© AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com. Writing Back Through Travel: A Study of The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan Arnab Chatterjee Assistant Professor of English, Harishchandrapur College, Pipla, Malda Email address: arnabehia@gmail.com Abstract Mirza Abu Taleb Khan who travelled to England from 1799-1802 is one of the early Indians who participated in what Michael Fisher calls ‘counterflows to colonialism’ and recorded his experience in the form of a travelogue. Taleb’s Travels foregrounds how a colonized subject from the periphery tries to understand and negotiate with the metropolitan centre that attempted to dominate and control the Other. It is pertinent to explore the cultural dialogue initiated by a ‘contact zone’ formed through the travel of an Indian. The oriental traveller who was both the gazer and the gazed, came up with a highly complex gaze that created a version of what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘autoethnography’ and a space for ‘transculturation’. Taleb’s entry in print culture through writing a travelogue seems highly significant because he tried to write back a genre called travel writing that played an integral part in the consolidation of empire by mapping the cultural topography as well as the flora and fauna of the Other. The travel of the ‘Persian Prince in London’ problematized an important binary created by colonial discourse-- Britain’s mobility as opposed to the stasis of the Other. Though Taleb accepted some of the binaries created by the Orientalist discourse, there are areas where he refused to accept the superiority of the British culture. First published in 1810, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799-1803 brings out the dialectic of the acceptance and rejection of the dominant metropolitan culture. He admired the science and technology of Britain, their education system and law. He also sharply criticized the British as proud, insolent, intolerant, non-religious, luxurious and lazy and his criticism of British culture provides a strong sense of postcolonial resistance. He debunked the empirical codes of European travel writing by positing the worldview of the Other through the form of ‘safarnama’. This paper attempts to critically locate Taleb’s text as an ‘authoethnographic expression’ and the problematic position of an Indian traveller who can question empire and also serve the interest of empire by teaching oriental languages to the colonial masters. Keywords: contact zone, autoethnography, transculturation, colonial discourse, postcolonial resistance Postcolonial criticism has paid considerable attention to bring out how the European travel narratives played a significant role in the development of the process of the discursive production of knowledge and perception about non-European territories. It gradually extended its scope to include non-European travelogues in the wake of imperialism and a critical focus on the travellers from non-Western countries to the West has opened up new avenues in postcolonial thought as travel writing is much about imagining the other as about inscribing the self. Indian travellers created a body of knowledge about themselves and their homelands which often countered the British orientalist representations of Indians. This paper attempts to look at Abu Taleb’s The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799-1803 to critically engage with the Indian responses to the process of colonization, his direct self-representation in Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Themed Issue on “India and Travel Narratives” (Vol. 12, No. 3, 2020) Guest-edited by: Ms. Somdatta Mandal, PhD Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n3/v12n321.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.21