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Isabella Bird, Rudyard Kipling, and the “bandobast” of East Asian travel
Abstract
Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks (1880) has often been read as a quest-narrative into the unknown interior of Japan, which centres on the resolute individualism of the female travel persona. This essay will instead regard Bird as a representative figure, insofar as (like other contemporary Victorian travellers) she is the beneficiary of newly established networks of trade, transport and communication in South-East Asia. I compare her journey with that of Rudyard Kipling, who undertook a similar Asian version of the Grand Tour in 1889, recounted in From Sea to Sea (1899). Focusing on Kipling’s idea of the “bandobast”, a Hindi word adapted into English to mean “systematic arrangement”, I explore the mutual interdependence of Victorian representations of Japan with other East Asian cultures, particularly China. Instead of contrasting masculine and feminine modes of response, I show how their overlapping itineraries allow engagement with the multicultural cosmopolitanism of the major cities of the region, and examination of the impact of aggressive Western expansionism in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
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First published in book form in 1899, and reissued here in the 1928 Macmillan edition, this two-volume collection contains a series of letters and travel reports originally written for newspapers by the young Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) on his journeys around India, Burma, China, Japan and the United States between 1887 and 1889. The 1907 Nobel Prize winner's characteristic fluid writing style is already apparent in these funny, poignant and vivid articles and short stories. Providing revealing insights into Kipling's notions of imperialism and Englishness, the works also reflect the writer's keen observational powers, and a telling intelligent self-awareness of his own cultural prejudices. Volume 2 contains the remainder of From Sea to Sea, covering the American west coast, Salt Lake City and Chicago, and describing an encounter with Mark Twain as 'a moment to be remembered.' This is followed by several short stories including The City of Dreadful Night.
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A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.
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