The "discourse of difficulty": English writing and India, 1600-1720

Abstract

This essay argues that early English travel writing on India tropes India as a difficult space as a preliminary to interpreting it. This "discourse of difficulty," which uses a range of features from the aesthetic of the sublime, first intensifies Indian dangers and subsequently demystifies it in an assertion of rhetorical control over vastness and difficulty. The article suggests that the tropes of later, eighteenth-century colonial writing on India are well in place within the discursive operations of the sublime aesthetic in numerous seventeenth- century travelogues. © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd.