ABSTRACT
Many scholarly studies on travel writings in India and the colonial world in general have demonstrated the imperial agenda that belied the purportedly innocent cultural activity of recording travels. Colonial travel literature, together with landscape paintings and cartographic projects, charted out a territory. In this light, I talk about the co-textuality of these practices when looking at the Himalayan region. While the Himalayas were framed aesthetically through the visual paradigms of the “sublime and the picturesque”, the region underwent various expeditions in the name of science and intelligence while all these projects were recounted fervently in travel narratives bearing romanticist resonances. The charting of the Himalayas was crucial in view of its figuration as the boundary of the South Asian peninsula, its strategic importance as the frontier and the conceptualisation of the insiders and the other in the colonial consciousness. This essay takes the instance of James Baillie Fraser’s travel writings and his paintings representing various locations in the Himalayas to look at the imbrications of these practices, while addressing a sub-text based on an ethnic Scottish streak in the travel writings of James Baillie Fraser (who was of a Scottish origin), which worked in collusion with and often masqueraded as British colonialism.
