Daniel Majchrowicz Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Northwestern University
Daniel Majchrowicz is Associate Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture. His books include The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023), A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025), and the co-edited Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press, 2022).
Abstract
“In 1851, the teenage maharaja of Indore went missing. Rumors in the bazaar claimed he had been drugged by his vizier, or kidnapped by agents from Calcutta. The reality was more prosaic: He had gone on vacation. In this talk, I examine the travels of the maharaja of Indore and the Urdu-language travelogue his court produced from that journey to ask why this genre suddenly rose to popularity in colonial India, and what its authors and readers hoped to get from it. The travelogue, I will show, let Indians give voice to a global imagination that reflected their ambitions and aspirations in the rapidly expanding world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps it was more than just a vacation after all.”
Co-sponsored by: South Asian Studies Program and Rutgers British Studies Center