SOURCE: Fisher, Michael H. “Preface: A Text and a Life.” In The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India, edited by Michael H. Fisher, pp. xiii-xxii. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Fisher examines The Travels of Dean Mahomet, maintaining that it reflects the author's place in the colonial process.

[W]e have never been as aware as we are now of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more “foreign” elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)

Dean Mahomet composed his book Travels in 1793-94 as “a series of letters to a friend,” recounting to the Europeans among...