![]() ![]() “He writes from the viewpoint of a sympathizer and native collaborator with the Company’s army,” according to Narain. ![]() In Ireland, in fact, he married a Protestant and converted to Christianity. ![]() As Narain writes, Travels “joins…European accounts as a document of the initial expansion of the British presence in India in the second half of the eighteenth century.” While the genre was dominated by Europeans, “Mahomet’s text…provides a detailed account of Indian culture and people and their first large-scale encounters with the British from the point of view of the Indian traveler.”Īs Narain shows, Mahomet was something of a border crosser, performing “balancing act of the marginalized insider.” He was “writing to familiarize alien identity and culture for the British public.” As a Muslim in a Hindu-majority country, as a member of the British East India Company’s mercenary army (made up of Hindus and Muslims fighting Muslims and Hindus), as an Indian in Ireland and England, Mahomet was a “complex diasporic subject.” On one hand, Mahomet’s text gives the perspective of an Other on Britain’s growing presence in South Asia. Mahomet was “writing to familiarize alien identity and culture for the British public.” ![]()
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