Cultural Politics of Counter Ethnography in Mirja Abu Talib Khan’s Travels

Abstract

Drawing upon Edward Said’s discourse of Orientalism, my dissertation on travelogues of Miraj Abu Talib Khan questions the assumption of Orientalism as a universal and instructive discourse that was conducted exclusively from the West to and for the East. Orientalism, as a global discourse and manifested by numerous rhetorics, has become effective in analyzing and studying the shifting geopolitical, cultural and social forms of power. This research argues that the contribution made by the entry of colonized people from the periphery to the colonial centre from their travels historically and politically been overlooked. Abu Talib Khan’s oriental travel developed along its own particular axes by both utilizing and reversing Orientalism through his cultural politics of ethnography. It further aims to illustrate that Talib’ travels, both in the colony and the metropole, were active and not passive agent in his negotiations of colonial as well as post-colonial ethnographical space. The travels of Talib has conveyed the hidden stories through autobiographies, diaries, letter, memoirs, poetry, and travelogues to establish himself within the space of, ‘writing back’, an imaginative endeavor that existed between the colony and the metropole.