“Quite the ‘Native Gentleman’: Travel Memoirs, Gender, and Imperial Politics”

My paper examines the memoirs written by male Indian travelers to Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ways these men performed their own gender and consumed British gender and sexual norms. While historians agree that Indians did not suffer the same racism in Britain as in India, scholars still use gender anxieties created in the “periphery” in their considerations of metropolitan relationships between Indian men and British women. According to historians, in the presence of European women, Indian men were “thrown off balance” whether they were in Britain or British India. My paper reassesses these relationships and considers the different ways Indian men experienced European norms of gender and sexuality throughout the British Empire. In Indian travel memoirs, any initial discomfort quickly fades to reveal that Indian men’s social relationships with European women depended more on class than race. Indian men openly exerted a sexualized gaze toward non-elite European women and sought out activities within Europe that allowed them to act out their curiosity and pleasure concerning white bodies. However, when interacting with middle class and elite women, Indian travelers became the commodified good. They willingly settled into the role of the exotic Indian.