What is it about?
This article looks at the account of the travels of the English churchman Edward Terry. Terry was in India between 1616 and 1620, and wrote several accounts of his time in Asia, each more fulsome than the previous one. In its final iteration--printed in 1655--Terry endeavours to try to understand what he has encountered in a way he hoped would be useful to other travellers. He did this by trying to understand why God would have created a part of the world that--from Terry's perspective--was dominated by idolaters. This view, of course, conditions his discussion of Hinduism in particular, but it also tends to reduce the inhabitants of the subcontinent to pawns in the hands of the almighty, people with no agency in themselves, whose purpose is merely to be read and understood by westerners. It is a strange approach, but it is one that comes to be repurposed in an orientalist guise in future centuries.
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Why is it important?
Much of the literature about early contact between Europeans and the subcontinent has been dominated by the idea of orientalism. But far from being able to impose any proto-imperialist notions on the region, European ideas about India in this earlier period are defined from a position of profound weakness.
Perspectives
What I found most interesting working through this piece was Terry's sense that a travelogue should be useful. He was well aware--writing some 30 years after his travels--that much of his personal experience was out of date and no longer had much useful for the would-be merchant advanturing to the subcontinent. His point, though, was that the presence of a culture so fundamentally different to that of Christianity raised important questions about God's plan for creation.
Richard Raiswell
University of Prince Edward Island
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Edward Terry and the Calvinist Geography of India, Études anglaises, August 2017, CAIRN,
DOI: 10.3917/etan.702.0167.
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