Fanny Parks’ book, one of the great travel accounts of India, written in 1850 highlights her love for India, its culture and its small talk

The radiant picture of Lord Ganesh you see on this page is from my favourite travel book – Fanny Parks’ (1794-1875) Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque During Four-and-Twenty Years in the East with Revelations of Life in the Zenana, published in London in 1850. Wanderings is one of three great travel accounts of India written by English women travellers of the 19th century. The other two are Maria Graham’s (1785-1842) journal of 1822, which is the first-ever travel book written by a woman, and Emily Eden’s (1797-1869) Up The Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India, published in 1867.

Fanny was born Frances Archer in Wales, England, and became Fanny Parks when she married Charles Crawford Parks, a writer, as an office clerk was then called, for the East India Company. She came to India with her husband in 1822, lived for some time in Calcutta where, among other people, she met the great Indian social reformer Raja Ram Mohun Roy and attended a nautch at his house apart from meeting the son of Tipoo Sultan. Afterwards, she lived with her husband for several years in Allahabad. During one of her journeys she met Emily Eden who recorded in her journal, “We are rather oppressed just now by a lady, Mrs Parkes, who insists on belonging to our camp. 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.”

An 'Independent Woman' she really was, for she travelled like a free woman for long years up and down much of north India, mixing with all sorts of people, equally at ease with the high and the low. Here she learnt Hindostani and became fluent in the language. She also learnt Persian and seems to have been equally fluent and so well read in that language that she could quote from Rumi and Byron with great felicity in the same breath. She travelled by boat from Calcutta to Allahabad, on her Arabic steed all over the north Indian plains and when required long distances even on foot. She was a restless soul and was possessed by such an untiring wanderlust and intense love of open skies that when she went back home to England she could not stay there for long and began pining for the open Indian sky, which soon pulled her back.

She loved India, its culture and its small talk so much that she became almost an Indian herself for which her contemporary English sahibs scoffed and sneered at her, ridiculing her for having gone native. That was an outright term of censure those days. But that did not seem to bother her. Such scorn served only to spur her ever more to love India and Indians. To give her critics a further slight, she began wearing a janeu or the Hindu sacred thread with 300 names of Hindu gods interwoven in silk and gold in it. She criticised the English for their lack of understanding and appreciation of Indian culture. She, however, continued to push her way as much into contemporary English social circles as she did into those of Indians of all classes. She was a keen observer of human conduct and character, and never failed to notice even the slightest nuances of an utterance or a movement. Her description of the Indian household of those days and pen-portraits of contemporary men and women are remarkably penetrating and perceptive apart from being extremely sympathetic.

Equally charming are her descriptions of the durbars and the zenana, maharajas a n d m a h a r a n i s a n d commoners, towns and villages, temples, fairs and religious customs, changes of seasons, and the woods and rivers of the Indian plains and hills. She loved writing and had a tremendous felicity in the 19th century art of writing journals. More than anybody else, this writing pleased her immensely which is why readers even so far removed in time can enjoy her books today. “My journal is a constant source of pleasure,” she wrote at one place, “it not only amuses me to record passing events, but in writing it I perform a promise given ere I quitted England.”

Although her contemporary English with cursed lips made fun of her, back home in England, her journals were lapped up by many avid readers. Her picture of Lord Ganesh became so loved in her home country that, cut out from her book, it today sells for over a thousand pound sterling.