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Representations of the Indian subcontinent by eighteenth-century European observers are a dime a dozen. For instance, there are the travelogues of Alexander Hamilton, John Henry Grose, and Claude-Marie Guyon; novels such as The Indian Adventurer, Hartly House, Calcutta, and the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah; the poetry of Eyles Irwin; dramas such as The Widow of Malabar and A Mogul Tale; histories by Robert Orme, Alexander Dow, Francis Gladwin, and Jonathan Scott; and visual images from the likes of William Hodges, John Zoffany, Thomas and William Danieli, and Balthazar Solvyns, not to mention the large body of translations of native texts produced in the Calcutta circle around Warren Hastings and William Jones.1 In contrast, accounts of visitors traveling to Europe from the East are harder to come by. Nabil Matar has documented the narratives of Turkish and Arab travelers to Europe in the seventeenth century, and Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam explore the stories of authors who traveled west from India - but not as far as Europe.2 More specifically, only a handful of accounts by travelers from the Mughal Empire to Europe are now known to exist, even though it is quite possible that more were written. Michael Fisher has exhaustively documented that there were many Indian visitors in Britain before 1800, but these visitors either did not write down their experiences, or those reports have not survived.3 For that reason, scholars now focus on five India-to-England travel narratives from the long eighteenth century:4 Munshi Isma'il's New History (1774),5 Mir Muhammad Husain ibn Abdul 'Azim Isfahani's Essays about the Conditions of the Land of Europe and India (1776),6 Joseph Emin's Life and Adventures (1792),7 Mirza Abu Taleb Khan's Travels in the Land of the Franks (1802),8 and the subject of this article, I'tesamuddin's The Wonders of Vilayet (1827).9
Even at first glance, these texts are significant because they give us glimpses of Indian perceptions of eighteenth-century England as the European accounts give us indications about British views of India.10 On a deeper level, the travel narratives allow us to uncover and investigate how the eighteenth-century Indian author sustains his identity in the face of a series of challenges from different variants of English culture - how personal, social, and religious aspects of Indian identity...