to intellectually engaging and ethically nuanced approaches, whereby sexual, cultural, and racial binaries are interrogated and questioned, these narratives offer enlightening examples of a new sensibility in action in the community of Anglo-Indians undergoing the transition from colonizing subjects to imperial agents. Despite the markedly nineteenth-century tone of their rhetoric, Fay’s, Graham’s, and Park’s endorsement of colonial sympathy draws extensively from its most sophisticated and authoritative eighteenth-century British apologists, namely Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and William Jones. Their composite outlook on the Indian question – which combines philosophical universalism and culture-specific sensibility with developmental historicism and utilitarian concerns – throws an interesting light on the complex, and as yet partly uncharted, cultural revolution that accompanied the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain. Beside championing a critical reappraisal of the significant role played by Eliza Fay, Maria Graham, and Fanny Parks in the tradition of the Indian travelogue, the article intends to show how sympathy accommodates a double-edged discourse caught between the imperial gaze and anti-conquest rhetoric, thus working at once as a powerful hegemonic tool for the nation’s stability and as a deeply fractured and, to some extent, heretical ideological construct.