This paper aims to explore the construction of the ‘Lushai Hills’ (at present the Indian state of Mizoram) as a dystopian landscape in colonial military expedition reports, a major sub-genre of colonial travel writings by critically looking at The Lushai Expedition (1873), one of the earliest colonial documents on Mizoram. The text is authored by R G Woodthorpe, a surveyor in the Topographical Survey of India and a member in some of these military expeditions to the Lushai Hills by the British in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The reading is premised on the recognition colonial travel and travel writing as central to the transformation of the Lushai Hills into a colonial territory in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Travel writing is viewed as an important tool of empire-building. However, given the enormity of the collaboration between travel writing and empire-building, this paper focuses on the framing of the Lushai Hills as landscape in the text.
From the perspective of space, its production, and colonization, landscape is best viewed as a visual appropriation of space. Given that (a) colonialism is an exercise in space-production and that (b) the construction of colonial space begins with acts of gazing, travel writing is central to the mutation of space into colonial landscapes. This backdrop makes it imperative to approach landscape as the key tool/trope of space-production in travel and expedition texts.
In Iconography of Landscape (1988), cultural geographers Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels define landscape as a mode of painting that originated in medieval Italy. This new artistic mode drew from the ‘linear perspective’, a fresh technique to represent three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas. However, a fuller understanding of the concept of landscapes comes from more recent works such as Landscape (2007), by John Wiley who summarizes almost all major contemporary views on landscape into three key approaches (17). To cultural geographer Carl Sauer and the ‘Berkley School’ of landscape studies associated with him, landscape is an external reality to be seen; to British geographer W. G. Hoskins (1908-1992) known for his landmark study The Making of the English Landscape (1954), landscape is an archive/palimpsest of rural local histories and hence a critical source of historiography; for American thinker J B Jackson (1909-1996), landscape is both a symbolic text and a tool of domination.
A fuller understanding of landscape begins with its recognition as both an object and a sight, and as embodiment, inhabitation, and dwelling. Wylie writes: “Landscape is not only something we see, but it is also a way of seeing things, a particular way of looking at and picturing the world around us. Landscapes are not just about what we see but about how we look. To landscape is to gaze in a particular fashion” (7; emphasis added). A landscape gaze is a culturally conditioned perception of space and is entrenched in “particular cultural values, attitudes, ideologies and expectations” (7).This definition encapsulates the vital perspectives on landscape and the politics of it- first, landscape is object/material referent; second, it is a gaze/way of seeing; and third, landscape as vision is predominantly determined by ideological positioning of the viewer. To this extent, a landscape is a political coding of space.
As a site to generate and consolidate colonial power landscape-making is central to empire-building. As suggested above, the construction of landscape in colonial texts is better viewed as an ideological exercise. The imperial eyes ‘de-semanticizes’ as well as ‘re-semanticizes’ (Pratt). It prioritizes select aspects of the topography and transforms others to redundancy. Its embeddedness in structures of power makes the landscape gaze of colonial travelers a crucial tool of power. In his study Social Formation and Symbolic landscape (1984), cultural Geographer Denis Cosgrove recognizes landscape-production as central to projects of controlling space (85). Landscape is a “way of seeing, a composition and structuring of the world so that it may be appropriated by a detached individual spectator to whom an illusion of order and control is offered through the composition of space according to the certainties of geometry” (55: emphasis added). Cosgrove views landscape as gaze and construct. However what is more important is that he conceptualizes landscape as an instrument of appropriating, or possessing and by extension, colonizing space. To this extent, the political coding or visualization of space as a landscape is often a colonising exercise. It is important to locate the construction of landscape in colonial travel writings in this larger project of colonising space.
The framing of landscape derives from visions of appropriation which determine the shape and disposition of landscapes. Cosgrove reiterates this view in “Prospect, perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea” (1985), where he argues that the formulation of landscape “involves control and domination over space as an absolute, objective entity; its transformation into the property of the individual or the state” (46: emphasis added). The landscape gaze transforms a plot of land into property (Wylie 59). It is possible to suggest that the conversion of space into landscapes in travel writings serve as preludes to the subsequent conversion of space into territories and productive assets. To this extent, colonial landscapes correspond to commodification of indigenous geography.
Although the link between landscape and ideology is suggested above, it is necessary to discuss it in further detail. Cosgrove observes that landscape is a “visual ideology” (Prospect 47), employed as a tool to reinforce and naturalize power structures. Wylie, in a similar vein, argues that landscape is often implicated in a “politics of vision” (62). The thesis that landscape is a tool in the service of power comes from works such as John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (1983), and Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740—1860 (1986). Barrell explores how a set of stock-scenes like “laborers at work” are employed to naturalize hegemonic structures in British paintings (3). Similarly, Bermingham points to the alliance between landscape-paintings and the enclosure process in Britain: “There is an ideology of landscape, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a class view of landscape embodied a set of socially, and, finally, economically determined values to which the painted image gave a cultural expression” (3). Don Mitchell in The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996) also reinforces the view of landscape-making as a hegemonic exercise. It is already suggested that colonial landscape is more of an ideological construct than an aesthetic exercise. It involves strategies which are not always obvious. W. J. T. Mitchell in Landscape and Power (1994), suggests that a landscape is best viewed as a performance. It is discussed later in this thesis how colonial travel and expedition writings host the transformation of pre-colonial space, not only as strategic visualizations but also as strategic performances.
As performance, landscape in colonial writings is a site to enact cultural visions as well as a means to formulate subject positions. Juliet Mitchell looks at landscape as a dynamic “medium of exchange”, a “site of visual appropriation” and a site for the formation of identities (1). Wylie also recognizes how cultural sensibilities such as modernity transfigure into landscapes (118). These views make it possible to suggest that colonial landscape is best viewed as self-fashioning and Othering. It is a condition and consequence of performance than an aestheticisation of space. Colonial landscapes, not only draw from but regularly collaborate in the proliferation of colonial power. They are visualizations of space that expedites the transformation of space into territory and assets.
In colonial travel writings, landscape are employed as tropes—or so to say—as metaphors to challenge indigenous ownership and authority over space. This explains the framing of the colony as a landscape of dystopia in these texts. Mary Louise Pratt in the book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), offers important clues into this where she highlights the centrality of ‘the imperial gaze’ in the framing of space as landscapes in colonial travel writing. The imperial gaze is marked by its keenness to “look out and posses” space (Pratt 7). Pratt also identifies the stock-devices and conventions that embody the imperial gaze. For instance, she links the conventional visual arrangement of sights in travel writing to the colonial desire to attain sweeping mastery over a scene. Pratt terms it the ‘monarch of all I survey’ mode (201). This convention is central to our understanding of the text under review. Pratt observes how, in a travel narrative, the writer-traveler positions himself in ways that gives him the sole privilege or authority to ‘survey’ the surrounding landscape as well as to construct it around the strategic military or economic priorities of the empire. It is possible to suggest that Pratt identifies wealth-making as central to the framing of space as landscapes in travel writing which she views as implicated in a “discourse of accumulation” (192). This insights form an important backdrop of this study.
Louise Pratt also offers important clues into the textual politics of landscapes in travel writing. She identifies the generation of “density of meaning” as the key to landscape-production in colonial travel writings (150, 204). This density of meaning comes from the use of adjectival modifiers, nominal colour expressions or in short, from the addition of material referents to landscape by the traveller-narrator. The other tropes that are central to this project are- first, “negative or anti aestheticisation” of a landscape in the form of binaries; second, transforming the relationship between the viewing subject/ traveler and the viewed object/landscape, into a master-slave dichotomy. These ideas throw further light into the issue at hand and in understanding the construction of the Lushai Hills in the text under investigation.
The foregoing discussion offers crucial insights into the preponderant employment of geographical/ topographical as tropes or metaphors by the colonial travel writer. As suggested elsewhere, this metaphorization of space as landscape is best viewed as prelude to more resolute and concrete attempts to territorialize space. The construction of the colonial landscapes as a metaphor of otherness is a prelude to subsequent claims of territorialization. One of the tropes central to the construction of landscapes in colonial travel writings, is the “rhetoric of discovery” (Pratt 175). Almost every act of travel is accompanied by a sense of indeterminacy and adventure. The sense of danger and corresponding excitement is amplified by regularly calling attention to the hazards encountered as the travellers plod along. However, it is the guts of the imperial traveler that prevails over the fear/danger of the unknown/unseen colony. In other words, the colonial traveler transforms landscapes into a metaphor for hostility as well as site of self-fashioning. The discourse of discovery that underlies colonial travel writing is a key instrument of imperial self-fashioning. Discovery as a trope helps to challenge contesting/ indigenous claims/authority over space. Pramod Nayar in his book Colonial Voices: the Discourses of Empire (2012), offers another important perspective on the issue at hand. He organizes the discourse of discovery into three stages- first, the imaginative exploration and the fantasy of discovery; second, the narrative organization in the form of reportage and; third, the explication and documentation of the discovered through a process of inquiry (8). It is possible to suggest that the construction of landscape is a layered exercise that involves the visualization, realization and review of the experience of encountering space. In other words, this is a movement from visualization through realization to the actual production of space.
In The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (1992), David Spurr refers to it as an “economy of uneven exchange” (14). It goes without saying that tricks of reduction and expansion often aid these projects. It could be suggested that landscapes in colonial travel and expedition texts function as what Pratt terms as “imperial allegories” (181).
Another trope that is central to the allegorization of space as landscape in colonial travel writings is the rhetoric of danger presented as anticipated uncertainties, topographical perils, and unfriendly natives. Like discovery it is also a tool of self-fashioning of the traveler not only as the imperial hero/picaro, but as the rightful steward of this otherwise dystopian landscape. This could be explained better with Pratt’s view of colonial travel writing as “negative aesthetic” and colonising designs that underlie such an aesthetic/ rhetoric (218). Landscapes are also presented as hostile, irrational and awe-inspiring triggering rhapsodic experiences in the traveler. What informs this aesthetics is the view of nature which is at once exotic, alluring, fearful, awesome and transformative; a framework within which an informed, rational and enlightened Western observer time and again gazes upon a rhapsodic otherness.
David Spurr’s views on rhetoric as central to empire-building adds further light to this. Spurr identifies surveillance (13), appropriation (28), aestheticisation, and classification (50), debasement (76), and negation (89), as central to colonial rhetoric. Interestingly, Pratt identifies ‘the aesthetic’ or poetic and the scientific as the principal modes of landscape construction in colonial travel writing.
The Lushai Expedition belongs to the large body of expedition writings generated in the nineteenth century northeast frontier. Some of these are Major John Butler’s Travels and Adventures in the Province of Assam (1855), James Johnstone’s Manipur and Naga Hills (1896), and William Griffith’s Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhutan, Affghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries (1847). Most of these writings come from men in colonial army and regularly attempt to create a network of what Robert Young in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West terms as “white mythologies” (2). Although structured as military documents these narratives appropriate larger cultural roles of domination, serving as strategic colonial apparatuses in a strategic site. Also in these texts, the campaign narrative also includes interior exploration of difficult and dangerous tracts. It is these forages that determine the layering of the imperial gaze and eventually influence the organization of space as landscape. In this sense, it is not inappropriate to view Woodthorpe and his compatriots as what Mary Louise Pratt terms as “capitalist vanguard” (Imperial 146; also see Beinart 7). Texts such as The Lushai Expedition, it is argued here, not only illustrate the ideological underpinning of colonial economic and military interest but also circulate a new kind of imperial energy. This energy is often derived from the transformation of existing space into a certain kind of landscape. As a result, ideologies that go into the production of landscapes in these narratives proliferate further justification of economic prioritization by, and, of space production.
As stated earlier, The Lushai Expedition (hereafter referred to as Expedition), makes use of most of the formal features of frontier narratives. The trope central to the construction of the Lushai Hills as landscape is that of the wild. The notion of the wild is deeply is entrenched in the Eurocentric notion of nature-culture binary. Landscapes in the text could be viewed as an embodiment of this master-trope. The narrative begins by marking the regions as a hide-out of “fierce and predatory” tribes (2). In other words, every attempt to morph the Lushai Hills into a landscape is already implicated in the metaphor of the wild. Once set into motion, it is argued here, this metaphor turns into an all-pervasive meta-trope to challenge the autonomy of the Lushai hills as a self-standing socio-cultural self.
James Hevia in The Imperial Security State (2012) suggests that colonial landscapes function not only as aesthetic or ideological texts but also as a form of strategic knowledge. This adds a new dimension to the understanding of landscape as a military and economic utility like surveys and route-books. This mutation involves the employment of techno-scientific reflection on space as operational terrain or a cartography of accuracy and exactitude. This desire surfaces more obviously in the eagerness of the traveler to survey and incorporate the region into grids or frame of reference of European science (miles, hours, temperature, and height). This could also be viewed as an attempt to discipline space.
The Lushai Expedition (1873), is an important colonial document written by R G Woodthorpe, one of those early colonial officials to pioneer and participate in the colonization of what the British viewed as the Lushai Hills (a territory that by and large corresponds to the present Indian state of Mizoram). The narrative is an account of colonial military expeditions into the erstwhile territory of the Lushai hills. Expedition writing is an important form of colonial knowledge and is central to projects of empire-building. This is illustrated by the proliferation of such writings in nineteenth century northeast frontier. Travels and Adventures in the Province of Assam (1855) by Major John Butler, Manipur and Naga Hills (1896) by James Johnstone, and Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhutan, Affghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries (1847) by William Griffith’s are some of the important names in this context. It is important to note that most of these are narratives of goal-oriented acts of military travel and expedition. Their organization replicate the regularity and discipline that characterize a military campaign. However, the traveler-surveyor cannot refrain from the urge to approach the northeast, both the site and destination of travel, through certain ideologically shaped tropes.
Woodthorpe approaches the Lushai Hills primarily as a military terrain and landscapes it as a strategic utility. As landscapes, these hills are reduced to a cluster of logistics. For instance, Woodthorpe writes: “Here crossing a beautiful stream of clear water, the ascent commenced, and a stiff climb it proved; a sheer ascent of eighteen hundred feet, with a slope of three hundred and thirty two feet the whole way. Arrived at the top, we had a long five miles to go over a very uneven path, ascending and descending alternately, never level” (62; emphasis added). Again, he writes: “The path, as is the case along most of the ridges, runs through a very open jungle, till it reaches the site of the village, a large bare gravelly spot” (179; emphasis added). Or “The road onwards of Mynadhur was similar in character to that up to it, precipitous and jungly” (115; emphasis added). These illustrate how the traveler not only gazes at the Lushai hills as a strategic site but transforms landscapes into strategic signposts. He writes:
The road running along the Sonai is very level as far as Nagakhal, a stream at the foot of the hills three miles beyond Monierkhel. It first runs through a very flat open country, but below Nudigram it passes through a large patch of a very high grass jungle, beyond which it enters a forest, and so to Nagakhal, passing two clearances for gardens, Durmiakhal and Monierkhal. (64; emphasis added)
Woodthorpe creates a density of meaning while construction the Lushai hills by employing phrases like ‘level’, ‘very level’, ‘very flat open country’ etc. The text also presents other instances wherein strategic precision knowledge is camouflaged as landscape. For instance, the following passage on the construction of military camps during the campaign illustrates the appropriation of landscapes as strategic knowledge:
All these stations were situated close to the river’s edge; a position by which an ample survey of water was secured, and the Commissariat’s boats were able to provide the troops with the necessary provisions every evening-the coolies being thus set-free for road-making. The rapids proved passable for boats up to two hundred mounds, though they were dragged through these with difficulty. (117; emphasis added)
It is what Hevia views as “military-strategic imagination” that is central to the construction of the Lushai hills as landscapes in Woodthorpe (9). This military-strategic gaze often, but not always assumes quite obvious forms and the landscape-gaze is directed to strategic sites such as potential military routes. For instance: “The latter, now famous by reason of the frequent raids made upon it, is a tolerable huge clearance” (65; emphasis added). Landscapes, for the traveler-surveyor Woodthorpe, becomes a survey of military utilities such as potential places of sojourn, passes, sources of water etc. For instance:
On the highest point of the mountains we found, to our surprise, a large native bedstead by the path…It now serves as a convenient resting place on which the weary travelers may recline after their fatiguing climb, and from which they may survey the smiling plains of Cachar spread out like a map some three thousand feet below. (67; emphasis added)
This is an attempt at the enactment of the monarchic trope. There are other instances when Woodthorpe places himself in the role of the colonial voyeur. He writes: “Old Kholel, most admirably situated beneath one of the highest peaks of the range, where the narrow ridge, widening as it gradually rises to the hill, affords a site of half a mile in length and about three hundred yards in width, commanding a magnificent view of the Manipur” (130). In another attempt to claim visual mastery over the Lushai country, Woodthorpe writes, “From the higher points of this range, the first extensive view of the Lushai country was obtained. Far away, to the north-east, stretched the Munipur ranges; to the east, the distant Lushai Hills, rising above the lower and nearer ranges; some clothed in every variety of green, while in others the forest was broken (132).” The self-congratulatory note and the sense of achievement underlying these passages attest to the fascination of the traveler to take over the Lushai Hills.
In the text, the convening of a negative aesthetic is the most apparent in the construction of a symbolic landscape often employing the trope of the wild. The following passage illustrates the attempts at transforming the Lushai hills as a landscape of danger, fear, and otherness. Woodthorpe writes: “It was astonishing how soon a waste, howling wilderness of jungle was transformed into a pleasant camp” (117). The landscape gaze on this occasion implicates both economic as well as civilizational imports. It is interesting that the unfavorable impression of the Lushai hills as “jungly hills” is immediately complemented by plans to transform these into “cultivated tracts” (173). This is an instance how landscape is a prelude to the conversion of space into imperial assets. On another occasion, while returning homewards after subjugating the Lushais, Woodthorpe apprehends that the hills will relapse to perpetual slumber once the colonial army departs. He writes:
By the 10th of March, in accordance with the orders of the Government before quoted, all the troops and coolies had bidden farewell to Tipai Mukh; and the Tuivai itself, flowing past ruined huts and deserted godowns, once more greeted the Barak with its ceaseless babble, undisturbed by the cries of coolies and the trumpeting of elephants, while the surrounding jungles relapsed into their former silence, resounding no more to the blows of the invaders’ axe. (320).
These instances illustrate how in the narrative, landscapes are more of an enthusiastic postulation of spaces than a disinterested gaze. In other words, inherent in these landscapes is the proposal in favour of a new spatiality. From that perspective, the production of landscapes in the narrative could be viewed as what Lefebvre views the transformation of space into the grids of abstraction and conceptualization. It is often by subjecting colonized spaces to anticipations and assumptions that the colonial traveler ensures ideological mastery over these.
It is obvious that landscapes in the text do not only stem from, but regularly initiate and reinforce a relationship of mastery of the imperial traveler-campaigner over the colonized space. Such projects are not always explicable in terms of a negative aesthetic. It is usual that the density of meaning is also produced through such strategies. For instance, Woodthorpe observes:
On the 17th, leaving behind a guard of fifty men of the 22nd under Lieutenant Gordon, the General and staff, with Mr. Edgar and Col. Nuthall’s wing of the 44th, marched from Pachui, and descended to the Tuivai, here still a fine stream- clear and cold, flowing between huge boulders, past shingly reaches, and bubbling over pebbly shallows, ever and anon widening out into still pools, in the clear depths of which were reflected the varied hues of the wooded hill-sides. A small bamboo bridge had been thrown across at a spot where a large stretch of shingle on the left bank narrowed the stream considerably. (187)
Instances like these illustrate the preponderance of visual trope in the text. It is interesting to observe that the aura of gloom and apprehension that perennially haunts the landscape gaze while moving into the enemy’s space suddenly disappears and is replaced by an enthusiastic and admiring one, almost like a voyeur. The same hill-scape emerges not as a strategic terrain. Instead of assuming repulsive and ghostly proportions the landscape emerges as an inviting host. It is only at this point that flowers and foliage in the landscape invite the imperial eyes. For instance, amidst people’s greetings a home-bound campaigner writes: “Beneath nestled a small village, and beyond lay the broad and smiling valley, through which far below, like a silver thread, the Teo wound its way. High hills of dark green, on the slopes of which the jooms shone like gold in the bright sunshine, rose in the background”(276). The same mood continues:
The beauty of the scene was heightened by the rhododendrons which clothed the hill-side on either side of the road and were then in all their glory of brilliant blossoms, and helmets and turbans became gaily decorated. Even the guns were not forgotten; their prosaic steel forms being also adorned with the bright flowers, with almost loving care…shortly after we passed through a magnificent pine forest; a gentle breeze sighting through the tall pines wafted their sweet perfume across our onward path. (276)
Similarly, Woodthorpe writes: “The scenery, both on the river and by the road, between Tipai Mukh and Cachar, was very fine; the autumnal-like tint of the foliage in the dense jungle, at this season, were most varied and beautiful; orchids and other wild flowers abounded, and the forest was sweet with their many-scented blossoms”(325). The passage gives the impression that all un-ease have receded. But the edenic vision does not continue for long and is immediately overtaken by the apocalyptic note that constantly underwrites the text. Woodthorpe writes almost in a note of alarm:
But an invisible foe haunted these fair scenes-and cholera, that fatal pestilence, stalked along the river, or lurked in the jungle, striking down the Sepoys joyously looking forward to a speedy meeting with friends, but numbering most of its victims among the poor coolies…a more dreaded enemy than any we had to encounter in Lushai land. (326; emphasis added)
Ambuscade as trope is central to the construction of landscape in the text. This is embodied as anticipation of an invisible foe from the very beginning of the campaign. Recounting the arrangements of the march, at Mynadhur, the base of the expedition, Woodthorpe writes: “The boatmen in these districts had the most intense horror of this part of the country, and it was with great difficulty that they were induced to go with their boats; many preferring to sink them, while they themselves disappeared in some place of concealment till the danger was past” (112). In fact, the foe, in the text is more suggested than explicitly painted and the invisible, ambuscading foe is framed through landscapes which validate their presence.
In several places, the Lushais had put up some symbols, intended as a warning to the troops not to advance. One was a small model of a gallows made of bamboos, with rough pieces of wood intended to represent men hanging from it, and another consisted of small strips of a bamboo stuck into the trunk of a felled tree, from the wounds of which, a deep red sap, strongly resembling blood, exuded-indicating to the troops the fate that awaited them if they persisted in the advance. (134)
Throughout the trail, the Lushais keep threatening the colonizer by their “threatening demonstrations” (134). The Lushai is always presented as an ambuscading figure lying hidden and unseen, sometimes in the jungle, sometimes amidst the crops, but s/he is always a co-traveller in the form of an unexpected and unforeseen enemy. In other words, the Lushai is always presented as hostile to the colonizer. For instance: “shortly after their arrival the Lushais commenced firing into the camp from the forest which surrounded it closely” (138). Similarly, he writes, “This Tuibhum encampment was surrounded on all sides by steep hills, as usual covered with forest, and the Lushais, concealed among the trees, continued to annoy us by firing into it, and at the working parties. The casualties, however, were not numerous, only a coolie and a sapper being wounded (147)”. As soon as the detachment leaves the camp, it is fired from all sides (148). Thus, the landscapes within the text are both actual and symbolic. It is obvious in the way the campaign is entirely framed as a confrontation between the torch-bearers of European modernity and an unfriendly ‘other’ suggested through the trope an invisible enemy. Probably the trope of a howling and roaring wilderness, as discussed initially reinforces this stereotype of an invisible foe.
Although the above-cited instances reveal the deployment of a negative aesthetic in the formulation of landscapes within the text, there are other occasions in the narrative which illustrate a more radical use of the same. In terms of motif and symbolism, these also draw from the same ideological repertoire. As stated earlier, what distinguishes these is the extremity and translucence to which the apparatus of negative aesthetic is stretched. As later instances suggest, the negative aesthetic is often instrumental in the construction of landscapes in the text. It frequently draws on the twin tropes of negativization and insubstantialization. For instance, Woodthorpe reports, how traversing through “obscure paths”, “tall and tangled grass jungle” and pestilential swamps they come across a “stone god and goddess” (61). It is interesting to look at the sarcastic way Woodthorpe comments at the sight:
Beneath these rocks, we found the rudely carved figures of the god and goddess, about three feet high, with strips of red and white cloth adorning their shapeless bodies. The former was sitting cross-legged on some broken stones, on which were some attempts at ornamentation, and which were apparently remains of a kind of canopy, or at any rate, of a throne. The goddess was standing in a small low-walled enclosure and at the foot of a bamboo bedstead. (63; emphasis added)
The landscape gaze almost reduces an indigenous sacrosanct landscape to derogatory proportions. Although it is more of an attempt at insubstantialization of the local space, what follows is an instance of more radical subversion of the same. In what could be as an instance of negativization this sacrosanct space as cast as a hoary-scary, nocturnal landscape:
Having lighted a fire, and killed, cooked and eaten a fowl, we made our beds, and were speedily asleep under the shelter of the goddess near whose shrine we were lying, though to acknowledge the truth, she was a somewhat fear-inspiring object, as seen dimly through the mosquito curtains by the pale moonlight, to a nervous imagination in moments of half-wakefulness. (63; emphasis added)
This passage illustrates the framing of the hills as an enigma. For example, the use of shapeless figures as a metaphor in the passage could be viewed as an attempt to find an imaginary parallel of the obscure path, tall and tangled jungle. Woodthorpe conveys the perplexing aura in the landscape: “I was unable to make out anything about these figures, how long they had been there, whom they represented”. This could be viewed as an extension of the trope of the northeast as dystopia.
There are more obvious instances of the way the imperial gaze frames the Lushai hills into a negative aesthetic. While returning from the expedition, Woodthorpe writes:
At one of the camps, a quantity of empty ghi-casks were thrown into the fires as the troops were about to march. Having been well saturated with the greasy contents, they blazed up merrily…and exciting the cupidity of the Lushais, who as usual, had collected to pick up anything the troops left behind…as the rear guard marched off, they saw the Lushais dancing and gesticulating like demons round the flames, red hot hoops being whisked out in all directions. (315; emphasis added)
Framing the Lushais as dancing demons accomplishes the appropriation of the colonized landscape by fixating it into ideologically conditioned discursive frames of negation or in this instance what Spurr views as “vilification” (Rhetoric 79). In keeping with the focus of the study this instance also reveals the ideological investment that go into the construction of landscapes within the text.
Woodthorpe’s narrative tries to transform the northeast into a landscape of savagery and anarchy. The trope as well as the rhetoric of danger determines the landscape gaze in his narrative. To this extent, Woodthorpe’s text is an attempt to transform the northeast as a colonial dystopia. However, the framing of pre-colonial spaces as or into a certain kind of landscape does not remain confined to observations of and on space. In fact, the landscape gaze that goes into the framing of space in the narrative is informed by a strong desire to transform space. Suggestions for the transformation of space are made, in the text, primarily by means of a negative aesthetic. In other words, appropriation of space and conversion thereof into landscapes are pursued through a rhetoric of dystopia. This is a case of metaphorising space. Woodthorpe’s text metaphorises the Lushai Hills as a cluster of dystopian landscapes. In a way, Landscapes as metaphors are used by the imperial traveler Woodthorpe to draw the attention of the Empire to these hills as empty spaces or places without rightful claimants, thereby enhancing the possibilities of expansion. The text also constructs the Lushai hills as a potential cornucopia. This is a more direct form of suggesting alternative uses of space. In a way, it complements the objectives which drive the more obvious negativization of landscapes in colonial landscape discourse. Either way, travel and expedition texts are precursors of the transformation of landscapes into possession or territorialization. The eagerness with which the traveler-surveyor Woodthorpe converts the Lushai Hills into imagined confrontation zones bears testimony to this.
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Cite the original source:
Baruah, Dr Dharmendra. “From Space to Landscape: Mizoram (the Lushai Hills) in
Colonial Travel Writing.” Mizo Studies, X, no. 3, Sept. 2021, pp. 565–583.
Cite the original source:
Baruah, Dr Dharmendra. “From Space to Landscape: Mizoram (the Lushai Hills) in
Colonial Travel Writing.” Mizo Studies, X, no. 3, Sept. 2021, pp. 565–583.
