When once asked about his favourite childhood reads, the renowned Urdu writer Naiyer Masud mentioned Khaufnak Dunya: Jazira-i Borniyo meñ Safar aur Jangaloñ meñ Shikar, an exhilarating account of hunting expeditions in the "terrifying" jungles of Borneo. Published in 1908 and written by a Punjabi dentist named Sayyed Muhammed Ali Shah Sabzvari, it was part of a trilogy featuring his adventures in Borneo, Kenya and New York. Masud did not recall Khaufnak Dunya for its delicate prose or eloquent turns of phrase, but for the joy of reading a dramatic travel account akin to Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels where the protagonist happened to be an Indian man. Sabzvari saw and presented Africa and Southeast Asia for his Urdu readers as sites of play and pleasure. He imagined himself as living a classic colonial fantasy – swindling gullible locals, setting up base in exclusive enclaves where he could relish his favourite food and music, and enjoying salacious pursuits with foreign women. Read today, these stories do not offer new insights for rethinking geographies or champion anticolonial action. Instead, they reflect Southasia's contentious and layered global past.
The rapid expansion of steamship and railway networks in the 19th century offered Southasian travellers the possibility of exploring new worlds with relative ease. Voyagers encountered plurality and difference, which helped widen their horizons in some ways while reifying their own sense of identity and belonging in others. The ability to challenge physical borders and explore new geographies and peoples, however, also sometimes strengthened views of social hierarchies and otherness. Travel did not only build cosmopolitan views of the world, it also brought forth dissonance and friction. Daniel Majchrowicz's The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia explores everyday voices in Urdu to trace the region's uneven relationship with a rapidly interconnected world. It illustrates the ways in which Southasians imagined new geographies and cultures and their relationship to them, conveyed through the production and circulation of travel writing across the subcontinent from 1840 to 1990. The book unearths the story of how the travelogue, or safarnama, became a popular genre for Southasian readers' everyday consumption, alongside new literary forms like the novel and the magazine.
Majchrowicz describes The World in Words as located between the fields of history and literature, telling the story of the circulation of ideas in the Subcontinent. The monograph zooms in on travelogues as a "literature of aspiration", whereby voyagers could convey their visions of what the world is and what it ought to be to curious readers back home. The writers of these travelogues were mostly not the political elite or colonial administrators but rather small-town Muslim and Hindu writers – men and women – who did not consider their position as colonised subjects to be a deterrence in engaging with the broader world physically and intellectually. The World in Words' major contribution is that, unlike much earlier scholarship on imperial travels, it does not pin Europe as the centre of wonder and progress, but turns towards journeys in Asia and Africa as a way of bringing forward the full potential of world-making in Urdu. The result is a refreshing view of the pathways leading to Southasia's global past, unburdened by the urge to write back to Empire.
The seduction of travel was wide-ranging. These writers travelled for pleasure, pilgrimage, education, worldly success and even nostalgia. Majchrowicz deftly avoids submitting these travel accounts to the hegemony of a singular intellectual orientation – cosmopolitanism, universalism or even Muslim exceptionalism. A vast corpus of existing texts have focused on how colonised subjects experienced Europe and its impact on their articulations of progress, homeland and nationalism. Others have chosen to prioritise what the literary scholar Isabel Hofmeyr calls narratives of "third-worldist subalterns at sea", ones that uncritically celebrate positive responses to ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism within the Global South. Southasian voyagers often carried forward worldviews and civilisational markers rooted in biases, prejudices and narratives of superiority. Majchrowicz's caution against these narrow ideological frameworks finds echo in the historian Nile Green's article 'Waves of Heterotopia', which alerts readers to view vernacular travelogues from the Indian Ocean as repositories of multilateral sets of responses to writers' encounters with geographical and cultural difference. Anti-colonial resistance, transnational activism and South-South solidarity were prominent outcomes of travel, but not the only ones. Southasian travellers often submitted to the logics of colonial capitalism and sought wealth and civilisational superiority. Far from forging solidarity, their accounts were often pervaded by racialised perceptions of Asian and African others.