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5 Nature and Some Naturalists In the wilderness: Leonard Woolf and others This chapter is about natural history, and figures of nature in Western writing about the East. In the first part I examine representations of the wilderness, how it is seen by those who enter it and how it returns their gaze, helping to constitute them as various kinds of subject — as explorers, writers, sportsmen, and naturalists, on missions of subjugation, or scientific expeditions, or in search of a paradise. The second part examines the single and instructive case of the uses of nature, and in particular the role of animals, in George Orwell’s representation and understanding of the Orient which he had known as a policeman of the empire. In a coda, I look at a naturalist in the postcolonial jungle. When W. Somerset Maugham, ‘in a far island away down in the South East of the Malay Archipelago’, encountered a great cockatoo which stared at him, his first instinct was to look about for the cage from which it must have escaped.1 In the jungle, he says, he never quite got over his surprise at seeing at liberty birds and beasts whose natural habitation seemed to him a Zoological Garden. It is a characteristic drollery, but for some of the people in Maugham’s stories the jungle is not always so amusing, and one of the disconcerting things about it is that, while it may provide plenty for the traveller to see, admire, hunt, or describe, it is not to be prevented from sizing him up in turn for purposes of its own. The thought ensures a sleepless night for the hero of Maugham’s tale ‘Neil MacAdam’. The darkness was profound. The noise was deafening of innumerable insects, but like the roar of traffic in a great city it was so constant that in a little while it was like an impenetrable silence, and when on a sudden he heard the shriek of a monkey seized by a snake or the scream of a night-bird he nearly jumped out of his skin. He had a 1. W. Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong (London: Heinemann, 1930), 83. P079-116 08/4/23, 16:10 79 80 Eastern Figures mysterious sensation that all around creatures were watching him. Over there, beyond the camp fires, savage warfare was waged and they three on their bed of branches were defenceless and alone in face of the horror of nature.2 The natural world and its contents have been very much linked with the enterprise of literature, and above all English literature, especially since the Romantic revolution of the late eighteenth century had undertaken to restore the integration, or deplore the alienation, between humans and their habitat. The tales of returning travellers were expected to include descriptions of foreign places and the things that grew and lived there, particularly when these were dramatically or picturesquely different from what was to be seen at home. But we have become very used to the idea that representations of nature constitute a kind of knowledge that is never ‘innocent’ in the sense of being detachable from the political context that made and continues to make it possible.3 It is in the domain of Orientalism that this truth has been most comprehensively asserted in the past quarter-century — so much so that there is now more danger of our falling into the opposite error, a reductive insistence that such knowledges are nothing but the expression of a political will to power. The case of Colonel Francis Younghusband is one that would seem to make most simply the point about a collusion between appreciating nature and dominating territory — between acquiring knowledge of a locale and acquiring power over it. Younghusband’s book India and Tibet (1910) contains celebrated descriptions of mountain scenery in the high Himalayas, for which he felt a frankly mystical affinity. ‘I was born in the Himalayas,’ he explains, ‘within sight of the Kashmir Mountains; and some inexplicable attraction has drawn me back to them time after time. Now that I was called upon to pierce through the Himalayas to the far country on the hither side, I was to make my start from that spot, from which of all others the most perfect view is to be obtained.’4 We do not need the clue in Younghusband’s fondness for the language of penetration into the interior...

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