Dean Mahomet’s Travels, Border Crossings, and the Narrative of Alterity

The first Indian author in English, Dean Mahomet, in The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a Native of Patna in Bengal, through Several Parts of India, while in the Service of the Honourable the East India Company. Written by Himself, in a Series of Letters to a Friend. In Two Volumes (1794), performs the balancing act of the marginalized insider, both in India and in Britain, writing and working to familiarize alien identity and culture for the consumption of the British public. The epistolary genre of Travels implicitly argues the possibility that an unfamiliar cultural and geographical landscape can be rendered familiar if one reads about it and intellectually travels it. Unlike his contemporary European writers, Mahomet does not satirize Indian customs or exoticize the Indian landscape or Indian native for British consumption but appropriates the discourse of travel to make a place for himself as an immigrant in British culture.