Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (review)

An eminently readable book, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze unravels the mysteries of the tropics in India as constructed by nineteenth-century Europeans. It is not environmental history in the strictest sense—a study of what David Arnold calls the "real" world of nature—but a postmodern interpretation of landscape as a cultural text. Arnold uses a range of sources, including Paul Carter, Michel Foucault, and Bernard Cohn, to suggest that the "tropics were invented as much as they were encountered" by the British in India and to argue that the idea of the tropics as "warm, fecund, luxuriant, paradisical and pestilential" was a critical ingredient in the larger colonising process (5–7). Arnold focuses on the idea of scientific tropicality and notes that the British brought to bear on their idea of India very different landscape perceptions and ideologies that influenced agricultural practices, scientific and technological interventions, and state management of the land. For Joseph Hooker and Hugh Cleghorn, the recognition of India's diversity did not preclude attempts to characterise India as a whole or to "look for environmental tropes that would make it possible to locate India within a larger schema" (33). Hooker became one of the most influential exponents of the idea of the tropics. The links between landscape and culture are exposed by this study, where missionary discourses of pestilential landscapes are linked to corruption and heathen Hindu practices. Arnold explores the landscape sensibilities of Francis Buchanan, James Tod, and Bishop Heber among others, as he untangles the twin discourses of romanticism and improvement.

Arnold's argument echoes other work: that of Bernard Smith concerning the South Pacific, for example, and that of Graham Burnett concerning British Guyana. Smith shows how "exotic" topography was elevated to the high places reserved for ideal landscapes by the late eighteenth century. Arnold argues that the idea of the tropics functioned similarly—as a category distinct from the temperate—and had its effect on "scenic appraisal" and "scientific practice."

There are problems, however, with Arnold's suggestion that the idea of the "tropics" was simply a tool for dispossessing native peoples and for codifying alien spaces. One must be careful in emphasising, as Arnold does, the discursive subordination of India through such means as travel writing and the scientific, artistic, and literary appropriation of the Indian landscape. Better, instead, to consider the ways in which travellers, artists, and botanists participated in and engaged with the land and the people. It is difficult to establish the coincidence of aesthetic appreciation of landscape, geographical science, and colonial appropriation. Arnold is clearly a bit uneasy about this as he examines the scientific work of Hooker and Brian Hodgson. Their travels, for example, cannot merely be seen as a representation of place used to root colonial claims to possession but instead demonstrate a far more ambiguous relationship with the place and its native inhabitants. Botanists and travellers in the 1840s often contended with indigenous knowledge and ideas of place. As Arnold himself notes, native collectors were important in unlocking the plant wealth of South Asia. Forbes Royale, for instance, relied on indigenous knowledge for naming plants and identifying their therapeutic uses. While this appreciation of indigenous ideas diminished by the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was still a force to reckon with in the earlier period.

Studies by historians Richard Grove and Satpal Sangwan have shown the vital relationship between colonial scientific discourse and early environmentalism in the tropics. The acquisition of a global knowledge of plants and fauna constituted one of the early steps to determine the influence of man on nature. These studies suggest that scientists in India and other parts of the colonial periphery played a revolutionary role in the evolution of ecological consciousness in the early nineteenth century long before such developments in Europe. We now know that far from being proponents of an all-embracing orientalist prejudice, Europeans (until the mid-nineteenth century...