Paper short abstract:

A reading of Landan-yātrā (Journey to London), a travelogue by Hardevi of Lahore published in 1888, with focus on the narrator of the text, and her staging of self-transformation through encounters with the wider world, structured and published with an explicitly didactic purpose.

Paper long abstract:

In February 1886 Shrimati Hardevi of Lahore undertook a long journey, by rail and ship, to London. Her account of her travels, titled Landan-yātrā (Journey to London), would be published some years later. My paper is a study of this travelogue, which was written by an educated, reformist woman member of the Indian elite, while she was still in her twenties.

I focus on the narrator of the text, and how this figure changes with growing distance from home. These changes are staged in a variety of ways: dramatic accounts of Hardevi being questioned by village elders, outpourings of grief for chickens cruelly killed to satisfy angrez meat-eaters, pointed escapes into lyricism and soliloquy, carefully ordered events that add up to an ethical or political instruction, and the constant refrain 'Dear readeress', intended to create a collectivity of readers and listeners qualified only by their gender.

I argue that Landan-yātrā is meant to nourish and sustain just such a collectivity; that it is meant to show the benefits of travel and escape from the domestic sphere; and that it does so not through reformist harangues about women's inadequacies, but a careful staging of pleasant and unpleasant experiences that have taught its narrator something. Hardevi engages with India, Egypt, Italy, Switzerland and France (though not, curiously, London) as a private, individual mediator between her readeresses and the wider world. She does so with the explicit intention, outlined in her preface, of helping create a polity (samāj) and society (sosāiṭī) of women.