Description
INTRODUCTION Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes is a 2002 historical travel book based on the journals of Fanny Parkes and edited by William Dalrymple. Dalrymple's work on this book followed his earlier book The White Mughals. This is an edited edition of the travel journals of the traveller Fanny Parkes who was in India from 1822 to 1846. Dalrymple previously edited another book by Parkes, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque. He wrote the introduction in which he challenged some of the preconceptions of academic studies of travel writing, which attempt to fit all English views on India into the 'Orientalist' template laid down by Edward Said. RATHER OPPRESSED just now by a lady, Mrs. Parkes, who insists on belonging to our camp,’ wrote Fanny Eden in January 1838. ‘She has a husband who always goes mad in the cold season, so she says it is her duty to herself to leave him and travel about. She has been a beauty and has remains of it, and is abundantly fat and lively. At Benares, where we fell in with her she informed us she was an Independent Woman.’ Fanny Eden was the sister of the Governor General, Lord Auckland, and the First Lady of British India. Fanny Parkes was the wife of a mentally unstable junior official in charge of ice making in Allahabad. The different status of the two women made friendship between them impossible, and posterity has been far kinder to the Eden sisters than to Fanny: Emily Eden’s Up the Country has long been regarded as one of the great classics of British Imperial literature and has rarely been out of print since it was first published in 1866; the critic Lord David Cecil went as far as placing the author ‘in the first flight of English women letter writers’. Fanny Eden’s Journals (recently republished as Tigers, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden’s Indian Journals, 1837–1838) are also much read and much reprinted, though they have never had the celebrity of her sister’s work. In comparison Fanny Parkes’ Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque had no second edition, and has only recently re-emerged into print. In contrast to the fame of Emily and Fanny Eden, few have ever heard of Fanny Parkes. Fewer still have read her.