Interrogating Orientalism
Hindu Festivals and Travellers’ Tales in the Colonial Indian Ocean
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11944186 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Crispin Bates (0000-0002-1978-5106, Sunway University, Selangor, Malaysia, corresponding author), Marina Carter (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 300-322 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-30 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-6534 • E-ISSN: 1743-9329 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03086534.2023.2167263 |
| OpenAlex | W4319788141 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
Thimithi – the Tamil Hindu fire-walking ceremony has always attracted the attention of the curious and the thrill seeker and remains a tourist attraction as well as the performance of a solemn vow in many parts of the world where it continues to be enacted. A source of much speculation as to the participants’ apparent ability to withstand the pain of walking over hot coals, travellers’ often exaggerated accounts of eye witness attendance at such events regularly graced the columns of western journals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article focusses on an unusual investigation carried out in colonial Mauritius in mid-1874. The enquiry resulted from a published description of thimithi written by Nicolas Pike, former American consul on the island which caused concern at the colonial office in London, who asked for an explanation. This produced a set of reports, firstly by British police officers, and secondly, but more remarkably, by leading members of the Tamil community on Mauritius. Their detailed and occasionally humorous responses to the western orientalist gaze deftly unpick the absurdities and hypocrisies of the so-called ruling caste whilst their very involvement serves to complicate our understanding of the relationship between white settler and Indian ‘subject’ in the mid-Victorian colonial empire
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Caste · Ceremony · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Hinduism · Homeland · Literature · Orientalism · Political science · Subject (documents · Tamil · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies
Was Hinduism Invented?
Castes of Mind
"Comparative Studies in Society and History"
The Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon
Conjuring images of India in nineteenth-century Britain
Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal
The Self-Respect Movement and Tamil Politics of Belonging in Interwar British Malaya, 1929-1939
| Highly cited | No |
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