ABSTRACT
In the preface to his travel memoirs, published in 1793, William Hodges observed that English readers had been furnished with much scholarly writing on the laws, religion and polity of India, ‘but of the face of the country, of its arts, and natural productions’, he lamented, ‘little has yet been said’. To supply this deficiency in what he goes on to call, more succinctly, ‘the topographical department’, was the object of his book and—we may infer—of his three-year tour in India which it describes. 1
